Empowerment and Equality: A Chat With Lady Garden
Interview ★ Kenzie Gay ★ @kenzwrites
Coming out of Cardiff, Wales, there is a new punk rock band emerging amongst the sea of local indie bands under the name of Lady Garden. The four piece that just started out in 2024 is comprised of Isobel (she/her, vox/rhythm guitar), Amelie (she/her, bass), Sali (she/her, lead guitar), and Xanthe (any pronouns, drums). In anticipation of the group’s debut single, ‘Funny’, we sat down with them to discuss representation, punk, and empowerment.
A Conversation With Lady Garden
Your debut single, ‘Funny’ is set to release on the 15th of February. Can you walk us through the creation process of this song?
It started with Isobel showing us the song she’d written called ‘Funny’. She wrote it when she was angry and confused about her just ended romantic relationship - the song is basically about trying to get over someone by meeting someone new. Xanthe quickly jumped in and started improvising a drum part, as she finds that improvising first and tweaking later is the best way for her to come up with the drums for a song. Then Amelie quickly picked it up and wrote a bass line while Sali worked on a lead guitar section and the full song started to come together.
Who are some of the band’s biggest musical influences?
We think our biggest influences would be bands like The Distillers, Bikini Kill, Veruca Salt, Amyl and the Sniffers and The Breeders, in terms of the sound and the energy when performing live.
What does female empowerment mean to you, and how do you express that through your music?
Female empowerment is the threshold of Lady Garden. The whole purpose of our music is to empower us and our listeners, our lyricism and sound massively expresses this. While a lot of our songs have more of a somber message, like Said Susie and Drop Dead Gorgeous, we encapsulate the repressed rage that so many women feel the need to choke down to appear “ladylike” through our intense overdrive and robust beats.
How do you think growing up/living in Cardiff has influenced you and your sound?
We have all been interested in music since a young age and growing up in Cardiff has made our passion for music flourish. When we were able to we all started visiting venues such a Clwb Ifor Bach, The Moon, Fuel Rock Club and Porters to see local bands perform. Although Cardiff has many strong female fronted bands like NOOKEE and PANIC SHACK among many notable others, we feel we have seen so many male fronted indie/rock bands and we wanted to stand out - influencing our all female punk rock aesthetic.
Music is an integral part of Cardiff and growing up here has inspired us to pursue our passion for our instruments and lyricism. Through being a part of Lady Garden, we feel as if we have found our voices as a young musicians.
This March, you are due to perform your first festival set at Immersed Music Festival in Cardiff. What are your excitements/anxieties surrounding this milestone?
We are absolutely thrilled to be performing as part of Immersed festival, we couldn’t have foreseen such a fantastic opportunity when we’d just started out contained inside the walls of practice rooms in Cathays. Although it will be nerve racking, we are beyond excited to be sharing our sound on such a remarkable platform as playing tramshed is a huge milestone for Cardiff bands, we will be showing immersed what Lady Garden is all about.
As a self–proclaimed punk band, what does punk truly mean to you?
Punk to us is not just about the music we create and playing as loud as we can, it’s about us having a voice and giving others a voice who may not have one. We use this voice to comment on problems that women experience globally. Though progression has been made, it’s still hard work being a woman in the world we live in. This has become ever more apparent when we started the band, as we have received plenty of criticism for what we are doing. Of course, we won’t be letting that stop us, some people don’t like the topics we talk about however we feel that in itself is punk to us. We’ll be amping it up even further in the face of adversity, and using our voice to shout louder than ever before about what matters to us.
According to Instagram, your first gig as a band was this past July for Pride Festival. That being said, how important is equality to you and the music you create?
Playing pride festival in July could not have been a better debut gig for us, equality is vitally important to us as band. Xanthe herself is a queer female musician and she has faced a fair share of challenges from a young age, but this didn’t deter her; instead it filled her with a fire to make a difference. Through both feminism and gay rights we truly believe everyone deserves equality no matter race, gender or sexuality. Although a lot of our audience are women we also connect with the lgbtq+ community through our songs. As mentioned previously our lyrics cover a lot of different relatable topics which we hope people feel connected to. Lady Garden has given us all a platform to express our opinions and a place to show our creativity through our instruments and lyrics we write, which we are tremendously grateful for, as our music is all about making ourselves heard and provoking change.
DIY is a huge aspect of culture in local music scenes. What are your honest opinions about your local scene?
DIY is a huge aspect of all bands no matter what your situation is and where you’re starting from, it’s all been a learning process and we are still learning. We have only been together as a band for about 7 months and the only reason we are where we are now is because we put in the work. Majority of the shows we’ve played we have booked ourselves, our social media content and artwork were all created by us. We don’t have a management team or anything like that, it’s just the 4 of us putting in as much effort as we can to get to where we want to be. Cardiff is great for supporting local bands - there are a lot of different promoters and funding opportunities that you can get involved in but the only way your getting them is if you make the contacts.
What advice would you give to young women who want to pursue a career in music but are discouraged by the challenges they might face?
The most important thing is to pursue what you want, because if you never try, you’ll get nowhere. We’ve only been together for about 7 months and even then it took us about 8 months to actually get it going, we never expected to be as successful as we’ve become - if we never started we wouldn’t be where we are today. Though it may be challenging to be a young female musician, nothing good will come without its hurdles! Do now, worry later, and face up to the challenges as they come. There’s no use sitting around waiting for something to happen, so if you have a drive for making music, follow it! Don’t leave room for regrets in your future by not chasing your passion, so get on it girl.
