Meet Hot Wife - the South London quartet here to soundtrack shenanigans and flirt with your mum & dad. Indulging in their passion for 90s garage rock and pop culture heroines, their music is the prefect accompaniment to any night out. From their effortlessly cool tracks to their high spirited sets - the band have seemingly walked straight out of a 00s romcom (Pink Slip eat your heart out).
Whether you’re already a fan or still to be converted, here’s Hot Wife’s guide to starting a band, making friends & taking over the world:
Step 1: Post An Ad
Claire: I posted an ad on joinmyband.co.uk - I wanted to start a girl band something like War Paint, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs- scream girl rock influences. And then Rachel answered the ad.
Rachel: She took ages to answer.
Claire: I forgot I'd put it up!
Step 2: Follow Up
Rachel: I was like aww that’s such a shame - that’s crazy because I live in Peckham and she was in Peckham. She was like I play bass. I was like - I play the guitar! And we had a lot of the same influences so I was like aww what a shame she ghosted me, never mind. And then suddenly she replied and we went for a drink. I remember I was cycling there because I was really late and I remember thinking it felt like a date.
Claire: It did! I remember going ‘She’s hot!’
Rachel: So it’s like we’re going on a date and I think we just verbal vomited at each other for like five hours - like blah blah blah!
Claire: It was like when two puppies meet each other.
Step 3: Recruit
Rachel: We did a couple of semi-awkward practices just us two being like so what do we do? What are we doing? And then we found Ethan - we almost pied him off though because we had a girl in the mix and we were like maybe she’ll be good. But then it didn’t work out so we were like - ok Ethan - you can come along! We met him on joinmyband as well. And then James was the last one to join. We had another drummer for a while - Gabby - we love her, shout out to Gabby! But she just didn’t have the time, so then we found James on joinmyband - so we’re basically an add for joinmyband!
Step 4: Define Your Sound
Ethan: We’ve had people say all sorts of things but I feel like our current sound is definitely punk, but probably more on the grunge side of things.
Rachel: It’s definitely a bit riot-girl.
Claire: Someone said Scott Pilgrim riot girl punk.
Rachel: Someone said The Ick meets The Ramones. We were like we can see that. The foundation is sort of punk-y but then we sort of go off in various directions depending on how we’re feeling.
Claire: A lot of it’s been angry vibes recently.
Rachel: I think we started off maybe a bit surf-rocky but I feel like James is a much heavier drummer and that’s kind of helped to make us more punk-y, or grunge-y. And Ethan’s a hardcore guitarist in his other band, so our sound has definitely gotten heavier over the last year, but it’s great because we’ve got a lot of rage.
Step 5: Take Inspiration
Rachel: I think we each have slightly different inspirations. I feel like for me, Veruca Salt and Bikini Kill are two of my top and The Breeders, so kind of like more 90s vibes.
Claire: I’ve been listening to a lot of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs old stuff and a lot of Amyl and the Sniffers as well - their baselines are really good!
Ethan: One of my favourite bands is L7, so definitely them in terms of guitar stuff - I think that their stuff is amazing so that’s an influence. And there’s general hardcore stuff that I feel like I take influence from, but it’s just making that suitable for Hot Wife.
James: In terms of drumming for Hot Wife, I’ve noticed it emulates stuff like Ty Segall, like heavy stuff because it’s quite straightforward but he’ll do lots of fast riffs. I like playing all kinds of music, but playing minimalist stuff is best with a basic beat and having a fill here and there, but just doing it fast and low.
Step 6: Write
Claire: At the start Rachel and I would just get together and we’d be like I wanna do this and I’ve got these chords and I wanna write a song about an older man being a dick and then a monkey!
Rachel: I think we work really well together, me and Claire, because I like to write musically first but Claire likes to write lyrics first. So it works quite well because sometimes I’ll be like I’ve got these chords and Claire will be like I’ve got these stupid lyrics! And then we make something out of that, but recently we’ve been collaborating more, which is nice because it’s obviously a lot more fun if everyone is involved sort of more equally.
Claire: Ethan’s brought a couple of riffs and stuff, we’ve jammed it and developed from people’s initial ideas.
Ethan: There's a song that we recorded last month that we’re hopefully going to release soon. So I wrote the song structure for that, like guitars, the drums and that stuff, and then Rachel came up with the melodies and lyrics.
Rachel: That was really fun! I actually really liked that one because I would never had written the music that you had written, so it was fun to come up with the lyrics and melody on top of something that was completely different to what I would’ve actually done. I sometimes find that a lot of the riffs I write will sound like other ones I’ve written, so it just keeps it a bit more varied and interesting when different people's inputs come in.
