A Year With The Ritas

Our first gig was on Sunday 30th October. We'd been preparing for a long time - although The Ritas started about a year ago, we plotted until December when we first played together, and it was only by the end of March that we'd actually recorded anything. This was our cover of "Jeane" which my boyfriend worked on with us. Having never recorded stuff before (well, I used to sing in a band with my boyfriend but he dealt with all that) there was quite a steep learning curve, but from doing that Olivia (The Ritas' singer) and I were able to go ahead and record stuff ourselves. My boyfriend gets co-producer credit on the EP though because he advised me on a lot of things ("WHY IS THIS NOT RECORDING??" "Because it's not plugged in, maybe?"). José Maldonado, the "Mexican Morrissey", played our version of "Jeane" on his radio show and it was an amazing moment for us.

I should point out that we had realistic expectations for The Ritas. Ok, as much as I might daydream about headlining Glastonbury (not that I'm much of a fan of chemical toilets or hippies), we wanted to play a gig in Birmingham and a gig in London, get some songs on iTunes and put out a CD ourselves. But things have changed slightly....

It was in May that my boyfriend decided to focus on his own projects. Whereas with "Jeane" he'd arranged it, played bass and programmed the drums, with recordings of our own tracks it was now down to me to play bass, do the drums, arrangements etc. I'd never played bass before, so basically I've only been playing it since May! Olivia and I worked hard over the next few months finishing off our tracks and we sent them to Lawrence, my boyfriend's pal in Glasgow, who mixed them for us. This gave us a lot of flexibility - I like collaborating but me and my boyfriend were having huge rows about basslines and drum loops and lead guitar lines and key changes, whereas couples are supposed to argue about buying shelves in Homebase and whose turn it is to put out the bins.

By June, Olivia and I had finished three songs - "Too Much Talking To Machines", which was an experimental number, and "Glitter & Doom" and "How Wrong I Was". That's not bad going, really, three songs in a month when I'd never used a drum machine or played bass before in my life, and was suddenly recording songs with them! To be honest, though, if you can play lead guitar, you can play bass, so it wasn't hard.

In July, I was approached by Gary from Dufflecoat Records who said he wanted to put out an EP. He said he could do a split one with another band, but as we were churning out songs at great speed, we decided to go for a Ritas-only EP. We mentioned that we wanted to put the EP out as a digital download, and Gary asked that we wait for the EP to have been out for a month so it could sell a decent number of copies first. Fair enough!

August came around - we'd arranged our October gig in Birmingham, our November gig in London, and announced that Dufflecoat were releasing our EP. We were working frantically to finish the EP and rehearse for the gigs. In fact, that's all we did over September - rehearse, rehearse, rehearse!

And then October. I was busy with my shop as well, working on the Swagger Joint clothes label, promoting it etc, as well as preparing for the gig, but I still managed to give up smoking (which I'd taken up again over the summer - not surprising really with all that was going on!). So much rehearsing, liaising with Lawrence who was mixing our backing tracks (there being only two Ritas, the drums and bass are on the backing tracks), and also making some more backing tracks for new songs that weren't on the EP and so hadn't yet been recorded. Somehow we managed to get all this done - Olivia knew all the words, I knew all my chord changes and widdly-wah bits, we had a set-list, I had a pedal board and a cool amp, and that was it, really.

The gig was fun. I enjoyed it. And the audience did too, apparently. We had The Choir Invisible over from Dublin as our support (which sounds rather grand for a first gig, but the guitarist is Olivia's friend!) and Bethan from Atta Girl (the women's music night which was one of the inspirations behind The Ritas) DJing. Arthur Tapp gets a thank you here because we'd had problems arranging the gig at another venue, and he sorted us out with the Actress & Bishop in a matter of minutes. Free hire AND a sound engineer!

We soundchecked but didn't have very long to do it because some bloke was downstairs playing Monkees' cover versions on a mandolin (I'm not joking...). The Choir Invisible were really good and Ruraidh was an amazing guitarist - really interesting watching him play.

So then the turn of The Ritas. We came onstage to "Too Much Talking To Machines" and launched into "Glitter & Doom". It was going well, apart from some feedback. Then into "Silent Protest", followed by "She's With The Band" - a song I wrote about obesity surgery! (there's not many of those around, are there!). This is when technical problems developed which dogged me for the whole set. My guitar turned itself off. It appears to have been some issue with my pedals - in changing settings between songs I'd managed to turn the gain down on the overdrive pedal. As gain is also volume (pretty much), everything went disturbingly quiet, the sound engineer trying to bring the volume back up where he could. This went on with the next song. Thence a guitar-change - I was so relieved to change it because I thought maybe everything would be ok (one of the Choir Invisible had leapt in and fixed the silent guitar problem). But no, the other guitar was out of tune! I did realise it, but I didn't change back to the first guitar because I was worried that'd still be conducting its own silent protest.

