Giant Drag Take Us To The Dark Side

“Shut up before I come and take a dump down your throats”. Not the sort of thing you’d want to hear from a girl you’re hoping to introduce to your elderly relatives, but just the sort of sit-up-and-listen shocker you wish more of our play-it-safe rock stars would come out with. Such a proclamation is especially surprising when it comes from a mouth in which it looks like butter wouldn’t melt - that of Giant Drag singer and guitarist Annie Hardy.

Along with the other half of her band, simultaneous drummer and synth-player Micah Calabrese, she makes for a larger-than-life presence on stage. But offstage, in the dressing room of Liverpool’s Carling Academy before the final night of a twelve-date tour with The Cribs, she behaves in a manner much more befitting of her china-doll beauty. Softly spoken, verging on shy, and fiddling nervously with a bottle lid throughout the interview, she still isn’t exactly your typical girl next door though, explaining her onstage persona and excrement-related heckler baiting as “just something that comes out. I don’t want people to, like, fuck with me. You’ve gotta stand up for yourself onstage, especially when you’re a girl. No-one’s going ‘show your tits!’ at The Cribs”.

Based in LA, Giant Drag have been making waves here in the UK since the release of their ‘Lemona EP’ in 2004.  Their debut album ‘Hearts and Unicorns’ has just received its full UK release, and they’re busy taking their spacey dream-pop songs around the country’s venues. And with just the two of them, they’ve become pretty close, finishing each other’s sentences and mocking each other as only best friends can. “We get separate hotel rooms once in a while, but even then we just end up talking to each other on the phone” says Micah. Annie adds, “It’s weird, we’re together all the time. We hang out a lot together at home too. Obviously, we get along very well.  Although we do have a lot of space really on tour. We can even find space from each other on the bus.” Laughing, Micah reveals, “But we always end up both sitting in the two front seats anyway.” Annie proclaims, “My God, we’re so gay!”

There’s that take-her-home-to-meet-your-mother charm again. And she seems to have a bit of a penchant for that three-letter synonym of “homosexual”, with a recent single being titled ‘Kevin is Gay’. “Kevin is just a guy though,” she says, “ the song is nothing to do with him. But this guy, a friend of ours, hacked into our website, so it’s a response to him. We posted up on there, ‘Kevin, stop posting all this stupid crap on our website. Come and see us tomorrow when we’ll be debuting our new song Kevin is Gay’. And the title just stuck.”