Pat Place and Cynthia Sley of Bush Tetras joined Audrey Golden for a New York dialog about their new album They Reside In My Head, the band’s recent lineup, Cave Women and feminist funk, and the lasting energy of their friendship.

“At this stage, for Cynthia and I, after doing it for therefore a few years, if it’s not enjoyable, we don’t need to do it,” Pat Place tells me because the three of us sit down to speak concerning the new Bush Tetras LP They Reside In My Head, out now on Wharf Cat Information. Fortunately for listeners, it’s nonetheless enjoyable, owing partly to the shut and enduring friendship of guitarist Place and vocalist Cynthia Sley. “We made a pact with one another when issues obtained difficult after we misplaced certainly one of our bass gamers, and every little thing was so…not enjoyable,” Sley laughs, “That it needed to be enjoyable. So now that it’s enjoyable once more, we will breathe, and we’re transferring ahead.” The brand new lineup — because the loss of life of Tetras co-founder Dee Pop in 2021 — options Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth) on drums, and Cáit “Rocky” O’Riordan (founding member of The Pogues) on bass. The singles Chook On a Wire and They Reside in My Head sit among the many band’s greatest, and in the event you’re something like me, you’re hoping the album ushers in a brand new period of Bush Tetras fame from Manhattan to Queens and much past.

Bush Tetras aren’t any strangers to sonic trendsetting, and so they’ve lengthy been synonymous with the New York Metropolis downtown music scene. Robert Christgau wrote within the Village Voice that the band “summed up the Decrease East Aspect circa 1980.”

“We shaped in ’79,” Sley tells me. “Pat and I met on the road with Laura [Kennedy, the band’s founding bass player] — I’d gone to artwork college with Laura — and we had been all actually good pals earlier than we began taking part in collectively. After which it actually intensified. We had been taking part in always, writing and gigging, recording. It was loopy.” Pat remembers their preliminary friendship, too, and the quick affinity amongst them: “I used to be residing with Laura on the time. Laura and I had been jamming with Dee, and we had been searching for the proper combo, so we lastly stated, ‘c’mon Cynthia!’ She was doing clothes for numerous folks, Lydia Lunch, Annie Lennox. However we satisfied her to come back in and be the singer. As soon as we obtained the lineup with Cynthia — we’d had just a few different folks earlier than — we had six songs, and we performed our first gig…. The 4 of us had an simple chemistry, and it was enjoyable. We did play loads: we had a bit of studio, and after we weren’t touring or gigging, we had been in there on a regular basis, principally jamming and having enjoyable.”

Bush Tetras began off on 99 Information, Ed Bahlman’s store and label. Just a few years in the past, the late drummer Dee Pop advised me a nowhere-but-NYC story of how 99 turned the band’s label: “I used to buy—effectively, all of us used to buy—at 99, and we liked Ed… We knew he was beginning a report label, and he was placing out Glenn Branca’s report [Lesson No. 1, the first 99 Records release in 1980]. Me and my mom went to Hunter Faculty on 68th Avenue to see a reggae group, Black Uhuru. It was their first present in New York — I’ve a really cool mother. So we went to see the present, and in the course of the present, somebody took out a gun and began taking pictures. Everybody ran out onto Lexington Avenue and began hiding behind vehicles. Me and my mom are behind this automobile, and Ed and his spouse Gina had been by the automobile as effectively. We’re all like, beneath this automobile, and my mom says to Ed, ‘he’s obtained a terrific new band! You must signal them!’ And the subsequent week Bush Tetras had been on 99.”

Simply after the discharge of the band’s feminist anthem Too Many Creeps, a December piece within the New York Every day Information inspired New Yorkers to buy regionally for the vacations and to purchase Bush Tetras data: “Wouldn’t or not it’s good to make use of the purchasing season to again an area band or label? 99 Information, operated out of the report retailer of the identical identify at 99 MacDougal Avenue…has 45s by downtown notables like Glenn Branca, the Bush Tetras, Y-Pants and ESG. All are distinctive, danceable variations on fashionable rock’n’roll, important for that discerning new wave nephew looking for the most recent developments.” After all, if the author had solely listened to Too Many Creeps, absolutely they’d have urged patrons to buy the only for his or her new wave nieces.

That track resonated with ladies all through city areas on the time, and it nonetheless does right this moment: “I simply don’t wanna go/ Out within the streets no extra/ I simply don’t wanna go/ Out on the street no extra/ As a result of these folks, they offer me/ They provide me the creeps, anymore…Too many creeps, too many creeps/ Too many creeps, too many creeps….”