I've since watched a video of the show - the out of tune guitar isn't too obvious in "Lost At Sea" but with "Jeane" it was abysmal, and I feel really gutted about that because it was our famous song - it was on the radio in America, it was the song that got people interested in us because The Smiths fans loved our cover and even people who didn't like The Smiths said they liked our version. Strangely though, the out of tune guitar has the effect of making the backing track sound of tune!

The last song! Oh was I ever relieved to get to the last song. It's odd but even during rehearsals, our songs had ceased to feel like our own creations, it was like doing cover versions. At rehearsals, we'd focus on what we were doing, thinking all the time. But on stage, all that goes - you're on stage and you get into a zone and you just do it without thinking at all. This has happened to me before with my acting in plays and film (yes, I've been in two films, folks. Bet you never knew that!). Our set felt like it lasted 10 minutes at most but in fact went on for half an our!

I LOVE playing "How Wrong I Was". It's a really good song to end on too, really angry and energetic and something to jump about to. It was all going so well. I'd changed back to the first guitar which was actually in tune, the volumes were all fine, there was no feedback. What could possibly go wrong?

Ah... the guitar strap fell off. I didn't miss a strum, I just got down on my knees and played on the floor. And then Olivia knelt down beside me and carried on. My boyfriend then got on stage and reattached the strap so I could get back to my feet. And then once the song finished, I switched on all my pedals and made as much unholy noise as I possibly could. And then we left the stage.

For a first gig, it's not surprising I had those kinds of problems. I didn't realise my semi-acoustic would go out of tune so fast (it was tuned when I was setting up earlier, but 3 hours of it being bombarded by loud music had knocked it out of tune). The feedback could have been abated if we'd had a longer soundcheck, maybe. The moment my guitar went silent, I should've tried to work out what it was - I hadn't thought it could be the pedal as I check my amp and my guitar to make sure they were still on. And on Saturday I'm getting some Dunlop strap locks to prevent a guitar-playing-on-knees scenario (although it did make me look like I was doing a Jimi Hendrix impression). The soundman shook my hand after the gig - he said I dealt with my technical issues professionally! I hope though in future I won't have so many technical issues to start with!

The other thing too of course is that when you've lived with songs for ages, written them, recorded them, listening to them over and over again to make sure the recorded versions are ok, heard umpteen different mixes, rehearsed them hundreds of times - you know what the song should sound like. However, the audience doesn't. So I doubt many of them realised just how much I fucked it up. But Olivia was great. She's a fantastic singer and a talented performer with heaps of stage presence who carried on like a total trooper while I struggled with the fruits of my ineptitude. But people loved the gig, and someone threw a bra onstage! ;)

The EP was released the very next day, Monday 31st October. We were recovering from the gig the day before, and plotting on going to a Manics signing at HMV and giving them our EP (we gave them the EP and Nicky Wire said he'd heard of us. Probably because we gave him a Ritas badge in Llandudno...). I didn't get round to Facebooking and Tweeting the EP release until the evening. By Tuesday, Gary said that the EP had nearly sold out. That's 100 copies gone in two days. No one could believe how fast it sold - I still can't! Just... wow, thanks so much to everyone who bought it! It really means a lot, just being able to connect and communicate with so many people through our art. It's fab.

We're now working out what to do about digital downloads - I'll let you all know soon because it's quite a cool thing. ;)

Big thank you to everyone who's helped us - my boyfriend (aka Eightball) and Lawrence especially, though Olivia would no doubt like to thank Ruraidh for encouragement, and we'd like to say a big thank you to everyone who's bought the EP, come to the gig, or even just commented somewhere that they like what we're doing. I'm going to stop now though cos I'm gushing.

But there you go - A year with The Ritas. A year of hard work, surprises, excitement and gold spray paint.

(Photos variously by Eightball Photography, Andy, Nick Hynan.)

PS: we're playing live again on Tuesday 15th November at the Vauxhall Tavern in London. It's free to get in & I'll make sure my guitar is in tune, doesn't turn itself off and won't fall on the floor!