Claire: It’s super collaborative which is really nice because it gets kind of one note- not literally - well yeah literally! The structure gets really same-y and stuff so it’s good that everyone gets involved
James: I feel like the past five songs someone’s come in with like a riff or a verse or something and we’ve worked it out from there - I’ve really enjoyed doing it that way.
Step 7: Gig!
Claire: You can expect a stupid t shirt from me. A stupid slutty t shirt.
James: It's good vibes, not too serious.
Claire: Very unpretentious - prepare to dance and shout!
Rachel: Usually that’s our feedback - people are like, it looks like you’re having so much fun! And you don’t take it too seriously - which is kind of the vibe. I don’t think we’re pretentious at all - we’re just here to have a good time. We just love it and hopefully people get that.
Claire: We’re all really close as well so it’s just like playing with your best friends- which makes it extra fun!
Step 8: Get Involved in Your Local Scene
Claire: The London scene has been really good, everyone’s been super supportive, everyone supports each other’s stuff and recommends other bands we can play with and comes to our gigs and stuff, it’s so good.
Rachel: There have actually been less barriers than I thought there would be. I thought it would be really hard to get in. There were venues on our bucket list where we were like we’ll never get to play those, it’s impossible! And it’s actually not, promotors are very open about putting us on and we’ve got really good relationships now with those promotors as well. We’ve been really lucky basically, we’ve just had really good experiences and I think we’re getting to the point now where we need to release more music so promotors know where to place us in lineups, but it’s been really interesting to play with all these different bands - it’s good vibes! It does feel like quite a buzzy scene, everyone is actually really good.
Claire: We keep up with everybody, like we stay in touch with all the bands we play with. It’s been a supportive scene for us so far.
Rachel: I do always say when we message promoters as well that we’d love to play with bands with more women, and they pretty much always have listened and have put us on lineups with other female musicians. It doesn’t have to be every band but I do think it’s important to have a good mix on the line-up, so that’s also been great to be listened to.
Claire: I think also it’s mad just how far you can get just by asking - we’ve just reached out, we’ve sent some cold emails to bands and venues and stuff and they’ve been so responsive and in really good faith. It’s been really nice. I don’t know if there’s this like aura of mystic around the London music scene that it’s really hard to break into so people don’t try.
Rachel: Yeah, or maybe we’re just like blah blah blah, we just don’t care.
Claire: Yeah we just chat so much shit they’re like oh my god stop talking fine.
Rachel: Yeah we do talk a lot of shit, so maybe the more you talk the more you get, I don’t know. Just talk shit you’ll get there eventually.
Step 9: Record
Rachel: We recorded two singles at the bookhouse with Tom Hill - it’s a Peckham recording studio, it’s really cool - we recorded our first single there too. So yeah we’re gonna be putting those out - it’s funny because these guys are like let’s put it out right now and I’m like we must bide our time! I don’t really know what I’m waiting for but they will be coming out soon for sure.
Claire: Tom’s really good, it’s really good fun. We had already planned out the structure and everything of the songs and Tom had really good ideas and stuff would just come up in the moment - he would be like aww there needs to be like a fill or something here and then we’d improvise something and it would just sound really good and come together last minute. We’ve been having a lot more fun with the vocals I think because it’s not something that we really get to play with live.
Rachel: Yeah I feel like it was quite fast we were just like bam! Here’s the song.
James: We did two songs in a day. We’re on a budget so we don’t have a huge amount of time.
Rachel: We had the structures of the songs we wanted to do pretty firmed up and it was pretty straightforward. Tom is such a professional - when we got there it was all set up. We were like yeah we want the guitars to sound like this and he was like - what like this? And we were like yeah - let’s go! It was so streamlined.
Claire: He knew exactly what we wanted straight off the bat.
Rachel: We just wanna do more - as soon as we left I was like I wanna go back tomorrow!
Step 10: World Domination (TBC)
Claire: Later this year we'll be releasing singles! And we’re playing a festival - we’re playing Cro Cro Land in April. We’ve put out a lot of feelers and we’re waiting to hear back so... and we have t-shirts! And stickers!
Rachel: I think we just want to record a lot, I think that’s my next priority. We’ve been gigging a lot, which I do think that’s where all the fun is really, we just love the live gigs but I do think our next step is recording and getting our recorded sound really tight. And then yeah play Glastonbury obviously.
You can catch Hot Wife at our show in collaboration with The Season on 7th Feb.
Grab your tickets here: https://dice.fm/event/7doxvb-the-season-x-sounds-sick-c-turtle-support-7th-feb-sebright-arms-london-tickets