Lambrini Girls Are Here to ‘F— Up’ the U.K. Music Scene: We Want to Be the ‘Madonna of Punk Rock’
Late on a July evening in the Faroe Islands — a small enclave of around 50,000 people located in the North Atlantic between England, Iceland and Norway — the G! Fest, one of Europe’s more unusual music festivals, is well underway. The three-day event’s lineup consists primarily of Faroese and Scandinavian acts, but there are a few U.K. performers as well — one of whom is the Lambrini Girls, an all-female and non-binary rock trio who take their name from a potent low-budget wine popular among British teenagers who don’t know better yet.
The Faroes are so far north that in July the sun only sets for an hour or two, and the locals traditionally stay out until all hours during summers (the festival’s evening-closing acts start their sets at around 3 a.m.). Still, the Lambrinis have the seemingly thankless task of going on at 1 a.m. on this chilly night on the festival’s second stage, located on the soccer pitch of a local school. Just a couple dozen people stand in front of the stage, drinking local beer and smoking cigarettes.
All of a sudden, deafening feedback, drums and loud power chords burst forth from the speakers, and a guitar-brandishing blonde in a black slip — Lambrinis singer Phoebe Lunny — is yelling at the crowd, bossing them to look alive. The band has barely started its first song before she’s out in the rapidly growing audience, ordering them to stand up, then sit down, then stand up again while her two bandmates keep pounding away. The crowd obeys: The group’s combination of chaos, commands and confrontation — not to mention Lunny’s utter fearlessness — is everything a classic punk rock show requires, and within just a few minutes the crowd has grown to more than 100 people, and then more.
As the first song comes to a shambolic close, everyone assumes Lunny, who’d abandoned her guitar onstage, is still bumping around in the audience. But suddenly, from behind and above, come the words “‘Ello, I’m up here now!” She’s standing on top of a wooden roof that covers the soundboard at the back of the pitch, 15 feet above the crowd, with the first rays of the rising sun behind her.
“This next song is called ‘Mr. Lovebomb’!” she shouts. “It’s about manipulation in relationships, and it goes like THIS!” She then rips her dress off, climbs down and plays the rest of the set in her underwear — on and off the stage, moving in, out and on top of the crowd, as the band plows through songs like “Lads Lads Lads,” “The Boys in the Band” and “Help Me, I’m Gay.” She makes the audience stand up and sit down several times, and sprays crowdmembers and her bandmates with a bottle of champagne.
The Lambrinis’ musicianship is not necessarily virtuoso level, but their ability to rile up a crowd — in a foreign country almost completely unfamiliar with their music, no less — most definitely is. By the end of the set all three band members are down to their underwear, despite the chilly temperature, and the crowd is wondering what hit it.
As the song titles indicate, Lambrini Girls have a lot to say about sexism and gender politics in and outside of the music business. Yet how much of that messaging actually gets through the chaos, humor and clothing-removal of their concerts — this was a fairly typical Lambrini Girls show — is more unclear. At least a couple of drunk males in the audience seemed to be using the unhinged setting to rub against women in the audience and basically engage in the precise kind of toxic behavior the band is criticizing. Speaking to Variety two months later before a show at the O2 Kentish Town in London, Lunny and bassist Lilly Macieira acknowledge that it’s a “weird balance” to strike.
“No. 1, you want to make sure it’s a safe space. At the same time, you want to make sure it’s accessible in order to get in front of those people who don’t want to hear you,” Lunny says over a dressing room spread of tequila, Coca-Cola and Pringles.
Lunny recalls a show in January where a young woman came up to her during the set and said a man had groped her, to which she responded by immediately getting him kicked out of the venue. But the Lambrinis know that they can’t control who watches their set — especially when they’re on the festival circuit.
“I actually had a friend the other day say to me [after Boomtown Fest], ‘I was a bit worried, loads of people were coming into your set and they didn’t know who you were,'” Lunny says. “They were moshing to ‘Lads Lads Lads,’ and it was a lot of geezers. It’s so counterproductive.” Macieira chimes in, “We’re satirizing them. Like no, honey, this isn’t about you. Rewind.”
But, Lunny concedes, “I wouldn’t want to stop anyone coming into our show, because you never know who you’re going to get through to.”
Indeed, the crowd in London that night consists mostly of men — probably because Lambrinis are opening for stoner metal band Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs (yes, that’s seven Pigs) — and some of them look like they need convincing. But the majority of the pit revels in Lunny and Macieira’s guerrilla performance style as they shred from within the crowd, with some attendees even helping to hold Lunny’s mic cord as she climbs the balcony with an ease that’s slightly concerning, yet impressive.
Asked about her unique performance style, Lunny says it’s less about being rowdy for the sake of it, and more to build a connection with the crowd to better get their message across. “If you make yourself look like a massive idiot in front of people on stage, people don’t care if they look like idiots,” she says. “And I think that’s how you can build a good rapport with people.”
