Tagged: Vixen
In bed and in a broom-cupboard – been there, done that!
Came to think of some of the weirdest or funniest interview-occasions I’ve been involved in through the years. Generates a big smile every time. :)
One of the craziest ones was with Pretty Maids when they were playing at the KB-hall in Copenhagen. I was doing the interview for radio, so it had to be somewhere quiet.
But they were doing sound check out there in the big concert arena (those were the days of arena-rock…) so you kept hearing that annoying “ONE….TWO…!” everywhere you went.
After having walked through the entire KB Hall, trying to open various doors without luck, one door suddenly opened. It was the broom-cupboard! Perfect!
With all those brooms and buckets in there, it was definitely sound proof!
Let me tell you, five people in a small broom-cupboard was not easy to organize, and it must have looked absolutely ridiculous if anyone had walked in on us. But they were good sports, took it with a grain of salt and just laughed about it. When asking for a radio ID, this is what I got:
So, you just make the best of the situation. :) It was fun though, having one foot in an empty bucket and the other one on a vacuum-cleaner while trying to be a serious reporter…! The good part? There were NO sound check noises on the tape! ;P
Another strange interview was with the ladies of Vixen when they were on tour with Deep Purple in the early 90’s. Their hotel suite didn’t have CHAIRS. But… it DID have a king-size HUGE bed in the room, so, we all just crawled onto the bed and did the interview there. :) Talk about RELAXED, huh? ;) Here’s Roxy and Share from that “bed interview”….
Janet Gardner walked in later towards the end of the interview, she wasn’t on this taped version.
Other strange things, not necessarily interview-related…. I was doing an exclusive interview with Alice Cooper at SAS Radisson in Malmoe ages ago (didn’t even know until the last minute if he would do it or not) and on my way out,
I met his band in the elevator on my way down. They were in a party mood and asked if I lived nearby. I said I lived almost just around the corner and they got all excited and wanted to come over to my place and party! They got so seriously into that idea that I didn’t know HOW to tell them that it wouldn’t happen.
I was still living with my parents, and just the thought of my mother walking around the house with curlers in her hair and dad being half asleep in front of the TV – and then me walking in with Alice Cooper’s band….just felt slightly bizarre. :)
I told my mom about what happened, and she was almost disappointed that I hadn’t invited them. Her comment? “I could have served them cookies and we had orange juice in the fridge…!”.
Oh. My. God. I’m SO glad that I DIDN’T say yes to THAT! Talk about total humiliation and embarrassment for a young rocker girl. Maybe I would have been more cool about it today but not back then.
Another slightly strange situation happened with Judas Priest. I had done an interview with them in the afternoon and they asked if me and the photographer wanted to come back after the show and hang out. I said I couldn’t cause it was Halloween and I was invited to a Halloween-party. Meaning – I was going to be dressed as some sort of ghost. Or something.
“Even better!” they laughed. Well…. Suit yourself, I thought, so we walked through security after the show that evening, wearing Morticia and ghost-makeup! If Priest even for a moment had thought that we were kidding they were now aware that we weren’t. ;)
It doesn’t happen often that the BAND starts digging for their cameras to take pictures of their GUESTS, but that’s what happened in this case. Either way, it was a fun evening!
[Me and K.K Downing after the show on Halloween!]
Then of course there was the interview that turned into a cookie-war that totally went out of hand. Electric Boys – crazy guys back in those days. Started with Niclas throwing a cookie at me for fun, I threw it back and before you knew it, cookies were flying across the room, people running around, pretty much stomping the chocolate cookie crumbles into the carpet and into the couch while screaming like three year olds.
The owner, Totte, opened the door in the middle of all this and saw me just as I was throwing a cookie. Oh great. The reporter from Kvällsposten acting like a total retard, caught in the act. Oops. The dressing room looked like World War 3, but at least we had fun! :)
Come to think of it – the past 25 years have been so much fun, I’ve loved every minute of it! And it ain’t over yet! :))
The metal queens that left a mark
When you’re on vacation you suddenly have a LOT of time on your hands. I ended up spending hours on YouTube last night watching videos by some of the female bands/artists that inspired me as I was growing up.
