Girls, Drugs and Rock'n' Roll

When he was 16 years old, Christopher Owens went to Bosnia and watched a lot of people die. “We visited hospitals where men a few years older than me had their legs blown off in the war,” he says. “And we would go to the homes of women who had been the victims of rape. And to orphans. We would say, ‘Somebody cares about you’. I’m not sure if they had heard that a lot.”

Owens, who fronts the druggy San Francisco group Girls, was at the time a member of the infamous Children of God cult, an organisation he nowadays likens to the Taliban. It was during the darkest hours of Yugoslavia’s bloody break-up and Owens and his fellow cultists were canvassing for new members amidst the dead and dying. It’s an experience he carries with him to this day.
“I remember holding people’s hands and crying. There was of course a religious angle to it, in terms of the Children of God being involved. It still affects me. I get upset nowadays when I hear about innocent people being killed in Iraq and places like that because I’ve seen it first hand. And friends will make fun of me. They just don’t get it. In my bedroom I keep a Serbian helmet with about 30 mortar-shell holes in it, which I use as a lamp.”

Somewhat bizarrely, his years proselytising in the conflict-ravaged Balkans imbued in him a lifelong love of Limerick stadium screechers The Cranberries. Really? “Oh man, that song ‘Bosnia’. It really meant a lot to me ‘cos of what I’d been through. I loved the hell out of it. It was so emotional.”
Listening to The Cranberries also helped him cope when, a few years after Bosnia, he made the fateful decision to cut ties with the Children of God (and, in the process, his parents and siblings). “I left in 1996 and it was a shock. It was literally as if you had grown up inside a cardboard box and then, all of a sudden, found yourself inside a mall. I got a minimum wage job in a grocery store. It was the only place where somebody like me – with no background, no education – could find work. I made enough money to buy three albums every week. And one of the bands whose whole discography I got was The Cranberries. I know a lot of people say they’re only a pop version of a lot of the groups bands. They meant a hell of a lot to me.”

Girls have just released their second record, Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Because of Owens’ Children of God background, the album has been widely taken as a commentary on religious extremism. Actually, Owens just liked the way the words look written down. “Growing up in an American hippie cult, we didn’t use phrases like, ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’. We said, ‘I love you brother’, ‘God bless you man’... things like that. It more appealed because it is a grandiose phrase, you know.”
When Girls’ first album came out two years ago, the group – then a duo consisting of Owens and multi-instrumentalist Chet White – garnered attention for honestly discussing their prodigious drug use. In one notorious interview with a UK newspaper – possibly conducted whilst under the influence – the pair held forth at great length on the relative benefits of morphine versus valium and explained they had cut their debut whilst pretty much off their faces on ‘pills’. After the piece was published there was a lot of blow-back. White recalls having to sit down for a “pretty serious” conversation with his family.
“Were we annoyed at how it got blown up? Well there was an irritating element to it,” says Owens. “However, there was also a conscious decision on our part to be entirely honest. We had to stick with that. There was nothing I look at and say, I wish I’d never said that. Yes, there were irritations. But that goes away after a while.”

As to the constant media obsession with his years as a cult member, this has had the unexpected and welcoming effect of putting Owen back in touch with people he had feared out of his life forever.
“I’ve seen over a dozen childhood friends, including my first girlfriend in Sweden,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of people who also left the Children of God. And I’ve become closer to my family. We’re sort of scattered across America and it’s hard to visit. When I tour I can see them all now.”
And though he wouldn’t go back there for anything, he believes his time with the cult brought certain benefits – from an artistic perspective, if nothing else.
“I grew up singing in a choir,” he says. “For me, it’s not a mystery that Ray Charles and Elvis came to music from a religious background. Singing in a spiritual manner, without the ego. It was about communicating something from your soul. The more I end up talking about it, the more I’ve figured that out for myself.”

The album Father, Son, Holy Ghost is out now.