Consuming passions

D’arcy, Melissa Auf Der Maur, Kim Gordon, Hillary Woods: the list of female bass-players in successful, male-dominated rock groups is long.

Long only in relative terms, of course. When it comes to the more coveted role of lead guitarist, few girls seem to battle their way into pole position. The list is hardly even a list.

Maybe the thinking goes: “Girls playing lead guitar might pull those funny faces that the boys make, and that simply wouldn’t be attractive, would it?”

Or, on a more serious note, could it be that because fewer girls than boys get into hard rock in the first place, it’s simply more likely that boys should get the good deals?

Carolyn Bannister, sylph-like bass-player for noise merchants My Vitriol, screws up her face as she tries to untangle this hairball of a question. Although, as a multi-instrumentalist who always ends up playing bass, she admits to having given the matter some thought, she’s not particularly keen on actually offering her opinion.

“The bass is big and sexy and Paul Simonon played it!” she laughs. She then becomes more serious. “When I was growing up and doing the teenage thing, I was in lots of girl bands and they decided it wasn’t quite enough of a sensible thing to do. That’s a generalisation, but… I think it’s humility, that’s what it comes down to. Or maybe girls don’t suffer from six-string envy as much.”

Although the band have only recently released their debut album, Finelines, Sri Lankan-born bandleader Som Wardner is already well-versed in the art of PR. This is perhaps not so surprising given his knack for multi-tasking. As well as singing and writing all the songs for My Vitriol, Som has also graduated from UCL as a fully qualified geneticist. And it was at university that he first began scouting around for people to join his band.

“I was trying to find musicians,” he recalls, “but everyone else was into cool, trendy dance music. And I’d put this advertisement around college with all these things that I wanted My Vitriol to sound like – corrosive, sweet, ambient, spacey, intense, loud, quiet and all these contradictory words, lots of juxtapositions.

“I found the note about six months ago,” he continues, “and I realised that with Finelines I’ve managed to capture all of those – everything’s there that I’ve listed.”

Fans of the record’s blend of angst-ridden, anthemic melody and intricately textured soundscapes include label mate Tim Wheeler of Ash, who has invited the group to tour with them in the summer.

Although My Vitriol hope to win over some new fans with the upcoming gigs, Som smiles self-deprecatingly when asked if he’s worried or excited at the prospect of becoming famous.

“With us, it’s usually the case that our fans and the music industry people know who we are,” he shrugs, “so we’re cool with that, you know? We’re cool with people who like our music knowing who we are.”

The glint in his eyes suggests that his ambitions may go quite some distance beyond that.

Finelines is out now on Infectious