Interview with Ren Aldridge of Petrol Girls

Post hardcore band Petrol Girls, out of the UK and Austria, won Change the Rotation's 2019 album of the year bracket with Cut & Stitch. I recently caught up with vocalist Ren Aldridge via email, while the band was on tour in Europe. In the meantime, much of the band's planned US and Canada tour had to be canceled due to visa issues. The band will still appear at South by Southwest in Austin. If you're here in Chicago, Typesetter and Blood People will still play at Sleeping Village on March 23. More info on that show here. I asked Ren about her favorite albums last year, touring and her experience with the current political situation.

Phil Collins: Congrats on winning Change the Rotation’s 2019 album of the year bracket. Did you have any favorite albums of 2019?

Ren Aldridge: Thanks so much! It’s always such a massive honour to be considered as anyone’s album of the year – thank you!! My favorites from 2019 are:

Lankum - The Livelong Day (incredible folk band from Dublin - best harmonies)

Personal Best - What You At (self-described as tragic lesbian rock! we’re honoured to have front woman and lead shredder Katie Gatt joining us on bass for our U.S. and Canada dates!)

Lizzo - Cuz I Love You (I don’t normally listen to a lot of pop so I came late to the party on this one but now I seriously can’t stop playing it)

Cult Dreams - Things That Hurt (it’s just so epic!!)

Nervus Tough Crowd (I think it’s such an art to put across radical politics with so much joy, lifts me up)

Refused - War Music (It was such an honour to tour with Refused last year and to hear tracks of this absolute rager live)

PC: Do you have any favorite songs to play live off the new record?

RA: This tour I’m really enjoying Weather Warning because of how hard it kicks in and because me and Katie have ended up coordinating our head banging on it, which is loads of fun! And I’ve enjoyed closing our set with Naive because it gives me the chance to put across the point that’s at the heart of our politics as a band, which is essentially that the unknowability of the future is something we should embrace as an opportunity to try to create the changes that we want to see. It’s an idea that’s hugely inspired by the writing of Rebecca Solnit, and probably what keeps me getting up in the morning.

PC: Albums seem to feel new to fans longer than they do to bands, because the band spends much more time with the songs as they form. Do you feel differently about any of the songs on Cut & Stitch since writing them?

RA: Sure! I feel like I now know some of the songs so much better than others, because we haven’t been playing every track off the record live - for example I’m not sure how we’d translate tracks like Skye and Rootless to our live show.

I think Monstrous is really helping me to express the pressure that I feel as the front woman of a feminist band - like I find the amount of emotional labour expected of me completely ridiculous. So it’s a song that initially was about a very specific personal experience that I now understand as being applicable to so much more. That’s part of the value of song writing I think, helping you to understand yourself better.

PC: You’re currently in the middle of a European tour, how have the shows been so far?

RA: It’s been really awesome and quite overwhelming to see such a jump in the number of people coming out to see us - we sold out 3 out of 4 of the Germany dates, which is wild. I’m writing this on the ferry and in the van from Malmö in Sweden down to our last show in Berlin.

PC: This is your first time touring the US and Canada, are there any cities you are particularly looking forward to hitting?

RA: Yeah me & Joe have never even been to the US or Canada! So we’re super excited and probably in for a big culture shock! New York is obviously a big one for us - you can expect all of the tourist shit on our instagram. We’re also planning to visit Niagara Falls before Toronto, which I’m most excited about! Philadelphia will be cool because Zock has a lot of friends there. And of course we’re excited to see Chicago too, and we should have a full day there before the show to actually see some of the city!

PC: Chicago’s own Typesetter is joining you on most of the tour. You’ve played together before?

RA: Yeah we took Typesetter out around the UK in 2015 and have remained friends ever since. It’s a bit alarming where 5 years have suddenly gone!! But it’ll be so great to go out with that lovely bunch again.

PC: The current political situation has made this a stressful time in the US and I’m sure in the UK as well. Can you speak to your experience with this over the last few years?

