And now for something completely different… and by different we mean a band that has come to a lot of people’s attention not only for their insane sound, but also for their rather unusual attire, for a male band that is. The Feminists drink a few beers, jump on stage, scream and rock out just like any other band, with the exception that these guys like to do the formerly mentioned activities in skirts, bras, garter belts and high heel shoes.

They often play in squats as they feel most comfortable among the dirt, alcohol and  thrill hungry people, it’s also the perfect place to let their uninhibited and trashy rock’n'roll loose. Their partly-written, partly-improvised compositions come from the gut, only to create a ball of energy that the audience feeds off from beginning to end. Those who try to resist it fail miserably.

We recently caught up with Sam aka Samantha Fuchs and Kevin aka Dr. Tranny for some girl talk.

From now on anything you say will be held against you.
Samantha Fuchs: Yeah man be careful. Don’t talk about what a twat Elias is.

So you’re Dr. Tranny and you’re Sammy the Bitch?
SF: So he says. I’ve been experimenting with names actually. Samantha Fuchs. Claudia Groin.
DT: Miley Virus.
SF: It’s best if we stay off that one. That one will get me into trouble.  


The other members are Holli Bastard, Judith The Tongue, Simonetta Beretta?
SF: She (Simonetta) left. No it’s Miss Gyver now, she’s hot.

What happened with Simonetta?
SF: She went off and started a family somewhere.

You kicked her out?
SF: No she went to study and become a real person.

 

Tell me a bit about the history of the band. Sam has been with you for a year or two?
SF: A year and a half…
Dr. Tranny: …and a few months.
SF: August last year was our first show together I think.

How did you meet?
DT: The rest of us Holli, Judith and I come from the same town in Thüringen. After we finished school we started a band. We just wanted to play for a birthday party, which in the end never happened.

But the band remained.
DT: Then we started playing around with another guy called Jens. We had the same guitar teacher. Then Holli and I moved to Jena, where we met Paul. Then four years ago, we moved together to Berlin.

So you’ve always performed under the name The Feminists?
SF: No. This history is actually the history of The Sticks In The Casino. The Feminists is a parallel project and has a much more fucked up history. You guys had a show at the Fete de La Musique two years ago…
DT: …and we could apply for just one gig, but we wanted to play two gigs, so we played a second show as The Feminists, under a name inspired by the band from the movie “Ex Drummer”, and we played a really fucked up gig at Brauhaus Südstern. It was raining as hell. The whole pedal bars were under water. The keyboard player had to play under a plastic tarp, and the whole drum kit was full of water. It was like the Blue Men Group show with water being splashed everywhere.

Did you have any audience?
DT: Yeah a couple of guys. Old men.
SF: But from this strange accident something magic occurred.
DT: At first we played at parties, birthday parties, as a side project with all the trash music we composed ending up in The Feminists’ setlist.
SF: We met a year and a half ago in a bar in Kreuzberg where I was busking, singing three songs like I do.
DT: Not Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain.
ST: Friedrichshain. Egal. That’s egal. Whatever. Whatevs. I play my three song and Kevin comes up to me and goes (with a think German accent)
“Do you have a band?”
“Na not really”
“Do you want to join our band?”
“Maybe”
“I buy you a drink”
“Yeah, alright”
Kevin gave me their Myspace account, and because guys do that every so often when I’m busking, I didn’t think much of it. I listened to their music and thought “This fucking rules! That’s it. That’s the best music ever. That sounds like a mix between The Doors and Van Halen. That’s perfect.” I called the guys up and told them I really, really want to try something with them. Four weeks later we started rehearsing for a show as The Sticks.

So to make it clear, you heard them as The Sticks In The Casino?
SF: Yes. Only four days after we’ve spent four-five weeks rehearsing for The Sticks and having played our first show together, did the guys even mention The Feminists. It was a few days before The Feminists were to play a gig. They asked me if I wanted to do it. I said “Ok let’s hear the songs”, and then I heard it and was like “Yes!”.
I like both bands, but The Feminists thing is just right on. It could only be made unconsciously. You couldn’t think about it and go “We’re going to form a trash band and it’s going to be great” because then it would come out as something contrived. Just in the fact, that it kind of came out by accident, is this mad thing that nobody has really thought about.
DT: The first few gigs he didn’t even have any lyrics. He just screamed into the microphone.
SF: When they asked me if I wanted to do that first show. I thought they meant if i wanted to sing two songs. I learned one song. I remember getting to the venue and going downstairs in this fucking dingy squat…
DT: …it could be. In the basement.
SF: The guys implied that I come on at the end and sing a couple of songs. I stood there dressed like a chick, like a slutty chick, and as the band started to play and the adrenaline started pumping, I just thought “Fuck that” and grabbed the mic. I don’t think anyone fancied trying to get me off the stage at this moment. I jumped up, started screaming and yelling at people. I climbed up the walls a few times, jumped on members of the audience. It was fucking great. Probably the most fun I’ve ever had up to that point.

 

How would you describe your music in three words?
SF: Fuck-In-Ace. Is that three words?  How would you describe it?
DT: Well-It-Rocks.
SF: I’d describe it as dark, fun and feminine. It’s a weirdly feminine thing. That’s the bizarre thing about it, there is this unrealized, but rare female energy to it.

You mean like a kick ass, rock chick or soft kind of energy?
SF: A lot of people come to us and say “You guys must be really influenced by the New York Dolls”, but we’re not.
DT: We’re more influenced by Los Banditos.
SF: Personally the influence I feel is more like the Slits, or Nico the really fucking great female, left-field, liberated women kind of band. Basically not like the masculine conception of femininity. Nico’s second album is the best precedent for the Feminists although it sounds literally nothing like it.

