BOSSY Love make just the sort of sound you might expect of a band with that name, only better.
Vocalist Amandah Wilkinson and producer John Baillie Jr make music that’s strident, sensual and consistently satisfying. Building a fanbase through energetic festival appearances and choice support slots with the likes of Kelis, their marriage of teasing r’n’b and frothy electronics originates at Dundee’s Fat Sams in 2008.
Back then, Wilkinson’s band Operator Please was touring the UK tour with The Futureheads. Support in Dundee was Danananaykroyd, a Glasgow sixpiece whose self-dubbed “fight pop” was as memorable as their tongue-twister name.
“We clicked immediately,” says Wilkinson, who is soon to leave her Glasgow base for a visit to family in Queensland’s Gold Coast.
“I remember thinking: ‘This person HAS to be my best friend’.”
The pair kept in touch, their relationship buoyed when Danananaykroyd went out to Australia to play with Operator Please, a bunch of teen punks described at the time by The Guardian as “the biggest thing to come out of Australia in years”.
“Throughout that whole time, we were always making music online together,” says Wilkinson of Baillie Jr. “I would record the vocals in my cupboard at home and send them back to him.”
A few years later, Wilkinson was finding she was leaving behind the spiky guitar sound of Operator Please for a more poppier, beats-driven sound informed by her love of hip hop and Eurythmics, a band whose videos she would watch every night as a schoolgirl.
The early 2010s wasn’t the right time for sassy, female-fronted pop, she says. Not in Australia, anyway.
“When I started Bossy Love over there, pop was almost a dirty word in Australia,” says Wilkinson.
The weekend before The National speaks with the songwriter, the band – now a trio with the addition of Ollie Cox on keys – played MacArts in Galashiels.
Wilkinson is impressed by the small team there striving to bring top names to the Borders, a place traditionally ignored on tour schedules.
“They are doing an amazing job,” she says. “Where I lived in Australia, it was very rural and so hard to get gigs as a musician. I thought, maybe I should get away from it and see the world, maybe do a bit of growing up.”
She adds: “I’ve been away for six years now and I haven’t really looked back.”
The four songs on Whiplash, their first EP, were based on demos Wilkinson cut not long after she moved to the UK.
As well as following up last year’s online mixtape Holidates with finesse, it showcases the duo’s particular chemistry – not least on lead track Up All Over Me where synths slither and boom around Wilkinson’s badass, self-assured melodies.
If her earlier songs were about “moving to somewhere new and not knowing anybody and feeling disconnected and alone”, Bossy Love’s new EP is about “breaking free from the everyday and chasing your dreams”.
“I realise now that I ran away from a lot of stuff in Australia and this EP is me finally feeling liberated enough to let some of that go,” Wilkinson continues.
Another single is imminent, she says, with an album set for release next year.
She and Baillie Jr have a stash of Bossy Love songs, the result of their years of collaborative work together – first online, and now in person at their self-built studio in Glasgow where they work five days a week.
“We have a good system going,” Wilkinson says. “We work in very different languages that hypothetically shouldn’t work. I leave him to do his production work as I very much get frustrated with technology and computers. But somehow John turns what I give him into something pretty much exactly what I wanted, like he has a connection in my brain.”
The creative partnership has helped her develop into an artist she feels is truer, more direct.
“I have really found my voice with Bossy Love,” says Wilkinson. “The band I was in was a guitar band and the industry at the time was such a male-driven area. I found I really shied away from showing my vulnerable side and giving myself permission to be obvious in my lyrics and let people in.”
She continues: “Until then, a lot of my lyrics were tied up in metaphor – it was me not having reached that level of maturity and confidence. With John’s encouragement I realised that I could do that. It let me know that I could open up and say what I wanted to say.”
Wilkinson is doubly glad she moved to Glasgow, where Bossy Love recently played a sold-out show with Free Love, the should-be-huge duo formerly known as Happy Meals.
In July, Bossy Love will play the 10th anniversary of the Kelburn Garden Party alongside Nitewave, SAY nominee Kobe Onyame and Optimo’s JD Twitch and other acclaimed Glasgow musicians and DJs.
“I feel very grateful to be in Glasgow right now,” Wilkinson says. “I toured a lot in my last band when I was younger. I remember touring the UK and there was a feeling that, as soon as we got over that border, that the shows were going to be good.
“I knew the crowd was going to have fun and let their hair down. I feel that here there is none of that pretentious crap you get in other places. It’s very face value here and I appreciate that.”
July 5 to 7, Kelburn Garden Party, Kelburn Castle, Near Fairlie
www.kelburngardenparty.com
www.bossylove.com
The Whiplash EP is out now
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