Cream Tea with HotWax
SERENA FERRARI
“Which one do you put first – the cream or the jam?” asks Tallulah Sim-Savage, lead vocalist and guitarist of new hyped rock band, HotWax. “The cream, I think”, whispers bassist Lola Sam, sporting her trademark dyed hair and an army green beret, pierced by a pin that says Fuck Barbie.
We’re at the Royal Victoria Hotel in St Leonards and it’s raining – typical English weather for a typical English custom: afternoon tea. The thought came to me on a whim; I was curious to see how the post-punk grunge of HotWax would clash with the etiquette of an established tradition. But to be fair, there is something uniquely anti-establishment about afternoon tea at the Royal Victoria. The scones are the size of boulders and the jam is, well, jelly-like, needing to be sliced rather than spooned. It’s great.
“In America, they call scones ‘biscuits’, right?” asks Alfie Sayers, the band’s enlisted drummer and final member. “‘Cause, I had biscuits and gravy”, he recalls of HotWax’s recent stint in North America, opening up for Royal Blood. “Which you didn’t really like,” shoots straight- talking Lola.
For the time being, the band is on home turf – that’s Hastings for Tallulah and Lola and Brighton for Alfie – and they are enjoying it. “It was weird, we thought we’d write in the van, but it wasn’t really easy,” says Tallulah. “So it felt exciting to come home and be able to do that.”
But they are not home for long. By the time this goes to print, the East Sussex band will have played festivals in Scandinavia before opening for Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes across Europe and the UK. I ask the twenty-year-olds (Alfie turned twenty-one on tour) if they ever get homesick while on the road, and all three emphatically shake their heads. “I liked being in places where no one knew who you were,” says Tallulah, explaining how in Hastings everyone knows everybody, which can feel, at times, a little claustrophobic. Lola adds that there isn’t much time on tour to miss home, what with the whirlwind of travel, soundchecks, and playing live. And as for Alfie, he sees it as an opportunity to learn, asking crew members and other musicians about their experiences and what kind of equipment they use. “And we spend so much time together,” adds Lola.
It shows. Throughout the interview, Lola and Tallulah whisper side conversations which inevitably end in fits of giggles. The two met in secondary school and became instant mates when a music teacher put them together for a school band. And they’ve been gigging together ever since. “We’ve been best friends for like seven years now,” says Lola “and we always play music together – we don’t really play music with anyone else.” That is, until they met Alfie in college and invited him to join the band. “We had another drummer who left and then when Alfie joined, me and Tallulah were initially just going to have it as ourselves, but we were like, ‘This doesn’t feel right; we’re a band, we need to have it equally, us three – all in the band’.”
But the main writers of HotWax are Tallulah and Lola, although Alfie will come in and add his “sauce” when the music is ripe enough. However, since going global, the young women sense a definite shift in their writing process. For Tallulah, the main lyricist, she describes writing as “a massive black hole of overthinking”. “It’s so hard because you feel so passionately about these random notes, and then you’re like, ‘What am I even doing’?” She laughs, a little self-conscious before adding, “I absolutely love it, but sometimes I wish I could go back to my mind when we were sixteen or something.”
It’s a common narrative for the creative in the public eye, a pining for a time less conscious of an audience. But it’s not all bad. “I think, in a way, it’s ‘cause we are more experienced in songwriting as well,” adds Lola. So, we think about the structure of a song more than we did before,” an evolution formed by working with different producers and musicians. Tallulah agrees: “For a while, we were really stubborn about it [writing with other people] – we haven’t been doing it a lot – but trying to work with different people expands your mind and expands the way you’d think you’d write a song.” Which means that HotWax is open to a shape-shifting sound so long as it feels right. “A lot of the time, we don’t really know what we want,” says Lola. “We know what we don’t want, but I think because we’re so young, our music taste is always changing and we’ve got to try new things because we still haven’t found – we still haven’t written the perfect song.”
The band members are so young that one would be forgiven for forgetting that they’ve already been performing and writing for five years. Do they ever feel the world underestimates them because of their youth? “I just feel like people underestimate women in music. When we went on tour, all of the group were male. They ended up being really nice but I felt like they might think ‘you don’t know what you’re doing’ if Talluah and I went on stage while they were setting up, even though I literally know how to do all that stuff.” However, “A lot of our team are female,” chimes in Tallulah, “ like our managers and loads of the label are.” “It’s definitely team female”, Lola affirms, and as I look at Alfie, who is nodding his head, he adds, “Yeah, there was a rumour we were three teenage girls from Bexhill.”
Our pots of tea drained and the scones scoffed, I find myself wondering if perhaps people’s prejudices can be advantageous to a band like HotWax. Once home, I watch a recording of their live show in Oakland, and I’m in awe of how the then-teenagers were able to convert a stone-faced crowd into roaring energy. If HotWax has anything to prove, it’s clear that they are out there proving it, whether they mean to be or not.
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