Among the big established talent playing Glastonbury this weekend, She Drew The Gun are on the bill having won the festival’s emerging talent contest. Ahead of their sets at The Rabbit Hole on Thursday (23 June) at 4pm, 2:50pm on the Greenpeace Stage on Saturday (25) and the John Peel Stage on Sunday (26) at 11am the group’s frontwoman Louisa Roach recalls the her experience of the band’s new talent search and what winning means to them.
My band are about to play the John Peel stage at Glastonbury Festival. It’s the stuff you dream of when you start off, there’s a photo of me with my friend Jodie (see below), first time we met, walking through town to some party setting the world to rights, chatting about music and future hopes and dreams, I’d not long started She Drew The Gun, I was like “I don’t wanna just do it for fun or just be playing songs around here, I want to play fucking Glastonbury.”
A bit has happened since then, I gained a band, first drummer Sian Monaghan, then a little bit further down the road guitarist Jack Turner and eventually Jen Kickhefer on bass too. I also met James Skelly, who heard my stuff through a friend and invited me round to his for a brew and to hear a few tunes, as a longtime fan of The Coral it was surreal, soon after that we started working together on what would become the She Drew The Gun debut LP Memories of the Future. Dream come true number one.
Fast forward again and lots more has happened since I uploaded a couple of tunes and pressed send to the mother of band competitions back in January. A first recording contract was signed with Skeleton Key Records. We released Poem (below), which seemed to capture a bit of the mood of the day, it got play-listed at 6Music, Steve Lamacq said it was the best thing he’d heard all year, Zane Lowe played it on Beats1, Billy Bragg even gave it a share. In March we got announced on the longlist for the Glastonbury emerging talent comp, about two weeks later they invited us to Pilton Working Mens Club to play in the final. The mood in camp SDTG was high, everyone back home was getting behind us like we were a local team getting on a decent cup run. Then came the final and an announcement that we’d won, it was pure unadulterated joy condensed into one tiny unforgettable moment.
The next few days were a whirlwind, we were all over the music industry news and once again it was all a bit surreal. A couple of weeks later we released the Album, and set off on our first headline tour, with sold out shows, it was a trip. Here we are a couple of months down the road and Glastonbury is upon us, we just got our first play on Radio 1 with new single Pit Pony, and got ourselves a gig everyday of the festival at some stage or another. Tactically speaking, we’ve gone for the keep ourselves out of trouble by booking a gig everyday of the festival line of thought, it’s all about the adventure, playing our hearts out every gig, building up to that Sunday Morning opening the John Peel. We’ll let our hair down after that, and then get buzzing again for The Lexington on Wednesday (29 June), with my mate Jodie’s band supporting us, still having that conversation we started in the pic.
Louisa Roach@shedrewthegun
For more head to Shedrewthegun.com.
