MPR’s Euan Kerr profiles local Celtic band The Flash Girls. The duo, Emma Bull and Lorraine Garland, discuss their unique “semi-Celtic polite folk Riot grrrls” style, Neil Gaiman, and doughnuts.
Transcript:
(00:00:00) Amiable is sitting in the front room of her South Minneapolis home. She is one of the Flash Girls Lorraine Garland sitting just to her right being the other.
(00:00:09) We're very nice people. Bob Ange, this is after all an odd way to try to make one's living. I'm a real little strange.
(00:00:18) I'm conducting up us more time to find out what went
(00:00:26) wrong. I know it died. I just don't know maybe it's heart stopped. Maybe it's hurt stopped
(00:00:40) even the flash girls have problems describing their
(00:00:43) music semi Celtic polite folk Riot grrrls. Um, But not quite what are we Lorraine? What are we I'm a big fan of music that can't be I think the highest compliment you can pay a band is when someone what do they do? And you say well, I don't know it's their own. It's their own thing. It's their own
(00:01:07) new music The Flash Girls play Celtic music laced with intricate vocal harmonies and lyrics with a strong flavor of Edgar Allan Poe. The rain Garland had been playing fiddle with various groups for some time when she and Emma bull who plays guitar. Our decided one night at a party to form the flash
(00:01:24) curls and there was just a real connection between Emma and I in terms of playing and we kept getting idea after idea and song after song kept falling into place. And it's it really has been surprising how quickly it's gone. We never expected it to go. So
(00:01:40) fast a year later. They have their first album art up to this point and Mobile's main occupation has been writing fantasy novels the influence of fantasy and science fiction is an important element in the Flash Girls work one of the other contributors to their album The Return of pansy Smith and Viola Jones is Neil Gaiman who writes the successful Sandman comic for DC Comics. Garland says he wrote post-mortem on our Of and also the much requested tea and corpses.
(00:02:08) That was the first one we got for him at that same Guy Fawkes party where we got together after everyone was done playing music. He sort of picked up the guitar and softly sang it a little light bulb went off in my head. We all looked at each other in horror and said, oh I think we'd better do this use You said that he would always stay together.
(00:02:52) So why don't you put that poison in my tea?
(00:02:57) Amiable admits that audiences sometimes don't quite know what to make of their work thien
(00:03:01) corpses for the people people who are hearing at the first time will spit coffee post-mortem on our love people will sit there and watch us looking for cues, because at the same time that it's funny it's also it's also horrible. It's a description of a really rotten love affair and and you don't know. That song whether you should laugh or or shift uncomfortably in your chair
(00:03:31) will says the Flash Girls work is actually in the tradition of folk ballads that for many years was the province of tales of magic and horror at times when such themes were unpopular in literature. They survived in many cultures in such unlikely spots as children's songs fantasy is popular again through the work of those such as talking and we'll see some of the songs being rejuvenated in a story form
(00:03:55) and I think one of the sort Sources even for American Horror fiction is a lot of the the mountain Ballads of stories of murder and hauntings and things like that. And I mentally Wade Wellman did has done several of them based on based on Appalachian ghost and murder tales and done a great job of it. The flash girls will
(00:04:19) perform at the Irish well in st. Paul on New Year's Eve, and also hope to tour the East Coast early 1994 they say it Opportunity to get on the road and enjoy their real passion Donuts.
(00:04:31) Yes. Yes. It is. In fact the donuts. We could have become policemen, but then we would have had to learn to shoot straight. It's much easier just to concentrate on the
(00:04:43) donuts. I'm you and care, Minnesota Public
(00:04:46) Radio.