“Because it’s not going to be a safe space if people aren’t informed as well.” “It’s just as much a part of us as the chaotic, rowdy side of things,” agrees Lilly, “You can’t pick and choose you’ve got to take it as it is.”Īs you’d expect from a band with song titles like ‘Terf Wars’, there’s no disguising that Lambrini Girls are fiercely unafraid to wade into issues. “The only way sometimes to make people listen is to literally shout it in their faces,” she says. The uncompromising way that Phoebe introduces ‘Boys In The Band’ at each show makes it impossible to look away. “There is a power dynamic between men and everyone else in the music industry, just because it’s obviously been so dominated by them for quite a long time already.” “It is fucking everywhere!” “It’s across all music genres, to be honest,” adds Lilly.

“It’s an inherent problem with DIY punk culture,” she says. “And it makes us as much of an issue as the people actually doing it and abusing.”Īfter time living in London, and chatting to people from other towns and cities, she realised it wasn’t a purely Brighton problem. “The worst thing about it is when it gets ignored because it totally perpetuates the issue,” explains Phoebe. The brutalising ‘Boys In The Band’, based on a specific band, takes a fierce aim at a DIY scene that still protects abusers rather than dealing with them. It wasn’t all cartwheels and downing bottles of Lambrini (though there remains plenty of that). Both Phoebe and Lilly played in local cult punk band Wife Swap USA (a group that also included half of buzzy Lime Garden), and after snagging a last-minute invite to headline The Great Escape’s opening party last year, things really began to click into place with a set that combined an anarchic sense of punky mayhem with a biting and searing dead-eyed stare at some major issues at play within both the local area and the wider world. The Brighton scene has a rich history of producing interesting alternative bands, and Lambrini Girls fit straight into that heritage. Now, with support slots with the likes of Frank Carter being followed by being hand-picked by Iggy Pop for his Dog Day Afternoon festival later this summer, that’s a question that has to be asked less and less these days. “But anyway, loads of people were like, ‘who the fuck is this band?'” “It was a bit of a strange time,” ponders Phoebe. “Drank three bottles of wine, ripped my trousers, came out to my mum on stage,” she grins, while bassist Lilly Maciera, not yet in the band at that point, laughs as she describes the show as “a fucking circus…”.

For vocalist and guitarist Phoebe Lunny, the night did not go entirely as planned. Born in lockdown, the band’s very first gig took place at a huge celebration of the local scene at Brighton Dome. Life for Brighton’s Lambrini Girls has been pure chaos from the very beginning. Truth be told, there’s little that makes a new band more exciting than a bit of chaos – and on that metric, there are few that get the heart racing quite like Lambrini Girls.

Iggy pop wife