In 1981, Sley described the track to New York Rocker like this: “In the summertime, it’s simply so arduous downtown, coping with these individuals who always harass you.” For the post-punk historical past Rip It Up and Begin Once more, Place advised Simon Reynolds about her songwriting course of for the only that had, by then, develop into a feminist anthem: “I used to be sitting at my job at Bleecker Avenue Cinema after I jotted down these lyrics for Too Many Creeps. The folks on the streets had been bugging me.”

“It simply went nonstop from that time,” Place says, “and it was a quick and wild journey from ’79 to ’83.”

Too Many Creeps additionally created a part of the soundtrack to the Tremendous 8 quick Cave Women, directed by Kiki Smith and Ellen Cooper. That includes the Cave Women “collective” of New York Metropolis artists, Smith and Cooper shot the movie between 1981-84. At one level, voiceover narration speaks out: “As of March 6, 1981, the next Cave Women have been documented: Cara Brownell, Bush Tetras, Ellen Cooper, Ilona Granet, Marnie Greenholz, Julie Harrison, Becky Howland, Virge Piersol, Judy Ross, Bebe Smith, Kiki Smith, Teri Slotkin, Y-Pants, Sophie VDT. The work continues.” Too Many Creeps serves a narrating perform for blurred, montage-edited footage of girls rising from and thriving in a setting that’s directly pre-historic and post-apocalyptic. In an interview with the cinema journal Framework, Cooper underscored simply how crucial the Bush Tetras sound was to creating Cave Women, emphasising how she was “very within the soundtrack,” and the way in which “the pictures and music are so necessary, you don’t want the story line.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFlZ0pdEuJY

Smith and Cooper each spoke about Cave Women in that 1983 interview. As Smith intimated even then, the work resonated with ladies viewers broadly: “Everyone’s obtained a imaginative and prescient of Cave Women, of constructing your personal fantasy, making your personal historical past.” Cooper described it as a type of radical experiment in “in the event you take away civilization and say, right here’s this group of girls, self-sufficient, earlier than all of the ornaments of tradition encompass us, residing and trying to create their very own setting.” Whereas Cooper clarified that the filmmakers had been “forgetting males for the second,” Smith declared, “I simply don’t know what to do with males. We hang around with ladies. We’re pals and we work collectively. It appears completely pure to not have males. There’s 10 billion males’s movies which can be about males solely. Cave Women is about ladies in a gaggle.”

“All of us go means again,” Place tells me within the current, talking about Smith and different ladies within the Cave Women collective. “I keep in mind Kiki from the mid-70s again in that Barnabas Rex [NYC dive bar on Duane Street] scene. There have been sure bars we’d all hand around in downtown, and we had been all pals.” Sley remembers a connection, too, cast earlier than she turned the singer within the band. “I used to be doing work with Kiki earlier than I began in Bush Tetras as a result of I used to be excited by vogue. We had been making screenprints, and she or he and I obtained to be good pals. I labored at Tin Pan Alley [a midtown bar named for the earlier collection of publishers in NYC], she labored at Tin Pan Alley, and we had that connection. Kiki is a genius.”

There’s a time-collapsing resonance in how Smith’s description of the necessity for Cave Women — and feminist collaboration extra broadly — again in 1983 speaks to Sley’s and Place’s work with the Tetras. “It’s a must to attempt to make the instruments on your personal survival,” Smith put it, “which is partly what we’re attempting to do with Cave Women. My intuition is to outlive, and an excessive amount of what is claimed is towards one’s survival. However it’s a must to make the instruments, think about what the pictures do…begin dialogues with each other…principally to make a friendship…. Cave Women is a means for Ellen and I, in addition to 5 or ten different ladies, to get collectively.” Trying again now, Place agrees: “It was an amazingly small little scene there. All totally different artists, musicians, dancers, comedians, actors, administrators, and all people type of culminated in that scene.” In a present-day interview for Hyperallergic, Smith ruminated about how, at its coronary heart, “Cave Women was…about making up your personal historical past. The histories that we had obtainable to us as women weren’t so advantageous.”

