A Quick Q&A With Pillow Queens

Nov 20

Nov 20 A Quick Q&A With Pillow Queens

Pillow Queens have cemented themselves at the forefront of a continued resurgence for Irish music; the last five years have seen the emergence of the likes of Fontaines D.C., SOAK, Silverbacks and The Murder Capital, but there’s something a little unique about the noise that Dublin’s latest export are creating. The all-female four piece, made up of vocalist/guitarist Sarah Corcoran, vocalist, guitarist and bassist Pamela Connolly, guitarist Cathy McGuinness, and drummer Rachel Lyons, have seen their stature sky-rocket in the short space of time they’ve been together. As they prepare to self-release their debut album, we caught up with Pam to chat about all things PQ.

You’ve smashed on to the scene this year, creating a fanbase almost without playing any live shows; what’s that been like for you as a band?

So, I think it was the initial over saturation of ourselves as much as possible that kind of allowed us to develop a fan base. Our fan base is quite non-male, although males as well and queer so I guess maybe some of it as well is seeing something different on a stage. Something that they can relate to. But I’m not entirely sure. We could probably do the same thing again and get different results. I think it was just a time. I’m not entirely sure myself why that worked cause we went against the grain, you know we did that thing where you release music right before Christmas, which is the one thing people tell you; if you’re gonna release music, don’t do it at the end of the year. We were like ‘fuck it we have nothing to lose.’ We don’t like waiting around, so I think that was mostly it, really [laughs].

I read a great quote, it was from an article, maybe a year or two ago from the beginnings of the band. I think Sarah announced that you could play Electric Picnic while you were just sort of knocking about in bedrooms. Has that ambition always been there from the offset?

Yeah, I remember when Sarah said that, I was like…’we only have half a band right now. We haven’t done anything.’ She was like, ‘I’m just gonna contact someone I know anyway’. I was like, ‘okay’. But I guess that is something, we didn’t end up playing Electric Picnic, it would have just been impossible. But I think we ended up playing the next year. We put huge aims in front of ourselves, stuff that maybe doesn’t seem super tangible, but you know, what’s the point of not putting them there. It will only mean that when it does happen, maybe it will happen a bit earlier than it should have, and I think having those big aims push you a lot.

It would be silly not to mention Dublin. The Irish music scene, obviously you’re a big part of it. How does the city and the scene influence you as a band?

A huge amount, I think. It influences music lyrically, and Dublin and Ireland in general has a very specific sound, the rock music that is coming out of Ireland right now is probably bigger than it ever has been in the past ten to twenty years, and, it’s not just what it always had been. You know it’s rock music, pop music, R&B, wrap and it’s so much more of a variety, there's a resurgence of an appreciation in music, and because we are a small country the scene is quite small, so you also have relationships with these big names and smaller names. It’s a nice community and there’s obviously a lot of things that go against being from a small country, but I think that community is probably one of the biggest positives.

Going back to Dublin again, I feel like there are a lot of male bands coming out of the city at the minute. That’s obviously not endemic of the scene, why do you think this is?

Well at the moment there is actually a bit of a thing happening, because some data was released with regard to Irish female musicians and the radio play they get against the Irish male musicians and consistently see 2%, 5% airplay from radio stations across Ireland. I personally listen to a lot of Irish male bands, but predominantly I listen to a lot of non-male fronted bands, so I know they’re there, and I know the quality is huge. So, there is a bit of struggle at the moment because we see these male acts, and it’s not necessarily the rock bands that are getting the air play. It’s the Gavin James’ and the Dermot Kennedy’s, that are the huge names that are getting that push forward, and obviously for a rock band we don’t expect to get that kind of push.

What is it like being a woman/womxn in such a male-dominated space?

It’s one of those things where we do get asked that question a lot, or we certainly did when we were starting out, ‘Oh have you experienced any sexism in the music scene?’ and we were very lucky to be like, ‘you know what, we really haven’t’ and I think that’s because when people are asking about sexism you immediately think someone’s saying something to you. We did get that like ‘oh I’m surprised that those are girls and you sound so big and stuff like that’. But as we went on and we got deeper into the structural element of being a musician and getting marginally more successful, it’s not the little quips that you hear on a venue, it’s actually the structural stuff that you only notice once you’ve gotten to that point.

Some of your lyricism is very emotionally raw. Are your lyrics observational, or written from more of a personal perspective?

For the most part I guess our songs are observational. I think people ask us a lot about whether we are actively trying to include this language in our songs, and I would say that we aren’t actively doing it. I think it’s already a part of our vocabulary because of the people that we are, and we’re talking about our own lives and our own experiences. So, we don’t sit down and go, lets write a fucking gay song. I want to write a feminist ballad; I don’t think that’s something that really enters our minds. When you sit down you write your experiences, you write what you see, you write how you feel. And if that’s something that comes across as something that is inclusive, and is championing a certain idea that is great, but it’s not pre-thought out, which I think is a better thing to do.

Your recent video was beautiful – it was littered with personal videos of you all during lockdown and directed by the super-talented Kate Dolan, how did this come to fruition?

So, we’ve worked with Kate before. We knew she was capable of, more than capable of doing a video like this because obviously it’s just difficult. We were releasing music, we weren’t gonna not release it. But, we’d need content to go along with it, and you know, we knew it was going to have to be something very low-fi. But, Kate kind of pulled it out of the bag with her logistics because she contacted people who were going to be able to film to a quality that would look really well. It was fun to be able to take part in as well, even though I certainly didn’t have the right camera equipment for it, but I had to be in the video [laughs].