Saint Agnes: “We are anti-clean”
Alejandro De Luna
There is something going on in the streets of London; there is something happening beyond the complacent music scene. The psychedelic rock n´ roll duo Saint Agnes, with a name “inspired by a town in Devon”, as an archetype between chastity and profanity, is a proof of that. With a brilliant EP recorded in Kitty Austen´s (vocals, guitar and keyboards) bedroom in “the horrible streets of Plaistow, the real east London” and waiting for a record label to the rescue, this band is a worthy rock n´ roll revival with a colossal sound. “Ennio Morricone´s rock n´roll” is how they described themselves before and they might not be wrong if you think of spaghetti western soundtracks overlapped with American´s cowboy-desert sound fuelled with heavy drugged, psychedelic passages.
“In a lot of the London bands everyone wants to be super cool and they are not really caring”, says Jon Tufnell, guitarist and vocalist of Saint Agnes while drinking a pint of ale next to Kitty in a noisy pub in Hampstead. “I don’t understand why the indie scene is getting popular. There are no good songs and they are so clean. It kills everything. We are anti clean, we a genuine partnership. Our sound is very lo-key, super unprofessional, very DIY.”
Despite their young age, Jon Tufnell and Kitty Austen´s career in rock music has been long already. Coming from bands like Lola Colt and The Lost Souls Club respectively, the pair met after Jon auditioned for Kitty´s band a couple of years ago. “We met and we just played guitar without knowing how it would sound like. By the end of the first evening we recorded a full song called “Tower Falls” and we became a band.”
Kitty recalls with the same feeling and drinks a pint with a smile on her face: “it felt really different to all the other London bands around at the moment. It was a liberating thing cause in the other band I just play keyboards and for me, it was refreshing not to be on the background anymore.”
Their musical knowledge is broad and well studied: “BRMC, the guitar sound of The Raveonettes and Fleetwood Mac´s well written pop songs but with the spirit of rock n roll” are just some sort of inspirations, but the truth is that Saint Agnes absorbs ideas rather than specific sounds.
“We both love Hendrix, The Who and Led Zeppelin. We like guitar solos, we like crazy noises. Kitty likes the sound of keyboards in Deep Purple and The Doors but I think we are not influenced directly by some specific bands. I grew up loving Van Halen, but we sound nothing like Van Halen but that must have made an impression on my guitar playing somewhere. The influence is more on the songwriting, in the spirit of not overthinking, on being quick. For example we love what Jack White is doing with that kind of spirit.”
Kitty listens carefully and adds sharp details to the conversation: “Influences out of music are definitely films; Spaghetti westerns, literature, and poetry. We love the old way of making movies that are full of space and full of stillness and we like to have those dramatic moments with lots of space in our music.”
Saint Agnes is fully prepared, loaded and ready to attack the rock scene. Songs like the Tarantino-like “The Good Fight”, the surfy “Drown Me In A River”, a druggy and schizophrenic version of The Doors in “Roundhouse Blues” and the anthem-to-be “Old Bonne Rattle”, proves the quality of these two renegades, but as in many cases, the industry and justice has not been kind as they are currently struggling in search of a deal. They have been exiled and they truly deserve attention.
“Every band I been has been DIY all the way but I am aware that they are limits within the industry without a record label”, says Jon. “We keep writing and doing some gigs; we have new songs. We got proof that people like it but we really need a label.”
The pint is finished and is time to leave. Jon´s expectations on Saint Agnes are to have “total creative freedom and play gigs all the fuckin time as it is what we love to do.” As per Kitty, she wants to leave a “not so glamorous existence and to make a living from music”, but who said that the dirty side of rock n´roll is glamorous?
