A year ago a new band hit the scene: five hot young girls in brightly colored tights and short shorts, laughing and joking with the crowd as they pumped out raw, catchy, pop-electro.
Since then, Go Chic has lost a couple of members, gained a male drummer, and graduated to silver tutus and a coveted place as one of Nike’s 10 top Taiwanese bands for the company’s upcoming party on May 23. They play three other shows this month — tonight at Underworld (地下社會), May 29 at The Wall (這牆) with a DJ set by Scottish dance-punk act Shitdisco, and May 31 at Riverbash in Pinglin (坪林).
“Honestly, I think we get so much attention because we’re all girls,” said Go Chic’s lead singer Ariel Zheng (鄭思齊). “People think that if you want to get the upper hand you have to be more like a guy, but we’re proud of showing what girls are: We’re sexy, we flirt with the crowd.”
They’ve recently added a male band member to the group, Winston Lee (李昀璁), as it was “hard to find a girl drummer.” They made him wear a wig “because everyone advertises us as a girl band,” Zheng said, laughing.
At 21, she said they feel old because they see people who are only 16 starting bands. Both she and bassist Sarah Wen (溫一珊) credit synthesizer and guitar player Sonia Lai (賴思勻) as the leader of the band. All three graduated from the same high school and hooked up last year around Spring Scream.
While in a music club in school, everyone had to choose an instrument. Though quite reticent, Wen pipes up: “I saw [that] everyone who plays bass is hot and sexy and really tall and I thought maybe [if I played bass] I’d become hot and sexy and tall.”
“People still don’t know girls could play instruments,” Zheng added. The other girls in her band make fun of her because she is “only the singer.” “She’s not really important,” said Wen, though Zheng does come up with the lyrics, most of which are “about girls, partying, and how we don’t care,” according to Zheng.
She tries to avoid singing about anything with “depth” as that is “a bit too pretentious.”
“We get up there and we want to be cool, we want people to love us,” Zheng said. “But in the end it all comes down to the music.”
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