Peggy Sue
Words by Holly Grigg-Spall
Katy Klaw used to live above a video store in Brighton. The corridor to her flat was packed with VHS tapes and this is where her love of the film format began. She now pillages charity stores for videos – classics and anything with a decent cover. Musing on how the same films turn up again and again – Notting Hill, Trainspotting, The Usual Suspects – she notes that there are some films that will never make it to DVD, and worries over her faulty video cassette recorder.
When Be Kind Rewind came out last year she watched it on a loop. It’s a fitting favourite; the band she’s in with friend Rosa Rex – Peggy Sue, that is – shows the same enterprising, inventive and enthusiastic nature as that movie’s video store clerks. At the launch of their new single it’s easy to see that the sheer effort and goodwill they put into their performance is winning. Last year they even held their own Halloween film festival, asking for submissions through MySpace.
Once Peggy Sue and The Pirates, then Peggy Sue and The Pictures and now just Peggy Sue, Katy and Rosa hold together a disarmingly DIY enterprise. Ollie is their drummer, picked – they claim – on the basis of a charity shop video choice; and he bumps up the bass lines – adding to the cacophony of instruments already on stage, including xylophones, melodicas and accordions.
As part of her film degree Katy wrote about the marketing of American indie fare, and she seems cynical about all those samey looking posters you see on the tube. They’re both savvy enough to want to sidestep definition – they may have toured with Mumford And Sons but it would be difficult to apply the same colour scheme to their sound. Two years into playing together, they keep changing things up – and if they don’t know how or where they’ll be next Wednesday, they’re not just making it interesting for themselves. In reaction to music magazines’ attempts to set the scene, they observe that the bands are getting louder and “everyone’s hitting the distortion pedal.” In contrast, when they began, they were listening to a lot of anti-folk, playing at Brighton open-mic nights, and generally sticking out like sore thumbs at student protests on Sussex campus with songs about the greatness of television.
Rosa and Katy like F Scott Fitzgerald, and gush over Jordan from The Great Gatsby like other people might coo over Angelina Jolie. “I’ve got a bit of an obsession with it, I’m always buying copies when I see one. I think I have six now”, says Katy. Rosa wrote about unfinished stories and Kafka for her English Literature dissertation, and with her band’s restless, limitless way of working, they’re looking like a good case study of metamorphosis. One thing’s for sure – however the story of Peggy Sue turns out, it’s definitely a page-turner.
http://www.myspace.com/peggysueandthepirates
Posted Fri, March 06, 2009