Though Bush Tetras remained largely underground in these early years, these within the know merely knew. In Los Angeles, their music was described as a “breath of recent air,” and the Guardian pounced on Londoners’ attraction to their “splendidly sinister single Too Many Creeps.” Downtown gurl-group. Feminist funk-punks. Avant-garde grrrls. A pioneering power in New York’s rock underground. Over the past 4 many years, Bush Tetras have been described each succinctly and effusively, and so they’ve develop into feminist icons. In 1990, journalist and musician Margot Mifflin lamented the dearth of feminist artists on the scene: “We had been doing fairly effectively 10 years in the past, with…The Bush Tetras, who by no means made it to a serious label however gained notoriety within the underground by laying sensible lyrics over funk grooves peppered with uncooked guitar noise.” “However,” she wrote, “MTV stalled the feminist momentum we had gathered.”

Place and Sley tried to maintain the band alive after the preliminary hiatus in 1983 when Pop left to hitch Gun Membership and Kennedy pursued different tasks. “We actually wished to maintain going,” Place remembers, however “there have been a whole lot of issues that put a halt to it… All of the partying, medicine and craziness made it look like a great time to get out alive. Lastly regrouping within the ’90s after you’ve been by means of this loopy time — and I’d actually modified the way in which I used to be residing — it made sense for us to attempt to write collectively once more.” Sley agrees. “It’s like, you probably have that chemistry, are you actually going to provide it up and by no means play collectively once more? Issues occur in life that separate you, however then one thing pulls you again in.” When Bush Tetras reformed in 1995 and launched the album Magnificence Lies (Tim/Kerr 1997), they appeared in print because the band “who first wrapped barbed wire round feminist funk,” and the San Francisco Examiner insisted that their music of the grunge period was “making a belated case for its unheralded affect on acts like L7, the Rollins Band, and the Pixies.” Sley “gnashes and wails,” one other reviewer delightedly wrote, and described Place’s guitar as “spellbinding.”

One other hiatus got here for the band shortly thereafter, and the band went by means of a collection of bassists following the loss of life of unique co-founder Laura Kennedy in 2011. “The band has positively had drama…it’s a bit of ‘Spinal Faucet,’ all of our bass gamers,” Sley laughs, and begins naming a few of the musicians Bush Tetras has had in recent times on EPs and singles that embrace Take the Fall (Wharf Cat Information 2018) and There Is A Hum (Third Man Information 2019). “However Pat and I don’t have drama between us! We don’t like drama,” Sley says.

“Wasted time, drama. So overrated,” Place replies.

Simply as Bush Tetras began engaged on a brand new album, the pandemic got here and created an earth-shattering fracture — not only for the band and for musicians across the globe, in fact, however for the world. “I wrote in 2020,” Sley remembers. “Within the bleakest moments, like June and July, I got here again to town and wrote then. Every thing felt so discombobulated and peculiar, and I wished to get a grip on it. Every thing simply stopped, so it was a really reflective time for all of us New Yorkers. You actually needed to sit with your personal unhealthy self and take into consideration the place you’re at in life, and the which means of every little thing. We had been pressured to cease and mirror.” The loss of life of drummer Pop in 2021 left one other startling gap in Bush Tetras, simply as New York Metropolis was starting to open up once more. “We needed to begin over in a sure means, Cynthia and I,” Pat says.

Pop’s rhythm lacuna would in the end be stuffed by Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley. “Pat and I had been simply devastated, and we didn’t have a clue about who to strategy who might fill Dee’s sneakers,” Sley explains, “so I requested my buddy Sal Maida [bass player of Roxy Music] for his recommendation. He had three folks, and certainly one of them was Steve. I didn’t assume he’d be free as a result of he’s so busy, however I contacted Thurston [Moore], and Thurston stated, ‘Yeah, he’s free,’ and we had been all like, oh my god, as a result of it appeared like he’d be nice. He got here in, and it was on the spot. He match instantly.”

When Shelley joined the band in 2021, “we had been writing the brand new report with RB Korbet on bass,” Place explains, “nevertheless it simply didn’t work out precisely, so we needed to half methods.” The addition of O’Riordan was the lacking puzzle piece the Tetras wanted. “A few 12 months in the past,” Pat tells me, “Rocky was again in New York on a two-year visa with the Irish Arts Council…. Cynthia obtained in contact with Rocky, and certain sufficient, she was obtainable. We now have this nice lineup now.” “It’s gonna be an entire new chapter with Rocky,” Sley fortunately chimes in. “She actually liked the songs from the album and actually took to it, and she or he’s actually including a whole lot of swing. We did a present within the spring, and it felt so good, it was just like the roof got here off.” Pat rapidly follows up, “and we’re excited to write down together with her, too. We’ve began 4 or 5 new songs together with her already!”

