Up and coming indie rocker Aimee Francis is touring around the country and her tour bus is set to pull into Perth this month before taking a trip down south.
Do you like life on the tour bus?
Apart from having smelly boys around me most of the time it’s okay. No we’re all good. It’s fantastic it’s a lot of fun.
You’ve recently played at some of P!nk’s Australian shows and I noticed you’ve toured overseas and worked with lots of different people, how have you scored so many great support slots?
Yeah it’s a matter of me being slightly gangster when it comes to booking and managing myself… I have done some pretty cool things, I’ve played some festivals in America and England. I did the ‘Dinah Shore on the shore festival’ in Palm Springs, LA which was great, I played with Pat Benatar and Steel Panthar and I just got off the road with P!nk so it’s been really good.
You manage yourself, which seems to be something a lot more artists are doing, what are the disadvantages of this?
I guess if you have a manager who knows what they’re doing, which I did not have at the start, which is why I left them and went independent. I guess if you have a manager with few more contacts then you might. I don’t know, I don’t know that many advantages of having a manager because I haven’t really had one that has been productive for me; it has always just been a headache. A disadvantage of managing yourself is that I am everything at the moment, I am my own booker and my own manager, so 24 hours of my day has to be spread into the creative and the business side of things so I think sometimes I need to pull myself from the business side of things and go “okay, you need to start writing and focusing on the music” –you really need to try and find some kind of medium or else its not going to work.
Do you find the songs change a lot once they have hit the studio?
I’m a bit of a control freak when it comes to my songs, they’re my babies. When I go into the studio I make sure the producer is totally amazing and gets where im going and im fairly production savvy so I can express what I want to hear most of the time and put my 95 cents in and the producer has his little 5 cents as far as what he feels; Although I am definitely into collaboration, but it’s a process.
I noticed on one of your facebook posts that someone had made a comment that you are a great Rock Chic, I don’t know if you saw it earlier this year but Abbe May wrote a piece about how much she hates that phrase – do you have any thoughts on it?
Unfortunately all I know about Abbe May is about her writing controversial stuff online and I don’t really want to know about her music now because of what she said on the internet, so I disagree with her. People are going to look a certain image, and with whatever she feels is right and wrong, people are always going to box other people into certain categories because that makes people feel better about life. This is what a rock chic looks like, this is what a rock chic sounds like.
Do you care about being put into boxes though?
No, I’ve given up. If people want to put me into little boxes that’s cool – I’m glad that they’re talking about me and they want to spend time worrying about what box I fit in. I’ve always struggled with that, I’ve always been myself and if people are happy with that and they want to put me in the rock chic genre then do – it’s great.
I see you’ve done a lot of advocacy for bullying in schools and you’ve spoken out about your own bullying in school?
That’s just something that is so common with any generation and everyone can relate to it, whether it’s at school, at work, family not accepting you for something – I think bullying happens every day and if I can make some kind of awareness of that, that this is happening, then that would be awesome because I really didn’t enjoy it when I was getting bullied.
Aimee Francis – Losers’ Game Tour (WA) presented by Events West is at The Ellington Jazz Club (acoustic session) on 13 October, The Court Hotel on 17 October with Lionizer and Codie Sunstrom, The Elliot Bar in Bunbury on 18 October, the Duckstien Winery in Margaret River (Oktoberfest) as well as the Swan Basement in Fremantle in 19 October.
Graeme Watson
