Lesserknown Facts

Some things you may or may not know about Coal:

• We're an all girl 5 piece from Cape Town
• We started out with Sherri on drums, Helen on bass and Vera on guitar - playing in Ronnie from Terminatryx's bedroom until fate sent us down different paths
• For the first 2 months we literally played Feline's Release Me over and over, and over... and over again, every practice [this got boring pretty quickly, and we spent a lot of time rummaging in magazines for inspiration on our styling, which has definitely paid off!]
• We recruited Linda by bribing her with the promise of ripe avocados at every band meeting - a deal we have, so far, managed to make good on.
• We prepared to audition about 15 vocalists, but only 3 ever turned up for auditions, thankfully Cathy was one of them - as she is really quite good!!
• 2/3 of the band would dump their boyfriends if Win Butler from the Arcade Fire came knocking.
• We all communicate religiously via e-mail and are probably being given the beady eye by our respective bosses as we speak. Except for Helen "employee of the year" Westcott!
• Sherri and Helen are overly fond of tequila. Which simultaneously pleases and horrifies our manager Sean Wienand.
• Vera and Helen used to be in Wicked City / I, Villain together... with Philip, who sings Henry Lee with us!
• We have a "safe word" to stop us from talking rubbish too much during practice. By all accounts bands without women in them do not suffer from this particular problem ;)
• We celebrated the success of our first gig by eating cake and drinking tea in Cathy's lounge. That's how girls rock 'n' roll.
• You will always find us at The Sleepers' gigs, and not just because over half of us are dating over half of them, but rather because they're simply mindblowingly incredible. We also really really love Sidecar Fire
• We were interviewed by Onesmallseed.tv last night, which we're really excited about!
• We're going to record 3 or 4 songs, time permitting, next week.
• We're all in awe of NIN and Trent Reznor, and not just the music, his marketing and merchandising ideas are genius. Helen also saw NIN live at Reading in 2007, and Trent Reznor kicked a stage hand, which was well amusing - though not sufficiently so to inspire recreating it herself.
• Our vocalist is dating our manager, recipe for disaster anyone? ;)
• Vera has been berated twice now for removing her glasses on stage. This is an astonishing track record, given we've only played 3 gigs!
• Adam Hill designed all of our cameo badges, in exchange for Helen's famous butternut lasagne

... we've still got 3 installments of "a day in the life" to go, so everyone will have ample opportunity to find out more about us as the weeks go on!
H