Touring band the BellRays return to New Zealand next week to inflict us with another onslaught of punk rock soul. Front woman Lisa Kekaula talks to Scott Kara
KEY POINTS:
When you go to a BellRays show, the idea is to get rid of all your inhibitions. Let yourself go. However, there's nothing hippy-dippy about it because _ as rock diva frontwoman Lisa Kekaula will no doubt announce before the band kickstart your heart _ the BellRays "don't f*** around" and they've come to do one thing: Party.
So let the Californians' self-proclaimed rock'n'soul music _ basically a sonic blast of blues, soul, rock and punk _ seep into your veins and go crazy.
"I feel as though we are kindred, at least in theory, to the same thing the Stooges and MC5 were doing," says Kekaula. "When they started doing that it was very explosive and you just want everybody to experience that. It's just something that feels right, especially when we're doing what we're doing. It just kinda goes hand in hand with the music _ the combination of the whole punk rock and soul thing. It feels like something that lets you loose.
"I think people have lost touch with what makes them feel what they feel, so if we get them to a point where they can let go at all, I think we've achieved something," she says.
The BellRays are part of a scorching triple bill with our own screaming rockers the Datsuns and Detroit band the Dirtbombs at the Kings Arms on Tuesday.
Kekaula, a woman with a towering presence, impressive afro, and a voice to match, wasn't brought up by her African-American mother and Hawaiian father to let her inhibitions go.
"Of course not, we're Americans," she jokes with her hearty and slightly wheezy chuckle.
But what her mother did teach her was to sing.
"I grew up in a house where my mum just sang all the time and it was encouraged all the time so it never really seemed weird to sing. It actually seemed weird not to and it wasn't until you get to school and join the choir that you realise certain people can do it and certain people can't. That was when I realised this was something kinda special."
It wasn't until she met BellRays guitarist/bass player Bob Vennum _ they are a couple now _ that she sang in a band. That was back in the mid 90s and they've been touring and releasing records ever since.
Besides her work with the BellRays you might remember Kekaula as the booming voice on the Basement Jaxx track Good Luck from the band's album Kish Kash.
In the last year the BellRays have changed: longtime guitarist and devilishly good axeman Tony Fate left the band and on new album, Hard Sweet and Sticky, there's more of a solid soul feel rather than their trademark combination of rock, punk and soul.
Fate left after the band's last album, Have A Little Faith, and the subsequent tour which included a blistering and sweaty gig in Auckland early last year.
"He wasn't on this record. He just said he'd had enough. That's about it," Kekaula says from her home in Riverside, California, during a brief break from touring before heading to New Zealand and Australia.
"There was nothing negative about it. We've just been doing this for a long time and that was enough for him."
She points out the band started without Fate. "So it's not like he's been there from the very beginning and I'm not going to sit up here and say that it's easy to make a change like that, but it's definitely not the worst thing that could have happened."
As for the album a song like Footprints On Water, which ironically was written by Fate, shows a beautiful side to the band not seen often and going by the dominant soulfulness of the record it sounds like Kekaula had more of a say on this one too, perhaps?
"I think so. I think I'm always gonna opt for it sounding more soul because that's kind of where I live. Then again it's all in the eye of the beholder because people hear different things. But what it does show, is that there is a variance and the BellRays are never the same, and while all the songs are different they all come from the same place.
"On this album everything lies a lot easier together. A lot of what we've done in the past _ and there's nothing wrong with it _ has been stylistically a different way of playing, where you just have this tornado of things swirling around, and on this album we pick moments to do that and within the song we just let things settle down."
But not too much, of course.
Kekaula and Vennum have just finished a tour through Europe playing acoustic shows. She says if anything the placid "Bob and Lisa tour" means she's gagging to get to New Zealand and Australia to make like Prince and go crazy.
"It [the duo] never takes the place of actually being up there on stage with amplifiers and drums behind you, so it really kind of gets you hungry," she hoots.
LOWDOWN
Who: Lisa Kekaula, singer in Californian rock'n'soul band The BellRays
Where & when: Kings Arms, Auckland, Tuesday March 11 with the Datsuns and the Dirtbombs
New album: Hard Sweet and Sticky, out now
Essential albums: Let It Blast (Live) (1998); Grand Fury (2000); Have A Little Faith (2006)
