by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Unlike her jet-setting, gold-digging namesake from Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, the U.K.'s Holly Golightly (born Holly Golightly Smith) has little interest in the upper classes, be it the rich or the musical elite. Of course, singing with her friends the White Stripes (on "It's True That We Love One Another" from Elephant) isn't exactly slumming. Moreover, playing with Billy Childish's band Thee Headcoats and its all-girl splinter group, Thee Headcoatees, placed Golightly at the fore of Britain's garage scene in the '90s, yet she's not inclined to pump up the volume and turn up the glitz to join this decade's glossy rock revivals.

Since 1994, her self-penned solo work has explored olde tyme rock 'n' roll, where folk, blues, soul, girl groups and the first strains of garage rock intersected. With a tightly knit band of friends and exceptional musicians ("I'm the only one who can't play," she says), Golightly records and tours purely for fun, between six-month stints managing social housing in London. The Mirror sat down with the singer/social worker, who was promoting her new album Slowly But Surely in New York City last month, to discuss her hobby and the dependable douchebaggery of the NME.

Mirror: I imagine the British press has treated you differently since your White Stripes dalliance.

Holly Golightly: The NME wouldn't even list my shows until that record came out. I've done one interview with them since. This guy came round to my house, and he seemed quite nice, but what he printed... it wasn't even words I'd said! As far as he was concerned, the only thing I'd ever done was a backup vocal on a White Stripes record. He didn't mention that there were 11 LPs before and that Jack and Meg grew up by my records. He was more interested in whether me and Jack White were fucking. [They're not.] If the only thing people know about me is that I sang with the White Stripes, then that's fine, and if it introduces them to my music, that's even better, but the focus of the interview was so off-putting. The awful thing about the NME is they don't write about music, they write sort of salacious, minor-celebrity gossip. It's like Hello for teenage indie kids.

M: Trends don't really concern you, I suppose.

HG: Yeah. What we do simply runs parallel to everything else, irrespective of what's going on in modern music. To a lot of people, it might sound like really old-fashioned music, but to us it's current, it's what we do now. There's no strategy in terms of me having a career in music. I have a day job which I really like and this is just something that I can do, that I've been doing for a long time, and it's gained its own momentum. I don't think that anybody does what I do at the moment, and that in itself is a joy. If I walked into a bar and saw us playing, I'd think we were great - maybe not that we were the best at it, technically, but that we were having fun and people were dancing, everything a band is supposed to achieve when you go and see them live.

With the Sunday Sinners at El Salon
on Friday, Nov. 26, 9 p.m., $12.50

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