Sisters in bands can set alarm bells ringing – The Corrs, Heart… fortunately Fife duo The Twistettes make the kind of hooky tunes and full sound which usually requires a band at least twice the size. With that in mind, we spoke to one half of the sisters D’arc…

Who?

Jo D’arc – bass, lead vocals, distortion
Nicky D’arc – drums, backing vocals, noise

When?

We’ve been playing together for years in various incarnations. Being sisters it’s been a natural thing for us to come together to play music. Previous to the Twistettes we played in a couple of other bands…other musicians have come and gone but we’ve just kept going. We have had some time off… sometimes the music scene can be grinding and as much as creating music is a beautiful thing with many wonderful and exciting people involved…there is another side that can be tiring, fake and boring after a while. This time round we’ve become involved with such a great bunch of people that we’ve hardly felt this though. We’re really grateful for this!

Where?

We formed in Dunfermline (both being Fife lassies originally) and spent the first few years of our time gigging in local youth clubs across fife. We were only wee but we did do the occasional sneaky pub gig. As we got older we gigged across the country…most of the time to about 3 people…we had some serious energy just to keep going regardless! I think we knew we were just learning and really just needed to keep working hard and we’d get there. Nicky lived in Glasgow for a few years when we were in one of our previous band and I live there currently so we’ve always had a good link with the scene there as well as in Fife. When we decided to get back to playing some music we were really influenced by the Glasgow scene at the time. We saw Amazing Snakeheads, Girobabies and Hector Bizerk all in the space of a couple of weeks and were blown away by them all. All for different reasons but they really inspired us to get back involved. I’d been DJ’ing for a while and was doing a set at Audio Soup festival when we stumbling upon Hector Bizerk playing in a really wee tent. It was just Louie and Audrey in the band at that point but they were just outstanding. We just thought…there are only 2 of them…maybe we can do that as well! And so it began…

What?

We make loud, driving, DIY, alt-rock, punk, riot grrrl noise with a pop-psychobilly twist. Our debut album is called Jilt the Jive and is out now to stream and buy from our bandcamp page…

Why?

Ach, we would love to be able to do music for a living but not anything more ridiculous than that. I know a couple of people in bands that manage this…that’s the dream! Not having to do a day job so you can spend all your time on music while being able to nip to the pub for a pint without anyone knowing who you are. We’re both pretty reclusive and need our time to ourselves so we‘re definitely not cut out for the crazy game though. So much as it’s a cliché we really do just seem to need to keep doing it. We’ve had our times when we thought we’d had enough but always ended up being drawn back to playing music again.

You can stream the album at thetwistettes.bandcamp.com