Girl grouping

>> Connecting the dots with
Brighton’s the Pipettes

HARMONIC TONIC: The Pipettes

by ERIK LEIJON

For a group that prides itself on attempting to recapture the ideal girl group sound of the 1960s, Brighton’s Pipettes have a very modern take on striving for pop perfection. For one thing, the trio of female singers in matching polka-dot dresses—Gwenno, RiotBecki and Rosay—are directly involved in the songwriting process, and instead of innocent virginal love, their subject matter veers more towards one-night stands and uniform fetishes. Available as an import for over a year, their debut LP, We Are the Pipettes, officially hits our shores Oct. 2.

“Sex and love have always been integral to pop music,” says Gwenno Saunders, the only non-Brighton resident in the group (she’s Welsh and used to act on a Welsh-language television show). “All the songs we write are really just conversations we have with each other. We try to do it in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.”

If there’s anything the girls love more than a boy in a school uniform, it’s dancing. Gwenno recalls before she joined the Pipettes in 2005, when original member Julia Indelicate left to form her own band, few were convinced a group of cheery Motown revivalists could incite a crowd of British indie kids to dance. “It’s become a trend now for bands to make records that make you want to dance, but even when I saw the Pipettes before I joined, it was a revelation. Now everyone sort of expects [danceable songs] from bands.”

The Pipettes’ visionnaries, Julia and Monster Bobby, came up with the idea for the band when Bobby noticed he was getting positive reactions when playing ’60s girl group records during his live DJ sets. Although a fan of the style, the plan was to sound more live and energetic, as opposed to the immaculate wall of sound the Motown groups were known for, so he created the all-male Cassettes, a four-piece backing band for the Pipettes. Bobby plays lead guitar and despite his Holland-Dozier-Holland status as the group’s mastermind, Bobby always intended to recede into the background and assign creative control over to the six other members.

“We all have different tastes, but we all meet in trying to write the perfect pop song,” says Gwenno, who cites the Charades and British girl groups like Bananarama and Shampoo as her all-time favourites. “It has to be something ridiculous and make you want to dance at the same time. We all write on our own, but when we write specifically for the Pipettes, we try to retain the same sort of sentiments.”

Gwenno says it’s not uncommon to see older music fans at their shows, ones who lived during the original Motown era. Admittedly, she wasn’t an expert before, but since joining, Gwenno has dedicated herself to revisiting the genre. She suspects it’s the fun and frivolous melodies that have made groups like the Shangri-Las stand the test of time, and she thinks the Pipettes’ experiment has successfully recreated the secret formula.

“We try to mix live instrumentation with pop sensibilities. It’s the sense of energy, and it might be quite naive, but people really crave that sort of thing. I think a lot of pop music can be quite cynical, and it loses some of its soul in the process.”

With Small Sins at Petit Campus on
Saturday, Oct. 6, 8 p.m., $15