Tomorrow, The World

Photo by Sonia Melot

Kids do their rites of passage stuff at a much younger age these days. We’re not just talking about things like smoking crack or stabbing strangers for their MP3 player (although that does account for 98 per cent of it). If you’ve been down to Underage Club in Elephant And Castle or Yoof Club in Nottingham or The Strange Place Club in Hertford, you’ll know there’s a whole scene of 12–16-year-old Horrors-lookalikes going crazy to bands their own age like Pull In Emergency or Poppy & The Jezebels. Poppy dress in charity shop gear, sound like a cross between Lush and the Langley Schools Music Project and sing songs with titles Nazi Girls, which plots world domination for the band by the time they’re 14. Teenagers love them, and so would anyone in their 20s if they weren’t too busy hanging around at the back of the venue and worrying that they feel too much like Jonathan King to enjoy it properly. Vice: What made you start the band? Dom: We wanted to feel special, like super heroes. Amber: Basically, we wanted an escape from school. Is school a problem? Poppy: It’s hard keeping up with course work. And all our gigs have to be at weekends or during school holidays! It’s the Fiction Issue—what sort of stuff do you read? Dom: I like poetry more than novels. My favourites are Sylvia Plath and Pablo Neruda but my all time favourite poem is “Colours” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Mollie: My favourite book is Sugar Rush by Julie Burchill. Poppy: I like that too. It’s not well written, bit of a collection of clichés, but the characters remind me of my friends and what they do. Conquering the world. Is that fact or fiction? Poppy: That’s just our joke, like when The Ramones sing, “Today your love, tomorrow the world”. It’s just cartoon images. Seriously, it looks like we’ll have to wait till we’re at least 15 and 16. What’s the worst thing about playing over 18 venues? Mollie: Drunken men either trying to hit on you or being loud and patronising. We had a bad time recently in a big venue in the midlands where the bouncers still wear shiny jackets and earphones. No one talked to us or smiled. It was obvious that they were uncomfortable with us even being there because we’re young and probably cos we’re girls. What did you do? Mollie: We raided the headliner’s rider while they were on. Nobody’s going to stop us. TIM JONZE