 

Is wearing female clothes about fun for you or about a message?
SF: It is about a message for me, but I think it ‘s about fun for the rest of the guys. For me, as a kind of an outsider that came later, there is this underlying clear message in the form of this strong female concept of masculine feminism. To me feminism in it’s nature is about women having their own identity away from male constructions of female identity, and getting out of the stereotypes of what’s considered male of female. The Feminists is about giving praise to women as women.

Do you have a lot of women in your audience?
DT: Yeah.
SF: Quite a lot.

 

You have supported the Slut Walks am I correct?
SF: Unofficially. We kind of had our own slut walk.

Your own slut walk?
SF: Yeah, we walked like sluts.

Walked like sluts?
SF: We did our own take on the slut walk.

But you took part in the major one?
SF: Oh yeah, we were there as well.

But not performing?
SF: No just being part of the whole female consciousness thing. I just think it’s really, really interesting the history of female consciousness in the western world. I’m really into bringing out the womanliness in the room when we play.
DT: Elias and I, we play in the Berlin squatter scene and for us it’s more about just having fun. Without this rock ‘n’ roll macho thing.
SF: I think we’ve got more in common with female bands.
DT: Like the Brunettes or The Inserts.
SF: We tend to play better off female bands. There’s something more interesting going on in female bands, but I don’t mean in bands like Atomic Kitten or Girls Aloud or whatever, not when it’s some patriarchal Daddy figure telling everybody what to do, but when it’s real, like the Slits, or the Shags, when it kind of gets away from that whole really, really phallic thing of this tyrannical 4/4 beat. It can be so imposing and masculine, and it invites, pogoing and all these silly, phallic dances. We’re a bit more about finding something interesting, more intuitive, which the best Girl bands are about, while a lot of male bands do this thing of trying to get the genre just right, and it can get stupid and macho. Not that we’re averse to a bit of pounding rock. With a lot of bands, a lot of guy bands, you just want to go and say “Jesus man why are you so fucking angry? Let it go”.

 

Do you encounter any clothing malfunctions because you don’t have so much experience with wearing girls’ clothes?
SF: We’ve got more experience than you think.
DT: We’re very professional.

How are you with high heels?
SF: Yeah, fine.
DT: Although they are not so cool for playing the wah-wah paddle.
SF: That could be a problem. I find, I break a pair of shoes every one or two shows. I jump up and down a lot, and the heels can’t handle it. They snap.

 

Where do you guys usually play?
SF: Squats mainly. Anywhere really.

You played venues like Festaal Kreuzberg?
SF: Yeah, we played those places. We played in Festsaal, NBI, White Trash a couple of times, but the squat shows are usually the best. They are a bit dirtier.
DT: Everything is very disorganized.
SF: Everybody is so drunk that they don’t notice how drunk we are.
DT: Trickster, we also played there.
SF: Trickster and Koma F are a standard. They have been our main stage.
DT: Koma F is our favourite place to play.
SF: They are fucking great. The sound is terrible. The people are crazy.

 

Do you have any rituals before you go on stage?
DT: Just the procedure of dressing up is funny enough.
SF: Oh Yeah, there is the dressing up procedure.

What’s it like?
DT: “Where’s my bra? Has any one seen my bra?”
SF: “Come on we’re supposed to be on stage 15 minutes ago. Where’s my bra? People will think I look ridiculous”.

 

Do you try to be sexy on stage or does it just happen naturally?
DT: Na. We try to be mean. I always look like this.
SF: I’m thinking about sexy. There’s definitely something that creates a some sort of sexual energy in the room with lots of guys in dresses on stage. Unlike this particular punk rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not rock’n roll to be looked at, but rock n’ roll to be danced to. So few bands do that these days. Everybody has forgotten what it’s really like.  So many people have gone like “Alright the Rolling Stones were really cool in ’68 so we’re gonna copy that” and it becomes just this false approximation of something that people can appreciate on an intellectual level. The Feminists work because it’s a side project, and nobody took it seriously. It works and it’s primal, on a very basic level. When I come on stage I just get into “Let’s fucking dance” mode.

It definitely makes a difference to see a band enjoy what they are doing.
SF: It’s nice to see if the audience seems to enjoy it.
DT: There were gigs where I was totally overwhelmed by the reaction of the people. Like this year at Fusion festival. When we played there, there were some weird people there, and we fucking rocked the audience too.
SF: The best gigs, I find, are those where there are hardly any people. For me the best show that we’ve played was in Basil. We insisted on going on last. There were about four other bands on tour from Italy and we were like “We are The Feminists and we must headline!”. We were all wasted, we’ve been there for a week already. The last band came off stage saying “Hmm…good luck headlining”. It was about three in the morning and there were about 5 people left, but it ended up being the craziest gig. People just went absolutely insane. We ended up doing about 15 encores. We played for 3 hours. We kept coming off stage and just screaming in front of each others faces, and running back on.
DT: Backstage we were jumping up and down on sofas screaming ”Jonny Brendt!!! JONNY BRENDT!!!!BACK ON STAGE!!!!!” Then we’d play two more songs, and then repeat the whole thing again.

 

So there were 5 people throughout?
SF: Pretty much and the other bands were dancing as well. The show we played in Lichtenberg a few weeks ago, that was fucking mental as well. At the beginning everyone was standing right at the back of the room, but that quickly changed.

 

Whose the sexiest of you all?
SF & DT: Elias.
SF: Elias looks fucking stunning in a dress. He looks exactly like the girl I lost my virginity to. I walked passed him on several occasions, not realizing who he is and thinking “Helllloooo” only to  realize a few seconds later that it’s actually him. It’s because of the smell, one can tell who he is. Kevin looks hot as well, but in a very different way though.

To see their next gig head to King Kong Club on 20^th September.

Interview & Image: Olga Baczynska

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