“We will really feel this actually good connection amongst all of us, and man, that’s actually arduous to seek out,” Sley emphasises. “Pat and I’ve had it for 43 years, however I don’t assume we anticipated to seek out it once more. And it’s nice Steve and Rocky are each actually famend and nice gamers, however they’re nice people, too, and that makes all of the distinction.” Bush Tetras has develop into a supergroup, I recommend and chortle, however I’m additionally a bit of bit critical. Consummate sounds emanate from They Reside In My Head.

But the brand new Bush Tetras period isn’t with out the post-apocalyptic moments that outlined their experiences as Cave Women greater than 40 years in the past. After they met up with photographer David Godlis and administrators Lewie and Noah Kloster on the former web site of CBGB — now, post-apocalyptically itself, a John Varvatos storefront — to make the video for the brand new single Chook On a Wire, Canadian wildfire smoke engulfed New York Metropolis all of a sudden. You might need seen pictures of the noon solar, eerily orange atmospheric mild like one thing out of Pink Daybreak. “Noah and Lewie are genius brothers!” Sley exclaims. “We put in some music for the superb video they did for Stranger Than Rotterdam with Sara Driver. In order a type of commerce, they agreed to do that video for us. We did it throughout that horrible orange air enterprise. Oh my god. I used to be with David, and we had been on the market reducing by means of the orange air, man. It was intense! So it provides to the weirdness of it. It was very spooky that day.”

Simply because the band has persevered regardless of the misogynistic propensity of the music trade, they’re now urgent onward by means of local weather change catastrophe and the lack of previously eminent sonic areas in New York — venues like CBGB, Hurrah, Danceteria, and Tier 3. The video is an excellent palimpsest wherein Place and Sley function reverently crafted paper dolls of themselves circa 1980 (Place’s paper doll even has an arm that wails on the guitar!) in previous Bush Tetras haunts, now overtaken with industrial big-box shops and bougie boutiques. The previous turns into current, and vice versa, because the Bush Tetras — in each paper-doll and human kind — make their means round 21-century NYC. (Naturally, I requested if there was any likelihood of getting a duplicate of a few of these paper dolls myself, and I screamed with glee when the reply was a powerful sure.) Town has modified however the band has survived — and sensationally so. The music video reminds us that, simply as Bush Tetras aren’t any strangers to being downtown NYC icons of a sure period, they’re additionally no strangers to creating New York Metropolis music new once more and bringing their definitive sound to recent audiences.

“It’s fascinating as you progress in life, you alter, and I’ve positively modified how I play a bit of bit, studying extra concerning the guitar, however I strive to not be taught an excessive amount of. We don’t need to damage the primitive side of all of it,” Place laughs. “In the long run, with the brand new album, working with Steve was totally different, and a few of the issues we wrote with him had been very a lot influenced by him and his course, and we’re joyful about that. It was enjoyable to go in a brand new course.”

Place and Sley have been pals for greater than 40 years. Though they’re reticent to recommend they’ve been the keepers of Bush Tetras, the lasting bond between them is apparent and highly effective. “After working collectively for therefore a few years, there’s this chemistry and communication that’s uncommon,” Place says. “Cynthia and I’ve this factor, and I’m grateful for it.” Sley laughs as she explains, “we take swims between our writing classes,” and tells me they “even share a room on tour as a result of we’re like sisters.” Sley appears to be like at Place and smiles, “to not get too mushy, Pat.” Place laughs too, “t’s very, very good.” They’re unique Cave Women, so it ought to come as no shock that Bush Tetras could have survived for all these years due in no small half to the facility of feminine friendship.

“At this level,” Sley underscores, referring to Bush Tetras, “it’s our legacy, Pat and me. We cut up every little thing equally with Rocky and Steve, nevertheless it’s positively our legacy. It’s simply that we discovered some new life, and there’s gotta be a purpose for it, proper? And we nonetheless have a whole lot of songs left in us. I don’t know if that ever stops.” They’re Cave Women, in spite of everything, rewriting a music historical past that places ladies on the heart.

They Reside In My Head is out now on Wharf Cat. Bush Tetras might be on tour from September by means of November with dates in New York Metropolis, London, Dublin, Berlin, and extra. Purchase tickets by means of Wharf Cat Information.

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Phrases by Audrey Golden. You may comply with Audrey on Twitter and Instagram, and you’ll try her private web site to be taught extra about her writing. 

Audrey can also be station supervisor of Louder Than Conflict radio, the place she presents the weekly present BREAKING GLASS each Wednesday at 11pm. Tune in for mixtapes highlighting ladies throughout the music trade, and make amends for the BREAKING GLASS Mixcloud playlist.