Photo: Fi Carroll

First record you bought 

Good Charlotte – The Young and The Hopeless, I was a baby emo, i’m very much down with the pop-punk, emo resurgence that’s happening right now. I got a CD walkman for christmas, aged 10, and I went to HMV to buy my first CDS. I got this Good Charlotte classic and it still bangs in my opinion.

 First gig you went (who, where, when)

I was living down in Devon when I was a teenager and we didn’t get many big bands coming down our way. But weirdly, Cage the Elephant played at what used to be the Plymouth Hub when i was like 15, and it absolutely blew me away. I’d never seen anyone stage dive or do anything as crazy as their lead singer, he was climbing the rigging and just hurling himself around – he was mesmerising and I just wanted to be him. 

 First band you fell in love with

The first band that I properly fell for as a teenager, collected all their records and played on repeat, was probably The Kills. I loved the dynamic between Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince, it felt exciting and romantic. Nobody I was mates with was into them at all either, so it felt like I’d found something underground and special.

First song that inspired you

Being in a band when i was at school definitely wasn’t a cool thing to do. There were like only three bands at my school, and the popular one was an indie band with three lads in it – this was the era of The Kooks and Razorlight. I hated indie music so much because everyone else was into it! I was very anti-social. My brother and his friends were metalheads and I remember hearing Metallica, Sad But True, and it was so different to what I was hearing at school, so heavy and no-nonsense – I thought it was amazing. I only wanted to play metal and classic rock and everyone at school thought i was weird as fuck, but that love of heavy, riff-driven music has never gone away. It wasn’t a phase!

First song you wrote (any good?)

I started writing songs when i was a really little kid, my brother played drums and i played guitar and we always wrote stuff together. We were in bands together all through our teenage years and he sound engineers for Saint Agnes now. Our first song, and this is no word of a lie, was called Flasher in a Lift and it was a two chord punk song. I don’t think we knew what a flasher was, we just liked the sound of it and it made people laugh when we’d scream it at them. I’d rate the song a solid 8/10. 

First gig you played (how’d it go?)

I actually lived in Spain as a kid in a tiny mountain village and mine and my brother’s friend Lucy came out to stay with us a for a bit. She was older than us and super cool (i was in love with her) and she played bass guitar and played me The Smashing Pumpkins. We set up our drum kit and amps on the roof terrace of my house and we did a little gig for our elderly spanish neighbours. They loved it. We called ourselves The Lost Shrubs and we played that one show for Maria next door and that was it.

First musical hero

Wendy James from Transvision Vamp. I had a VHS that I wore out with the Baby I Don’t Care music video on and some live stuff and I was obsessed with her.