RA: Where to even begin. It feels like everything is happening too fast to even get our heads round it let alone meaningfully resist. The recent election of Boris Johnson in the UK, almost entirely on the back of the pro Brexit vote was pretty devastating, and we’re just starting to see those policies being put into place now. I think what saddens me the most is the xenophobia, racism and rampant nationalism that has been central to all of the campaigns around Trump, Johnson, Brexit and similar political movements globally. It’s just all such textbook bullshit, scapegoating migrants, Muslims, Jewish people, or whatever marginalised group, for issues that are the fault of government policy, bosses or capitalism more broadly. Capitalism is in crisis but instead of looking to more realistic ways of organising ourselves, people are turning on each other. The planet can literally not sustain capitalism as a political model, yet those in power seem to be doing everything possible to protect it.

It can be completely overwhelming, but we have to just resist in whatever ways we can. I always think of the end of the latest Idles record, where he’s shouting ‘KEEP GOING, KEEP FUCKING GOING’ - because that’s all it comes down to for me, working out how to sustain our resistance, communities and political movements. Political or historical change is so complicated, and the victories that we enjoy today were the result of complex processes and a multitude of people acting to create them. It can be so hard to see the full impact of our actions - but we have to keep working for the changes we want to see in the faith that others are doing the same and that together we will slowly change things.

PC: Can you tell us about your involvement in Solidarity Not Silence and what people can do to help?

RA: So I’m one of the defendants. We are a group of women in the UK who are all being sued for defamation by a man in the music industry because of comments that we each made separately regarding his abusive behaviour towards women. A number of his ex-partners are facing a libel claim as well as feminist musicians, such as myself, who spoke up in support. We each received legal letters from some fancy high end media lawyers that he hired in 2016 to try and scare us into silence. Most of us were then able to come together as a group, support each other and share legal representation. There’s no legal aid or financial help available for these kind of cases in the UK, so we paid our legal fees ourselves then turned to crowd funding when costs exceeded more than we could possibly afford.

Solidarity Not Silence is the name of our crowdfunding campaign - we’re on instagram, facebook, and twitter, have merch available on bandcamp (www.solidaritynotsilence.bandcamp.com) and the main crowd funder at www.crowdjustice.com/case/solidaritynotsilence - we just desperately need money to pay our lawyers. They’ve been incredibly understanding of our financial situation, but we are behind on payments and have hit a crucial point in the case where costs are escalating fast. His lawyers have now dropped him, which in a way is great news, but could end up costing us more in legal fees, and more importantly means that our lawyers are now the only barrier that we have between us and him. It is vital that the survivors in this case are not put in a position where they are forced into direct communication with him.

So the situation now is that we need to raise a hell of a lot of money, fast. Our strategy is to do everything possible to widen our network, so we’re not just leaning on the same people, and so we have hope of attracting the support of a sympathetic celebrity or wealthy person that might be able to help us out. We’ve got some huge fundraising plans dropping around International Women’s Day - so follow us on socials, spread the word, donate if you can, and help us try to bring the campaign to the attention of people who might help. Its frustrating because if we were based in the U.S. we’d be eligible for help from Times Up, but the UK version is using the funding in a different way and there doesn’t appear to be any similar fund that can help.

Our case has the potential to affect legal precedent for similar cases, and we’re very aware of the resonance of our case in the context of the #MeToo movement. If we can win this, we will not be quiet about it.

PC: How are the music scenes in Bristol, UK and Graz, Austria; where the band is based? Are there any bands we should check out?

RA: Bristol is really cool, and is where mine and Joe’s families are based, but we ourselves haven’t lived there in many years. These days there’s a really cool punk scene based around a venue called The Exchange, which is now community owned! There’s a great record shop and label above it called Specialist Subject, and tons of great bands associated with that.

Graz is much quieter, though there is a bit of a punk scene mostly based around a DIY space called Sub. We’re on tour so much that I feel a bit disconnected from any local scenes wherever I’m living to be honest!

PC: Anything else we should keep our eyes open for with Petrol Girls in 2020?

RA: I think we’ll try to come back over to the U.S. a second time this year to make the most of these outrageously expensive visas!!! So we’ll try and hit some of the places that we’re missing this time round - we’re always keen to hit political or DIY spaces so get in touch if that’s something you can help us out with. And yeah I guess we’ll start to get the ball rolling for writing record number 3! I want 3 records by the time I’m 30.