As you might guess, the All Girl Boys Choir is a band of many contradictions. Alicia Warrington and Marlene Hammerle have a bare bones performance style that is, strangely enough, completely cohesive with the dense, heavy cacophony of their music. The Amplifier caught the two women after a wild set at the open mic. Why sell everything to go on tour together? Whatever happened to the poor, poor band cats? For answers to these and more questions, read on…
Alicia Warrington (left) and Marlene Hammerle (right) of the All GIrl Boys Choir perform at The Soundry
Amp: Why “The All Girl Boys Choir”?
Alicia: We’re both really bad at naming things. We were just sitting around trying to come up with a band name, and that just came out if my mouth, and Marlene was like ‘wait! that was kinda cool!’ … And then it started to have more of a meaning. Rock has always been the boy’s game, so we’re here as two girls to try and rock it up a bit, to show other girls that we can get out there, we can get crazy on stage just like the boys.
Amp: How did you guys get together?
Marlene: My old band, The Gore Gore Girls, hired Alicia to play drums on our European tour in 2008, and we started talking about starting a band together back then on the tour, and immediately after we got back we formed this band and we started recording right away. We hit the road, and we’re on tour for about 5 months this year. This is our first month.
Amp: Why sell everything to go on tour?
Alicia: We’ve both been in bigger bands on record labels and things like that, and we’ve been fortunate enough to tour all over the world with those bands, and since starting this project it’s totally DIY, we’re not on a record label, we don’t have any money… a lot of bands don’t put in enough work, and this is a lot of work. You’re either in it or you’re not. We couldn’t be at home and work jobs and do the band, cause you have to get out there and you have to keep the momentum going. That was what we had to do. You have to be in it all the way, especially since we’re doing it all ourselves … so we had a very large yard sale, and got a storage space for the rest, and bought an RV.
Marlene: And I’m definitely happier doing this than anything else.
Alicia: Yeah.
Marlene: We play shows every night, and it’s amazing.
Amp: Got any stories from the road?
Marlene: We started out with our cats, two cats and we couldn’t find anyone to watch them when we left. That was quite an adventure traveling with them. They hated it in our rumbling RV. We dropped them off in Michigan.
Alicia: Luckily my mom is babysitting them until October when we go play there again. … The first couple weeks, we bought the RV, and we knew nothing about owning an RV, or how to operate anything, so that was quite an ordeal.
Marlene: Our first show was with the Austin Rock n Roll camp for Girls, it was about 110 degrees and we were running with the cats into a cool air conditioned building–
Alicia: –And we were carrying them in their cages and they came into the rock show– we didn’t want to put them in that situation, but we couldn’t leave them.
Marlene: Their cages had little signs that said ‘Band Cat.’
Amp: How did you find The Soundry?
Marlene: I found it online researching some different cool places to play, and it sounded really interesting.
Alicia: Yeah the art space and everything.
Marlene: We love it!
Alicia: We like the community thing you have going on here, it’s a really cool space, Jennifer’s a really cool lady– luckily she let us stop by this evening.
Amp: What question should I be asking you that I’m not? What do you guys want to get across to people?
Alicia: one thing we want people to know about the two of us is that we do everything ourselves, and the music you hear– I’m primarily a drummer so I do the drums and the bass. it’s not pre-recorded, it’s not sampled, it’s not a drum machine, that’s one thing we have to get across because people are, especially guys are like, ‘so who programmed your drums? and I’m like ‘I played them.’ It’s just me and Marlene. We do absolutely everything from the music to the booking to the promotion to the driving.
Take a look at http://www.myspace.com/theallgirlboyschoir for more on the All Girl Boys Choir and their debut EP “Walking Miracles.” To donate to the all-important Tour Fund go to http://agbctoursupport.blogspot.com/ — And don’t forget to stop by and testify at their next show at The Empire in Portland, ME from 8 to 11:30 pm.
