Battle Of The Band

On a grey October afternoon, the frontwoman of the hottest new band on the planet is chomping carrots and talking about Enya.

“My mom is half Irish and I grew up around a lot of Irish music: Clannad, Shepherd Moons, all the early U2,” says Warpaint’s Emily Kokal. “For the first 10 years of my life, they were pretty much the only records I must have heard. ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, stuff like that, it educated me about things that were going on in the world. Ireland has loomed large for me ever since, as this sort of vast mystical place. I can’t tell you how fantastic it is to be here.”
She couldn’t have picked a better time to visit, that’s for sure. With Warpaint’s debut album The Fool newly released, the buzz around the Los Angeles foursome is heading towards deafening. Purveyors of woozy, subterranean art-pop, in recent months they’ve variously been extolled as spiritual heirs to Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Slits and hailed as foremost among a generation of West Coast bands helping LA usurp Brooklyn as ground zero for alterna-hipsterdom. In short, they’re so smoking hot, it’s a wonder Hot Press hasn’t contravened the fire code just by cornering Kokel in her dressing-room for a chat.
“It’s funny – people say to us, ‘Oh you’ve been around a while and now you’re getting all this attention,’” Kokal reflects. “The truth is we’ve only gone as fast as we wanted to. Once we signed to Rough Trade we knew we were going to get a lot more exposure. The timing is great for us because they were several kinks we needed to work out in terms of our relationship.”
Coming from LA it was probably inevitable the band’s relationship with the movie industry would become a major talking point. Their original drummer was Shannyn Sossamon, a sometime actress better known to the wider world as the star of the Heath Ledger vehicle A Knight’s Tale (a role she snatched from under the nose of Kate Hudson). Ledger, for his part, was an early cheerleader for the group, as was moustache twirling Titanic villain Billy Zane. At the time, the group was grateful for the exposure. Today, you sense they are profoundly fed up with answering questions about their Tinsel Town connections.
“I don’t know why journalists always bring it up,” sighs Kokal. “Maybe they think they’re doing us a favour or something. It just gets repeated and repeated. Hopefully it will die off once people hear the music and see us play. Then the stigma will go away. It just gets annoying some times. Like... Billy Zane was at our show. I don’t know... it’s so random. I think the more interesting story is the relationship between the four of us and our music.”
She is more comfortable discussing her relationship with Red Hot Chili Pepper John Frusciante, whom she dated for several years.
“Being around him, I learned a lot about the reality of fame,” she says. “To be that much in the spotlight, it really becomes a big business. You are obliged to do certain things and be a little more controlled. Which freaked me out, but taught me a lot also. Just seeing the reality behind the dream – I learned a lot in terms of what to do or not to do.”
Los Angeles bands tend to be leery of the city’s ‘classic’ venues on the Sunset Strip. Speak to groups such as No Age and Health and they’ll tell you that the action is in the quasi-gentrified eastern neighbourhoods of Echo Park and Silverlake. Based in the latter, Warpaint are as excited about LA’s emerging bohemian hotspots as anybody else, but they’re not quite ready to write off Sunset Strip as some of their peers.
“We’ve played the Troubadour,” she says. “That’s a cool place to play. And we played The Viper Room once. You know, at one point, it was very cool, because Johnny Depp owned it. That was back in the day when it was a club for Hollywood people, River Phoenix and the whole thing. Now the vibe is more that it’s kind of had its day. The sound is good in there. It’s a cool place to play if you can get people to come in and see you.”
Kokal grew up in northern California, moving to Eugene, Oregon when she was 12. Quasi-rural and deeply liberal, the town was perfectly attuned to her parents’ hippy sensibilities. On her first day at high school there she met Theresa Waymouth, eventually to become Warpaint lead guitarist.
“When I met Theresa we started hanging out every day. We lived next door to each other. We walked to school together. Basically, we did mostly everything together until... well, we still do I guess! We moved to New York together when we turned 18. We travelled around South East Asia together. And we went to LA together. Which is weird, because it’s a place I never thought I’d end up. I guess I had an idea of Los Angeles in my head that was the same as everybody else’s, that it was this superficial, tinsel town kind of place. But I liked the weather and the people there. Going there was a really great thing.”
The day before our interview Ari Up of pioneering all female punk group The Slits passed away at the age of 48 after a short battle with cancer. Kokal is somewhat shaken by her death – Warpaint opened for The Slits on a US tour several years ago and she developed a deep affection for Up.
“It’s so weird, I was just talking to The Guardian about this. The Slits were a band I only properly discovered in high school. One of my friends had their album Cut. What I remembered was them topless and covered in mud on the cover. But their music sort of passed me by at the time. I didn't pay it the attention it deserved. It was only later, when I was in my 20s, that my boyfriend recommended I listen to them. I’d started singing and I was struggling to find my voice. So I listened to Cut ‘cos my boyfriend thought it would help. And it did, totally. I was completely inspired by the way she sang.”
Pausing to chomp on a carrot stick, she continues: “It’s funny... not long after Warpaint started, we were invited to play with The Slits. Sharing a bill with them was an unbelievable experience, especially considering we’d just started out. At the time, we never actually got to talk to Ari, though I do know she watched us play. I met her later at a house party arranged by a mutual friend. She turns up in this huge padded jacket. She reminded me of a football coach. I remember thinking she was so cool. She'll be missed, that's for sure.”

The Fool is out now on Rough Trade.