I’ve always collected albums by female rockers, whether it was all-girl bands or female fronted male bands or even the very few women who got a gig playing in a male band (not just singing).
The very first heroine was of course Lita Ford. When I was just a kid with very little knowledge of the music world, I remember stopping in the record store being totally in awe of the cool girls on the cover of this Runaways album:
Lita was of course the one who caught the eye of a curious 8-year old cause she wore that silver-thing on her arm. Then when she released her first solo-album in 1983, I really started collecting Lita-stuff. She was definitely the number one role-model.
[Cheesy early Lita-video, title track of her debut solo-album “Out For Blood“]
Joan Jett never appealed to me as much. It was only last year at Sweden Rock Festival when I attended her press-conference and saw her live, that I truly got why she’s stayed on the top in this business all these years. She is genuine and breathes rock’n’roll! She ruled the crowd, they loved her!
In the early 80’s, there were very few females playing metal. One of my favorite bands was Rock Goddess. The youngest member, drummer Julie Turner, was so young at the time that they even had trouble getting her into some of their own gigs!
They came to Sweden opening for Def Leppard in 1984 I think, but I wasn’t allowed to go. My parents were still not happy about the fact that their daughter was into heavy metal, it was something they had heard “bad things” about. Needless to say, they had to change their minds along the way… ;-P
[Rock Goddess with the asskicking Jodie Turner on vocals and guitar!]
I picked up whatever I could – Girlschool, She, Lita, Joan, Headpins, and then of course Lee Aaron. The Metal Queen. When I first heard her, it was on the radio (must have been some local station, they didn’t normally play heavy metal on the national Swedish radio back in those days) – I thought it was a guy…! Man, the lady had quite a set of pipes! And she was beautiful too, not to mention a bundle of energy on stage. Well, that’s how I imagined her, because I never saw her live and there was no YouTube so I had to rely on the reviews I read in the metal magazines I could get my hands on in 1984. I was happy to finally see her live at Sweden Rock Festival last year and she blew me away! She is still stunning and hasn’t lost her vocal range one bit!
[Quite cheesy video but these were still the early years of music videos…]
As the years went by, the world of metal started to expand and more women fought their way in. Cause it sure as hell wasn’t easy being a woman in metal in the 70’s or 80’s! There were very few, and the ones who DID manage to secure their place in the business, constantly had to deal with stupid juvenile sexism. It was automatically assumed that heavy metal was a man’s world and as a woman you simply couldn’t play.
At its best, you would hear comments along the lines of “well… pretty good – for a chick“. It was still pretty bad when I joined my first band. When we played, I would constantly hear some drunk asshole (and his equally drunk idiot pals) yell: “Show your tits!”. Well, show your d***k if you can find it, son of a b…. It was a pain in the butt, but you couldn’t let it stop you.
Late 80’s presented the classy ladies of Vixen for instance. Eventhough I wouldn’t call them metal, I loved everything about them. I was young, thought of them as inspirational not only as great musicians but also as fashion-statements for women in rock. :-) I had the pleasure of talking to them a few times during their fairly short, but successful career and loved their personalities.
Other ladies that I listened to during this period was Femme Fatale fronted by a lady with an attitude – Lorraine Lewis. She’s still active, playing the Monsters of Rock Cruise for instance. Would love to see her, cause most of those American bands never made it to Europe for some reason.
Doro had been around since…forever! Starting out with Warlock, I’d say she’s also one of the few true, 200% dedicated and impressive metal queens out there. Doro and Lita won every poll for “best female artist” back in those days. I love Doro, who doesn’t?! She’s a wonderful, humble person with a true love for heavy metal.
