Leopard Leg
I’ve been dreaming of all-girl psych-noise-magic
collectives for years, but I don’t think I ever quite
envisaged the Brighton/London group Leopard Leg.
I’ve been dreaming of all-girl psych-noise-magic
collectives for years, but I don’t think I ever quite
envisaged the Brighton/London group Leopard Leg.
Not even that time I was tripping in a meadow and
everything went a bit like a Richard Dadd painting
and I thought a thistle was a real person, a barearmed
girl with green-white skin, and that there
were maybe hundreds of other whispering thistle
girls hiding in the long grass.
Almost, though: there appear to be hundreds
of Leopard Leg members (around 10, at the last
count), and they hide in a meadow of jack leads,
mics, drums, and more drums, and they whisper
too. They dress in motley costumes from a desertisland
dressing-up box. But – after a beautifully
tense build-up of groans and sighs, scraped violins
and microtonal sea shanty – they erupt into a
massive fucking racket, a Heath Robinson-ish
construction of percussive sound. They’re no longer
ghostly or hallucinatory; they’re like some elite
fighting faction: determined and quixotic.
“Leopard Leg was one drum and four cassette
players until last summer,” says founder Maya, who
describes herself as a “meat and death historian”.
“For a long time I had wanted a really big band that
was drum-based, that other girls would see and
think, ‘I can do that’.”
A year later, and Leopard Leg have just been
recording their first album – in Seven Sisters forest in
Sussex. “It was on a new moon, and we saw some
unidentified flashing lights!” says Robyn. So where
else would they make music, given the choice?
Answers range from “One of the chambers in
the Great Pyramid of Giza” (Aymie) to “A petrified
forest, or Wookey Hole” (Blue) to “That church
made entirely of skulls, in Prague” (Emma, referring
possibly to the Kutna Hora ossuary). Rowan would
like to play in Newgrange, Ireland, “on the dawn of
the winter solstice. It was constructed in 3200 BC,
and for only 17 minutes a year it’s flooded by
sunlight,” she explains. “It has interesting acoustic
qualities, like misplaced echoes.”
Leopard Leg share with recent tour-mates Liars
a self-aware primitivism that draws on a nonspecific,
mondo-archaeological past in order to
make transcendent, hedonistic music in the present.
“Leopard Leg in a way feels like a humble salute
to our ancestors,” Robyn says when I ask what
ancient civilisations the band like the most. Aymie
and Emma go for the Egyptians. “I love Ammut, or
‘female devourer of hearts’,” says Emma. “When
you die, you meet Horus and he weighs your heart
against the feather of truth for rights of passage into
the Underworld. If the scales tilt, the Ammut will
crawl up to the scales and gobble your heart. Ha!”
The band’s forthcoming release is a split album
(on Upset The Rhythm) with San Francisco’s T.I.T.S.,
another band of mind-melting female avatars.
T.I.T.S. are less in number than Leopard Leg, more
song-based and more guitar-heavy, but they share
a similar group-mind aesthetic. They’re pretty heavy,
too, with giant riffs and chilling choral vocals
straight out of Suspiria. Is the release harbinger of a
slew of heavy music that’s female-friendly and
female-led; a document from a world too wyrd, fun
and scary for the macho noise-posturers of the
current sub-underground? I certainly hope so.
“Sometimes it’s hard for someone new to
connect with us on stage when we’ve all created a
storyline,” is the tactful reply when I ask if they need
another pair of hands. Luckily, however, “free jams
in the forest are all go!” Count me in.
Posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007by
