LAXMag had the chance to sit down in London for tea and coffee and a chat with Dee Plume from Robots In Disguise about their upcoming tour in Germany, their new record Happiness v Sadness and the girls’ other projects.

You’ll be coming back to Germany for some gigs early October...

Dee: Yeah. We really want to because it took us a while to make a record so we depend on that to promote ourselves.

It took you a year to make the record?

Dee: Two years. Because we didn’t have any founding and we had to go through pledge music and to get our fans to preorder the record and use that money to pay our producer. It was good in terms of the fact to get your fans involved in it to start with and then they know when the record comes out and they're interested. So that was good.

What can your fans expect from the tour?

Dee: It depends on what's happening the room, what the audience is doing. Our live shows can be quite mental, there's jumping in the audience and climbing onto speakers. We wear specific costumes, we always got a costume, and in the past we had loads of visuals with videos and we have dancing robots. A guy who lives in Berlin, an artist called Jim, he built these robots and now his mate Neil is in charge of them, so we have two dancing robots. They probably won't come to Germany because that means we have to pay for them and we can't afford them.

When you’re so struggling with money – do you ever think you should have gotten a normal, boring job?

Dee: I don't think "Should have gotten a normal job from college?" because I wouldn't have made four albums of music and that's what I wanted to do and it's sort of amazing because I always wanted to be in a band and I made it happen. I made stuff I like. I like writing and I write a bit comedy at the moment and I quite like it.

You’re thinking about being an office temp?

Dee: Yeah. You can pay your bills and it gives you the motivation. "I don't wanna do this!". You can make sure you work. I've done loads of shit jobs in the past.

What was the shittiest?

Dee: I did a lot of retail jobs but I probably kind of enjoyed them. Because I used to chat to customers. I did a job as a trainee bike mechanic, that was good and then they couldn't afford to pay me but I still hang out there. It's a nice environment and really interesting. And I got a song out if it, I write solo stuff, so I wrote a song about it.

You’ve got a solo project?

Dee: Yeah, it’s called Psycho Delia v The Ward, it's me and my friend on drums and me on the electric guitar. Actually, we perform at the end of September in Berlin. (Death by Pop party at the White Trash in Berlin, 23rd of September.)

On "Happiness v Sadness" there’s this song called "Lies". Did you specifically plan on writing a song against the tabloid media or did it just happen?

Dee: It was just happening to me in my life because I was going out with someone who got a lot of attention from the press. I felt like things were written and I couldn't really say anything about it and it was all really negative and you can't take media up anyway, you would just look foolish so I felt like doing it. There's a massive tabloid culture in all European countries, but at that time there were all these free papers snapping everyone coming out of bars and stuff. They were just like total trash. They don't really exist anymore. They just died, that was good.

"Chains" is an unusual first single...

Dee: Well, it's bits and pieces all written separately. Sue has written the chorus and then we got together and jammed it out, I was playing drums at that moment and so we wrote the rest together. That's how we write our songs - one of us got a bit of a song and we start singing it and working it out what we actually want to sing about. And then in terms in lots of layers on that song - David Alexander, who was producing it, worked quite a lot on that song and we used lots of different effects on that song and it became quite layered. It was a bit of an experiment really.

There's something quite familiar about it as well, it reminds me of other songs, it has quite an 80s feel. A remix I quite liked of it is by Dead Dogs. I love that song, but it takes the song in another direction. Holly of Dead Dogs put vocals on it and a different keyboard on it and it sounds like a Madonna single. It's really good. That would probably be more like it should be like as a traditional pop single, it's shorter and faster.

I heard you did the soundtrack for the movie "Come On Eileen" ...

Dee: We're in the film! It was part of our live performance on Reading festival in 2008 and they filmed us singing "DJ got a gun". It's a scene where one of the characters goes to a show. And that show has the robots in it! And Neil built a massive glitter ball and we jumped out of it! It was good and it's great to have that caught on film.

Do you see yourself as a feminist band? How much do you care about riot grrrl?

Dee: I'm definitely a feminist. In terms of like being able to do what we want and encouraging other girls to, because our fan base consist of teenage girls right now. There's loads of them and we definitely inspire them and help them and that's what I wanted to see when I was a teenager and that sort of thing didn't exist.

Who were your idols growing up?

Dee: I liked sort of all the 90s bands like the Breeders and I obviously liked all the 70s punk people like Siouxsie Sioux and all the sort of kind of energy and women being really badly behaved.

What was the most impressive moment of your career?

Dee: It would probably be a gig, really. I don't know, there are kind of a few gigs that were really good. A gig last December we played in Warsaw, I can't remember what the club was called, but the gig was really good and we were really into the audience and the energy was insane. So it's always gigs. And the gig maybe we played in Paris in 2008. That gig was insane as well. It doesn't get better than that.

Thanks to Dee Plume of Robots In Disguise for the interview from: Simone Bauer

Tourdaten:

01.10. München - Atomic Café
02.10. Wiesbaden – Schlachthof
03.10. Berlin - Lido
04.10. Hamburg - Grüner Jäger

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