Interview

Twerps

Interview by Koen van Bommel
Photos shot by Lucie McGough in Melbourne, Australia

Sometimes you find yourself doing something without any preparation. For instance: you wake up one morning to find an email in your inbox, mentioning you have to interview someone in twenty minutes. You have not done any research. There are no questions scribbled on a piece of paper in a logical order. What do you do? You improvise. And try not to make a bad impression. As Julia McFarlane of Twerps would say: “It’s okay to just show up and pull something out of your brain, something you already know. You’re not gonna die. You’ll be fine, you’ll live to see another day.”

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Hi Julia! Due to my appalling work ethics, I have just woken up and I’m completely unprepared for this interview. How about that?

Haha, that’s okay. We can just have a nice chat, it’s all good.

When was the last time you felt horribly underprepared?

With, eh, with everything I commit to? Apart from maybe… let’s see. I’ll try to be specific. I just finished a degree, so throughout the whole degree I felt like that, unprepared. But maybe, like, I’m starting a new band and I keep saying I’ll have more songs finished at the rehearsals. And then I get to the rehearsals, and I’ve only got like, some chords and I’ll try to come up with something on the spot. So yeah, I guess very recently and all the time I feel unprepared.

Does that happen often, that you get to a studio to record while thinking: “Shit, I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to be doing?”

Haha. Well, actually we made a song for Merge, they put out a series of 7″ of bands on their label, in celebration of their 25th anniversary. So they asked us to do a song, and we said fine, yeah we can do that. And we made an EP, and we thought it’d be no big thing. And you know, the date loomed and we realized it was due. So we used some instrumental stuff we had already recorded and I went in to do a vocal take and it was really unprepared, I was writing lyrics on the spot. I know a lot of people can flow like that, but I don’t. I perform well under pressure sometimes, but not to that degree. But in the end, it turned out really well, so maybe I’m full of shit.

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I hope I can say the same about this interview after we’re done. I still have no idea what I should ask you.

Well, I reckon preparing.. I saw this clip of Marc Maron, do you like him?

I can’t say I’ve heard of him.

He’s a stand up comedian, and he has a podcast where he interviews other comics and musicians out of his garage. I saw a sketch of him the other day, and one of his bits was like: “Well, someone asked me if I was prepared for this. And in response I said: I don’t really like preparing. I generally don’t like preparers.” And then he says that whenever he comes across a preparer, he’s like: “You’re a coward.” His angle was that improvising is god.

Yeah, I think I can relate to that.

There’s a lot to be said for having something up your sleeve, you know, having something prepared. But I think improvising is a good thing to try first.

Do you improvise a lot while making music?

Well, I guess it’s all improvising. You’re improvising when you’re writing a song. But there’s room for improvising when we play live, for sure.

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So when you go on tour, do you play the same songs every night? Do you make a setlist and commit to that, or do you change things around a lot?

No, we change our setlist every night. We’ve just been asked to do more touring in the US at the end of the year. But I was kinda in the mindset of, I could never do another tour after Europe on these same songs. So for those reasons we change the setlist every night. We can’t really just do the same songs every night.

Still, there’s a lot of bands that do exactly that. They play the same setlist every night, and even the jokes that they make between songs tend to be the same jokes over and over.

Yeah, we just toured with a band that does that. I respect them, and I respect them as a band, so it was kind of confusing to see they did that. But then again, realizing at the same time there are reasons people do that. There are reasons people become successful, because they do something they know works.

Yeah, and I think that if you play like, a lot of shows, it just gets easier to…

Exactly. I suppose you just pass a threshold of repetition, where everything sort of feels fine. Like, you can just repeat whatever.

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Are you ever worried about making a bad first impression?

All the time. I feel like that all the time. I think people hate me, and then they like me. Gradually, they like me.

Why?

I’m not sure. I think it might be… I’ve got quite an angular face. Not that I want to blame it on things exterior to my control, but sometimes I think it has something to do with that. But also, I have foot and mouth syndrome a lot. Like, I say the wrong thing. My friends look at me often and they’re like: I can’t believe you just said that to this person.

Like what?

It just happens too often for me to pull out an example. I’ve got a bit of a temper as well, and sometimes I can get a bit fired up about stuff. Especially when you’re touring, you constantly get in situations that annoy you. Especially as a girl in a band, I feel like I’m up against it all the time.

What does being a girl have to do with it?

I think during the last tour we’ve done I’ve experienced it more, or I’ve become more aware of it, but I feel a little bit annoyed often in a band setting when it’s like, soundcheck or doing an interview, not this one, but other interviews, where you get asked dumb questions because you’re a girl in a band. You know what I mean?

Probably not, but…

I’m put in situations often, because I’m a girl. Like, I’ll get asked if I write my own lyrics.

Do you feel like you’re not taken seriously?

Well, no. I guess… Or maybe, yeah. Yeah, not taken seriously. Recently I’ve felt a bit grumpy about that. While we’re touring, I’ve been meeting a lot of people for the first time, so I’ve possibly made bad first impressions wherever I go.

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Have you ever had one of those dreams where you’re back in high school or some place, and you have to do something but you’re not prepared? I recently dreamt I had to sing in an opera, but I didn’t know any of the lyrics.

I used to have those a lot! And I guess they just mean you’re scared of being unprepared. But maybe what those dreams really tell you is that it’s okay to be unprepared. You’re experiencing things in your dreams that you’re scared of, so you can be better at them in real life. Like, if you don’t do your homework and you’re going to school, you’re not gonna die. You’ll be fine, you’ll live to see another day.

I really like that, I’ve never thought of it that way

I’m a bit of an optimist, and I would hope there’s at least something to gain from a situation like that. I mean, at least I haven’t had that dream for a while now, so maybe I’m getting better at being unprepared. I really think that dream isn’t necessarily about how you should be prepared, it is more about it being okay to just show up and pull something out of your brain, that you already know. And you know… you’ll be fine.

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