Going Underground

A dreary Wednesday in Portsmouth and, for the third time this week, Charlotte Cooper is fielding questions about her personal life.
What’s it like, the journalist asks, being in a band with your boyfriend? Do you row constantly? Holed-up on a tour bus, how long will it be before you begin to secretly loathe one another? Who’s the hot-head and who’s the peace-maker?
From the other end of the phone line, you sense Cooper is smiling wryly and, perhaps, rolling her eyes.
For The Subways’ bassist, bare-faced inquiries about her relationship with the group’s guitarist, Billy Lunn, are rapidly becoming part of the daily regime
Her solution, simple yet efficient, is to politely say nothing at all. Actually, that’s not exactly true. She will quite cheerfully proclaim herself astonished that anyone should care a fig about what she and Lunn get up to off-stage. People these days – haven’t they got better things to think about?
“We didn’t really expect all the attention and sometimes it can be quite amusing,” says Cooper, who sounds posher than you might expect, her accent devoid of any trace of estuary.
“It is weird to see yourself written about in that way,” she elaborates. “It baffles me why anyone would want to know. We just stay quiet about the whole thing and let journalists keep on guessing.”
Cooper looks and dresses like an indie-rock barbie doll and, in Britain, has become an alternative pin-up. Indie boys, it is reported, turn weak-kneed for her big-eyed/big haired shtick, which is two parts Courtney Love, one part unattainable girl-next-door.
If she sounds, at times, a little breathless, this is no surprise. The story of The Subways, pliers of fizzy punk-pop, is one of rampant success, achieved in the space of several months.
The trio, from a small town in Essex, have, since the start of the year, progressed from the indie-toilet circuit to support slots with Oasis and Green Day (Lunn and drummer Josh Morgan are half brothers: the former took his mother’s name for fear of being confused with The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan).
From the outset, it was the presence of diminutive indie-chick Cooper that got The Subways noticed – something that continues to irritate deeply.
“It’s strange that people should make such a big thing of the fact I’m a girl,” she fumes. “I’ve always just seen myself as another member of the band. It took me some time to realise that people had latched onto the fact that I was a woman.”
Female musicians face particular pressures, though Cooper is reluctant to dwell on the fact. On stage and in video shoots, there is an expectation of glamour. Nobody cares if Lunn and Morgan turn up for a gig looking crap – Charlotte, it is presumed, will at all times be immaculate.
“That’s a right pain in the arse. I don’t want to be seen as eye-candy. I’m a musician. So long as I play my parts right, who cares what the hell I look like? I mean, come on, this is 2005.”
Nor are women permitted to devote themselves to rock’s tradition of excess. Kurt Cobain’s smack habit was seen as a tortured plea for release. When Justine Frischmann took up the needle, we pitied her as a tragic junkie.
This Cooper agrees, is absurd and unfair but not especially relevant to her. She isn’t given to swigging vodka before a show and it doesn’t trouble her if a proportion of the audience (The Subways’ fan-base comprises overwhelmingly of sweaty blokes) have come to ogle the bassist.
“My attitude is to let it go over my head. We focus on being in a band and if anyone else thinks it’s a big deal that I’m a woman, that’s for them to worry about.”
Nevertheless, Cooper confesses to having felt a shiver of pride when someone – a journalist, probably – pointed out that she belongs to a short, but exalted, tradition of female bass players.
“Well, there’s Kim Deal (Pixies) and Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth) and not many others,” she enthuses. “They were really cool and I love those bands. So it’s kind of great following in their footsteps. For some reason, not many woman want to play guitar or bass in a band, which has always struck me as odd. We’re as talented as men, so why not?”