Salon Society: Interview and album review

By Ley on Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - 00:40

Ask anyone that knows me what I like, and 9 times out of 10 they will say: music!

Ok, maybe I should be more specific: ANYTHING to do with music! I love it, everything about it: hearing it, seeing a gig, playing one of my many musical instruments, and above all, discovering a new band and becoming completely hooked on listening to their album on loop for a month and a half. Which’s the object of my latest obsession? Salon Society.

A couple of months ago we featured an interview with the band's lead singer, Roxy, in our magazine, with promises of the band profile and more from the interview to follow. Well ladies, here it is.

The band are made up of Roxy Claxton, Luci Jones, Dorothee Weber and Mhairi Hutton.

For those of you who haven’t yet read the interview: firstly, shame on you! Secondly, you can read it here.

For those of you that have: well done, and here’s the promised continuation of the interview along with more information on the band themselves: Salon Society.

eurOut: I know, I know, I was intrigued by the name as well, which is why I had to ask Roxy where it came from and how it came about.

Roxy: Well, basically [laughs], everybody thinks is you say Salon Society are mostly girls obviously you can only be talking about hairdressers, that’s definitely not what we intended! [laughs] Basically in the 1900s in Paris, you’d get a lot of street artists and full of observers who’d spend all day watching people, writing music, and art paintings…

Moulin Rouge-esque?

Exactly! Totally! That’s it! Totally!! At the time, Dorothee (Weber) and I, had been many names, we’d started off as Yellowish, and then that went to Roxanne and Dorothee, and that became Salon Society when Luci (Jones) joined us in 2007.

We had no money, we loved to make art, we loved to make music, and we felt like poor artists going to play for this rich music industry. We were getting involved with this industry and we were terrified of getting screwed over, or abused along the way. We felt that we had to be very careful at disclosing our sexuality and sexual status, and also as women! Where can we go in our music as women? What prejudice are we going to come up against there?

We said, well if the music industry is like a posh salon, whereby courtesans like us are invited, and not just by the way of invited, just barged in and turn up... [laughs]

[laughs] You gate-crash it!

Yeah, we’ve not quite got to the privileged position of being invited yet!

Just sneak in through the back door...

Sneak in, exactly! [laughs] We just thought of the salon, and we want this society of individuals we want to create with, collaborate with: Salon Society! It just sort of made sense, that’s what it is and that’s what it’ll stick as, and one of my biggest influences is, probably at the time, was Pink Martini, and we just loved them! They speak like 8 different languages between them, and they self-release stuff, and they play with all sorts of awesome musicians and that’s why we kind of thought: “Yeah, why not, that’s cool, that’s a bit different.”

But as a result of being different, we’ve often been told we’re hard to market as well? Which I find really odd.

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Call me cynical, I don’t care, but surely if a band is different and unique, it would be easier for them to stand out in the crowd of all the music acts that are around just now? Which would make them a recording company’s marketing department’s dream come true?… But apparently not. #opportunity-fail

Well fine, their loss… and the independent record industries gain!