Another band that I really liked, but who never made it commercially (they stayed somehow “underground” eventhough MTV aired their videos) was Phantom Blue.
They were the first and only female band to be signed to Mike Varney’s Shapnel Records (only 3 months after forming!). Just as a bit of trivia, guitarists Michelle and Nicole were both students of Paul Gilbert and Bruce Boulliet of Racer X. Great guitarists and to top it all off – the amazing Gigi Hangach on vocals.
They couldn’t compete with the likes of Vixen or Lita in terms of airtime or albums sold, but they made a mark in music history for sure. Michelle married John Norum (ex-Europe) and moved to Sweden where she formed the band Meldrum. I remember being in touch with her back and forth about a gig at my club Hard Break in the mid-, late nineties, but due to a double-booking it fell through. Michelle was anything but happy about it, to make a long story very short… :-( It sucks that things had to go so wrong. She passed away in 2008. Read more about the band here. The actual promo video for this great song used to be on YouTube but I’m sure some idiot had it removed for whatever reason… The only thing left is this incredibly inspiring “look at this photo”-video, but at least you can still HEAR the music.
As far as VOICES…there was only ONE that could blew off the competition. Not that there ever was any competition. This woman was on her throne and nobody ever came even CLOSE to her vocal power! Ann Wilson of Heart. That voice amazes me to this day, she was and is one of a kind.
Then, of course, there was the CHEESE.
Some stand out as worse than anything. I bought records by these “ladies” but they’ve only been played once and then took their place in the collection just as “fill-outs”, never to be played again.
Lisa Dominique, she was in Kerrang! all the time, but the only reason she was, was because she was selling her “sexy image” more than her music – she couldn’t sing if her life depended on it! Take a listen to this (warning for possible injuries on sensitive eardrums….)
Then there was the super-cheesy Betsy Bitch from the band….Bitch. I’m lost for words, this is just about the cheesiest crap I’ve ever seen or heard in most aspects, especially lyric-wise! :)
Granted, she was one of the very first female metal vocalists, starting out in 1980, but that doesn’t help, at all. This song especially is horrible. Check it out:
Another uh..lady, that must be placed in the cheese-department is The Great Kat. It’s not that she didn’t know what she was doing; she was a classically trained violinist, graduated from Juilliard and had been touring playing classical music before she became…that.
Once again, she ends up in the cheese-department simply because…well, you’ll understand when you watch the video below. She could play, has even been listed as one of the top shredders of all time by Guitar One magazine. Maybe she would have passed unnoticed if she hadn’t created this insane persona, where she often claimed she was Beethoven reincarnated. ;)
Enjoy…(or something)!
Jesus, I think I’ll have go and take a break after that. :-)) Hope you’ve enjoyed the rundown!
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Honorable mentions that didn’t fit into the article above but that you should take a listen to:
Canadian rocker Joanna Dean, loved her album “Misbehavin”
One HELL of a voice – Chrissy Steele (who was recruited to take over vocal duties after Darby Mills in Headpins. This is from her solo album “Magnet to Steele“)
In bed with VIXEN (part 2)
Roxy: You’re into MEN now??
Share: He’s not a man, he’s a rock’n’roller!
Found the Vixen-interview “part two”, the one with the stupid questions. :-)
I actually had a lot of fun with those stupid questions. The artists did too, it gave them an opportunity to just relax for a second and laugh a bit instead of constantly repeating the same thing about their new album or tour or commenting on some rumor, whatever it happened to be at the time.
You know, the sort of thing where people ask “…so Ozzy, did you really bite the head of a bat on stage?” or “…so, Bruce, what’s it like to be back in Iron Maiden?”.
You get the idea. The same sort of thing that every other rock-mag is going to write about too for months.
