Interview: Electrovamp Is Back!

Remember Electrovamp? This British girl duo responsible for internet radio sensations such as "Drinks Taste Better When They're Free" and "I Don't Like The Vibe In The VIP" has been absent from the pop seen for a while, but you better not count them out. Back and ready to go with a brand new single and a video in the works, Tammy and Kally gave me all the details on their current music, as well as a glimpse into the near future.

You guys have been around for quite a while now, but for those who aren't as familiar, who is Electrovamp?

[EV]
We are two sisters, Tammy and Kally, and we are Electrovamp! Our music is electro-pop and all about having fun. That is exactly what we like to write about. In a bomb shell, anyway.

Who's idea was it to make music as a sister team?

[Tammy]
Back when I was thirteen I wanted to enter a talent competition, but I was far to chicken to do it on my own so I asked Kally to do it with me.

[Kally]
I don't think I would have done it on my own either. When Tammy asked, we were on the same level about things, and we thought "Yeah, let's just go for it". We work well together and bouce ideas off one another quite well.

You guys get along pretty well, but it has to be challenging making music with your sister.

[Tammy]
The only thing challenging about working with my sister is we like the same things. I bought a new outfit, and I was so excited to show my sister. She told me I had to return it because she already owned it!

Kally

[Kally]
If I bought the outfit first, who do you think should have got to wear it?

I don't want to get in the middle of that!

[Kally]
We don't argue much, just with silly things like that. Things like clothes or hair products. Typical sister stuff. We are friends again five minutes later.


You two look so similar. Do you get mistaken for being twins often?

[Kally]
They do. We always get asked that question. Sometimes even when they've asked our age, the next question is "are you twins?" How is that possible we just told you our ages.

[Tammy]
Then sometimes we have them guess who is the oldest. They usually say it's Kally who is the youngest. That would be me!
[both laugh]

There are a lot of girl electropop groups -- a surprising ammount of them sister groups. How do you guys manage to stand apart from all the other groups.

[Tammy]
We just try not to think about the others. We only focus on what we are doing and want to do. We've been at this for such a long time.

[Kally]
We've been out there performing and recording since we were 13 and 14, and we are getting our heads back in the game. We're just doing our own thing, focusing on our own ideas and if they happen to be simular to others we must have something in common.  There's plenty of room for us all

Most of us in the US learned about you guys from the movie How To Lose Friends And Alienate People. How did you guys get involved with a feature film?

[Kally]
Basically, the person we were writing the album with at the time was friends with the director. He played some of our songs for the director to get some feedback, and he loved the songs. He asked if he could use them on the film. We ended up with two tracks on the movie. It was nearly three but we didn't want it to be an overkill.

How big of a US fanbase do you have?

[Tammy]
We really don't know to be honest. We have people from all over the world messaging us, and saying they love our music.

[Kally]
It seems to be a good time for artist from the UK to come over to America. Groups like One Direction and Cher Lloyd are doing well, so it may be the right time for us to get over there as well.

Tammy

You guys have put up a lot of snippets of songs that weren't fully released. Are we going to get to see the full versions of any of these?

[Kally]
A couple of them, yes, but we have been writing a lot of new music. a few have gotten a lot of great feedback so we will be putting them on the album.

My favorite is definitely Domino.


[Tammy]
That is definitely going to be put on the album. We may need to rename it, though. Jessie J released a song with the same name. She beat us to it! We plan on tweaking it a little bit.

Your newest release, Hands Up, had two differnet versions. What was the idea behind that?

[Kally]
Keenan really liked the song. It just felt natural to add him to the song. He likes to have fun just like we do. When he asked us --

[Tammy]
Yeah, why not! Let's put our hands up in the air and put him on the track.

[Kally]
We had so much fun with him shooting our mini video in Chicago, and he even came out to see us while we were in Florida. We are actually going to be shooting a video for the song soon. We aren't quite sure when, yet.

What is the concept for the video?

[Tammy]
Nothing set yet, but we want it to be lots of fun.

[Kally]
We want to play off the classroom motif in the video.

Will Keenan be involved as well?

[Both]
He definitely will!

How did you meet him? 

[Kally]
It's quite a long story behind this, but I'll try and cut it short. We met a guy who claimed to be a relative of Keenan, and he got everything organized. We got over to the US to do a video, and there was nobody waiting for us at the airport. We had to sort everything out last minute, and that guy disappeared off the face of the Earth. Luckily we got everything worked out in the end.

You guys went cold for a while. Hopefully you are going to keep it going now and release music more quickly, right?

[Tammy]
We have about three singles we 100% want to release but we can't really talk about them right now.

[Kally]
And we want to get more gigs in, too. We want to travel around and get people excited for our music again. We don't like to jinx things, though, so we are just going to take things as they come.

Speaking of gigs do you have any big ones planned soon?

[Kally]
The main one is the Poptronic festival in Spain on the first of September. It's gonna be a lot of electropop artists similar to ourselves. It's going to be right on the beach and be so much fun.

No release date has been set for their long overdue debut album, but you can buy the new single "Hands Up" featuring YouTube sensation Keenan Cahill on iTunes.