Macieira adds, “I’d really internalized the sort of sexism and misogyny around the music industry and the gatekeeping, especially. It’s always made me feel really out of place [on stage]. So the more I played with Phoebe, the more comfortable I got and the more I realized like, I can literally do whatever the fuck I want.”
For Lunny, there will always be Lambrini Girls B.L. (Before Lilly) and A.L. (After Lilly). Though the band existed before Macieira joined, Lunny knew she’d met her creative match when Macieira subbed in for the band’s former bassist, who couldn’t make a show.
“I remember afterwards, me and Lilly had quite a lot to drink, and we always talk about this because we’ll never forget this moment: We were both talking about how frustrating it is when people pull out of a show in 24 hours or just aren’t up for it, and you’re working as hard as you bloody can to try and make your band a thing,” Lunny says.
“I was like, ‘I want to have this take off,'” Macieira adds. “And I just remember the look on Phoebe’s face, she was like, ‘Same, me too!’ And I was like, ‘I wanna be the Madonna of punk rock!’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah, me too!’ Then we held hands and jumped up and down for a little bit.”
Thus, the modern-day Lambrini Girls were born. And not only did Lunny and Macieira align on their work ethic, but also the type of message they wanted to convey. Both had come up in the seaside music scene of Brighton, where they witnessed their fair share of toxic masculinity.
“I don’t know any women, or NB people, or queer people, who have not had something fucking shitty happen in the music scene,” says Lunny, who uses she/they pronouns, as does Macieira. “I can’t name one. And when you come into the music scene, it’s something that’s presented to you straight away, like you can’t ignore that. It’s everywhere.”
This topic is explored in the official music video for “Boys in the Band,” released on Thursday, in which powerful statistics about sexual assault in the U.K. flash across the screen as Lunny and Macieira perform (and puke) at a Brighton venue. Macieira chalks this pervasive issue up to a lack of accountability that transcends from the bottom of the music food chain all the way to the top. “Unfortunately, it’s very inconvenient to hold people accountable, but I think we need to push further than that and extend our compassion beyond what affects us directly,” she says.
“There’s a lot of cases where people will prioritize talent or clout or their own personal interpretation of what a band means to them over the stories of victims,” Lunny agrees. “Matty Healy, for instance. I’ve got so many friends who love the 1975 and they’re like, ‘I know he’s such a bad person, but I just fucking love him.’ And I’m like, ‘He’s a sexist, misogynistic, racist, piece of shit.'”
Lunny is, of course, referring to some of Healy’s well-publicized behavior in recent months, including an episode of the podcast “The Adam Friedland Show” in which the singer admitted to watching a porn site known for its degrading content involving women of color, and made derogatory comments about rapper Ice Spice (who told Variety last month, “He apologized to me a bunch of times. We’re good”). A rep for Healy did not comment.
But, to Lambrini Girls, it’s all about the example it sets. “People still listen to him because he’s not directly doing it to anyone you know or he’s not doing it to you,” Lunny continues. “But what you are doing by going to his gigs or posting about him or just fucking listening to him and being like ‘I love him,’ is you’re endorsing his behavior and saying that’s OK. It doesn’t seem like, at the time, anything that is going to have any ramifications, but it does because it normalizes it.”
Clearly, Lambrini Girls aren’t afraid to piss people off — and that includes TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, a term that refers to women who do not believe the gender identity of trans people is legitimate. On top of having a song called “TERF Wars,” the band found themselves receiving a slew of hate online after a comment they made in a “Kerrang!” magazine spread — “I will scrap any TERF, any day in person with my fists” — made its way over to the wrong side of the internet.
“People were being really aggressive with us,” Macieira recalls. “Sometimes it’s hard not to respond to the aggression because Phoebe, particularly, was presenting a lot of facts and people don’t want to listen to those facts. They are willfully blind and ignorant towards it. So at that point, what else can you do but tell them to fuck off?”
Luckily, Lambrini Girls have plenty of rock icons on their side — the band counts Iggy Pop as a fan, and opened for him alongside Blondie, the Buzzcocks and supergroup Generation Sex (Billy Idol, Steve Jones, Tony James and Paul Cook) over the summer.
“I’ve heard from multiple people that he’s said we’re his new favorite band,” Macieira says. Though she has “yet to hear it from Iggy Pop’s mouth,” the Godfather of Punk texted Lunny once just to say he admires her guitar skills.
As for the Buzzcocks, they told Lambrini Girls at the gig that they’re “the real deal.” “They were so chill, like ‘You alright, girls? Go on then, just fuck it up!'” Macieira recalls.
And that’s exactly what Lambrini Girls plan to do. “Fuck as many people up as possible — as in the bad guys,” Lunny echoes in a mission statement of sorts. “Just try and change as many minds as possible, and get to a point where you can’t ignore it.”
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