ROXY AND SHARE (VIXEN) Copenhagen 1990
The “Stupid Questions”
[the trailer they’re doing in the beginning was for my show on Radio MCB]
The “stupid questions” was a way to lighten things up a bit and it always worked. The Vixen girls were laughing, David Coverdale was pretty serious but gave really interesting answers. Either way, it’s something I’m glad worked so well every time. :)
I was digging through piles and piles of old cassettes last night. Found interviews I even forgot I ever did…! I was happy to find the one with Arerosmith’s Joe Perry that I did back when “Pump” was released. There’s a pretty funny story behind that one too, just goes to show how much I really wanted to do what I was doing, interviewing all those people, no matter how or when or where.
I was just a kid when I did most of these “In The Rearview Mirror”-interviews, and when I listen to some of those conversations now it’s amost embarrassing, but it was an important part of my journey. Without those experiences, I wouldn’t still be here today.
We’ll see how much of those 20 year-old cassettes that I can save and turn into mp3’s before they get ruined. You’ll be the first to know. :-)
In bed with VIXEN
Who would have thought that I would ever end up in bed with Roxy and Share from Vixen??
Alright, it’s not as naughty as it sounds, let me see how much I can remember now 20 years later!
It was in March 1991 and Deep Purple were playing at Forum in Copenhagen. It was the Joe Lynn Turner-lineup, and opening for them was Vixen.
I was so excited because I was a big fan of Vixen. I still love their two first records, “Vixen” and “Rev It Up“, they were a huge inspiration to any female rocker out there back in the day.
As a matter of fact, one of the very first interviews I did was with Roxy in 1989 (or 1988?) when Vixen were opening for Scorpions, also in Copenhagen. She was so easy to talk to, and you bet I was grateful for that, cause I was just a teenager and I barely knew what I was doing!
She made it very easy on me, so I was looking forward to doing THIS interview.
The record company had confirmed an interview with Roxy and Share, at their hotel. I think it was Sheraton. The funny thing is that I remember what it looked like when I walked into the lobby that day. There were GUYS everywhere with Vixen-vinyls, waiting for the girls. What a weird sight. Back in 1991 the only thing you would normally see, was female groupies. THESE guys were… well I won’t know, male groupies? :)
Either way, it was like stepping into Twilight Zone, what’s wrong with this picture? ;P
I went to Roxy’s and Share’s room and they were like two teenagers, laughing and kidding, just very easygoing and cool to be around. There were no chairs in the room, only a king size bed. Soooooo…. We all got up there, got comfortable and did the interview – IN BED!
That would be the first and only time I ever interviewed anyone like that. I can recommend it though, it was fun!
After the first initial “serious” questions (such as these two audio files) it got pretty giggly. As usual, I had a “part two” of the interview where I just bombarded them with stupid questions and they were laughing, just having a good time. I would say that this was one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve ever done.
I will post the funny part of the interview soon enough. I’ve got it on a USB-stick somewhere, god only knows where. I’ll use the weekend for that. :)
So if you like Vixen, stick around.
When we were done with the interview, the door opened and Jan and Janet came in, they had just finished their interviews in the other room, right next to ours. When I left and walked through the lobby, I saw a guy proudly flashing his brand new Vixen-logo tattoo…
The girls kicked ass on stage! They were young, hungry, damn talented and had a lot to prove! What a huge difference between their set and Deep Purple’s…. We got..what..30-45 minutes or pure raw energy from the Vixen-girls, and THEN we got a tired and uninspired Deep Purple only a half hour later. One of the few times where I actually prefered the opening act.
Well, Vixen split up, like so many other bands but got back together again. I just miss their glitz and glam-period, but at least I was lucky enough to have been around when they were in their prime!
Here are two short clips from the SERIOUS part of the interview. I’ll get back with the giggly one soon. Keep checking back.
ROXY AND SHARE @ SHERATON COPENHAGEN MARCH 1991 (1)
ROXY AND SHARE @ SHERATON COPENHAGEN MARCH 1991 (2)
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IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR 