Interview – Kylie Cowling, Diva Demolition – February 2013

By Shane Pinnegar

Shane’s interview with DIVA DEMOLITION lead singer/bassist Kylie Cowling originally featured in Xpress Magazine 27 February 2013

They’re supporting KISS, Motley Crue and Thin Lizzy on the huge Australian MONSTER tour, starting in Perth 28 February and moving on through Melbourne (March 5 and 6), Sydney (March 10), Brisbane (March 12) and Mackay (March 16)

By Shane Pinnegar

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: So hey, thanks for your time today.

Ah, no worries, thank you.

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Big news, Diva Demolition are on the bill for the massive KISS, Motley Crue, Thin Lizzy tour. You guys must be a bit over the moon about that.

Oh yeah, absolutely thrilled, excitement hits at least five times a day! I can’t explain, it’s a rock n’ roll dream come true really… no words can really explain.

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Sure! Are you guys fans of all the bands?

Yes!  Although, I didn’t know as much of Thin Lizzy as I realised. I had to do a bit of research into that band. I kind of knew a few of the hits, but not really how big a back catalogue they’ve got.  A lot of songs you just know and you don’t realise how you even know them, you know?

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: So, the big question is: how did a virtually unknown band score the support slot of a lifetime?

Well, it’s still a bit of a mystery to us, but I’ll tell you what I know. Last year, round May, we played a support here in Brisbane, for Doc Neeson’s solo band, and those guys really loved us. They went back and had a talk with their record company friends and stuff, and all of a sudden it all started. Now the record company that we’re with – Spitfire Music – they’ve driven this whole thing.  I don’t know what they do, I don’t know how they do it, but the good news is that they have been in the industry for a very, very long time.  Like, the guy who owns the record company, started out as the roadie and he’s done all the biggest bands that you’ve ever known. So he’s friends with a lot of those people I guess…

Ah, it’s all about who you know isn’t it?

Yeah, I guess he’s got a few strings he can pull, and a few favours he can pull in, and a bit of back scratching, and that’s how it’s really come about. So it has had nothing to do with us, aside the fact that our concept, our act, and our genre really fits the bill… It sort of ticked the boxes, I guess.

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Right on! So I hear that you have history in a couple of outfits -Kaleidoscope and Legless, I think? How did your involvement there lead you to forming Diva Demolition?

Well, I guess Diva Demolition is a combination of all the fuck ups that have happened in the past to now…

[Laughter]

Made the wrongs right and the experience that I have gathered from all that experience, certainly equipped us for what we’re about to do, I think? I guess I can appreciate it from a person that has been in the industry a lot of time, and had the roller-coaster of good and bad happen. This is at the top of the roller-coaster I guess, not that it’s all downhill from here, but…

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Hopefully this isn’t you peaking early, hopefully this is just a stepping stone.

I know, one day I’d hope that we might headline something

[Both Laugh heartily]

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Awesome! So since the big announcement before Christmas, the band’s profile shot through the roof! Has life changed in any practical way yet?

Yes it has, we’ve sort of been told to give up our day job, and really start to work the social networking, as that’s where all the hype of things in popular culture spring from now days, so we’re glued to Facebook and Twitter, basically we’re stuck to our phones like some sort of 14 year old child… [laughs]

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Awesome! Get your teen freak on, yeah right on!

Yeah, yeah! So I’m doing Facebook, and (guitarist) Shaz is on Twitter, and we’re gonna swap eventually so that we can all get an understanding of each platform. Yeah… I’ve learnt a few valuable lessons about social networking and even strategic things about what time to post and that sort of stuff… it all goes towards that strategy of building the band’s profile online.

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: There’re only a few weeks to go before the tour starts now. I guess the big question for the band in recent weeks has been, how are you going to make an impression in front of these three stadium sized bands?

Yeah, funny you should ask that, we’ve been told to focus on getting the music just right. But this week we sort of, on Sunday we head off down to Sydney, and we’re in rehearsal, and there’s going to be some interesting things happening there. We’re looking at what sort of sized stage were going to be playing on, trying to get some idea of what’s going to happen with the three bands that set up behind us, and how much [room] we’ve got. We’re looking at in-ear monitoring – first time we’ve ever used it, so that will be another thing to have in the back of our heads, and also sort of wireless mics. It’s hard for me to sort of wander around the stage a lot because we’re sort of stuck on the microphone!  But we’ll have probably 20-25 minutes at the most, so it’s going to be an intense 25 minutes, but were going to be very rehearsed…doing… you know what I mean. We’re getting our arses out and a big block of rehearsal work in, and really sorting out things we need to sort out, beside playing the music live, which we’ve got down.

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Do you have any experience under your belt of playing big stages like this?

Yeah, no.

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: It’s gotta be a bit of a head f**k doesn’t it?

Yeah, I guess so… it’s exciting too. I’ve had quite a bit of experience being a support act in the last year and a half up here in Brisbane. And what I’ve learnt from that is that when it’s your turn, when you get your five minutes to do sound check, do your best, and then when you’re on stage, do your best. So I doubt it’s going to be very different to that, we are the first of four acts, we are an unknown. These bands are the biggest in the world – oh my god!!  We’re going to be sitting there, waiting for our opportunity to get our little sound check. And then were just gonna give it everything we’ve got, and hopefully the performance will see it through.

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Your website takes the really novel approach of telling your bio as a comic strip, who came up with that excellent little concept?

It was a bit of a combination of things: at the time when we did the studio recording, I had got a new iPad and I was having a bit of a play around with a few different programs and stuff, and we just started posting our daily diary in a kind of cartoon form.  We’d take a few pictures and make some funny comments, rather than having to go; ‘we went to the studio today, and did 85 tracks of lead guitar’… We just kind of did a diary like that in the cartoon sort of way, using pictures, and we’d just sent that out to the whole team and we’d all get a laugh, and it was fun. It evolved from there really… ‘we just love what you’ve done with the cartoons’, [so we thought] where can we go from here? And [management] pretty much took it on and took our little cartoon thing, and made them bigger and better, and then they took them from there. It’s not like we’ve drawn them ourselves, really…

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: So the albums recorded I believe? How was the experience working with Craig Porteils?

It was different actually. I’ve done quite a bit of recording in the past, in both the previous bands that I was in, and mostly those experiences were independent, where you’re paying for it, so you’re watching every hour. You’re very conscious of money and time. And that wasn’t the case [this time].

Obviously, we were told to focus on the music, and get it right, and don’t worry about all those other little peripherals. I was getting on a very different level indeed with the music, rather than all the organisation [side of things], and I really enjoyed it. I’ve always been the person that had to pay the bills and keep everyone on track, and that wasn’t the case, we’ve got some really good people and they organised a drummer, for a start, we didn’t have a drummer. And it was a very hands on experience for everyone involved.

Craig Porteils himself – to get back to your question – he’s a really easy going chap, he relies on food and exercise, so you have let him have a little break every now and then to go and have something to eat and work out. He had some great suggestions as well, he listened to everything that we wanted to do, and then said flat out that it wouldn’t work. And okay, we took his instruction, I don’t think I insisted upon many things. Yeah, it was just too easy, it flowed really well.

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Awesome. When is the album likely to be released?

We’re releasing a physical copy of it during the Kiss tour, which will be available in the merchandise places. But the actual album won’t be available online for a little while yet, were gonna do the tried and true method of, lets release a few singles and see how it goes. Because really the most important thing for Diva at the moment, is trying to get some recognition on the radio so that people are familiar with our sound, and that’s kind of where we’re going to focus our efforts with releases, we’re gonna release a few singles to make people want to buy an album, not just release an album, and then there is it… we’ll have to record another one. [laughs]

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: If you were gonna give yourself the hard sell, would you say the band is for fans of… who?

Joan Jett… The Divinyls, oh I love The Divinyls!

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: They are pretty good names to start with!

Yeah! And that’s pretty much where we pitch our music.  We’re a rock band who are also a pop band, we’re a pop-punk band I guess, because we write the old school songs in that way.

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Cool, and after the big tour, are you going to try and crack Australia by going round and round, or are you going to head overseas?

I hope we do a bit of both, there’s a few things on the cards, and we’re waiting to hear back.  We’re looking at doing some… We’re from Adelaide originally, and we were meant to play heaps in Adelaide, but because The Angels 100% tour got cancelled [when Doc Neeson needed treatment for cancer], I don’t know what happened, there were a few other things that sort of changed along the way. We haven’t made it to Adelaide. Kiss and Motley Crue are playing The Clipsal 500 and at first we were going to be playing as well but then there was a local competition through a music government website for the opening slot which ironically was going to an emerging band from South Australia, which you know, three years ago that was us!

[Both Laugh]

So we’re not playing in Adelaide, so were looking to do some shows to pick up where we had sort of already started doing some work in Adelaide, and Cairns and Townsville and all those sorts of places. I think we’re going to try and reach out there as a priority first before we do our big Sydney and Melbourne launches… ‘cos they get heaps of bands [laughs] – they don’t need us, they can wait a little bit!  They can go and see some other bands, they can go and see Black Sabbath or something [laughs]

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: So, finally, what does music mean to you?

It’s been my whole life; it’s a massive part of me. I like music because it’s independent of all other things.  You know, no matter what happens in your life, music’s kind of there as a separate entity. You can commiserate all the crap things, or celebrate all the good things [with] music, creating it as well, I’m very much invested

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Thanks so much for your time Kylie.

No worries, thank you Shane!

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Good luck with the tour, and we’ll make sure that we’re there early in Perth and catch you guys.

Yeah that was my question, I was gonna say, are you going to the show in Perth?

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Absolutely! Yeah, wouldn’t miss it!

Ah terrific, well please, come and say G’day, and make sure I can put a face to the voice!

100% ROCK MAGAZINE: Absolutely will do. Okay, see you later!

See ya!

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Category: Interviews