The latest band touring through Cambodia is Wild Flowers, an indie guitar-bass-drums trio from Portugal. They’re currently playing shows in Thailand, and will descend on Siem Reap next Wednesday, thence to Phnom Penh for Thursday and Friday before heading to Ho Chi Minh City for one last show. LengPleng tracked down Jessica (guitar/vocals), Natasha (bass/vocals) and Joe (drums) in Bangkok this week to conduct a video interview.
Natasha began by explaining: “This is where we’re staying. It looks like a boarding school dormitory. There’s no chairs, that’s why we’re all sitting on the bed, it’s not some weird band thing.
LP: What’s the origin myth for Wild Flowers?
Natasha: This band has only been going for just a year, year and a half. We’re all living in Portugal for our various reasons, working on our own music projects. My husband Paul, who I’d been playing music with, passed away. Then I met Jessica and we thought it would be cool to start an all-girl band, so we needed a drummer. I was working with Joe in another project, his original band, where he was playing guitar, I didn’t know he could play drums, but it turns out drums is his first instrument. Joe very graciously said he would keep the seat hot until we found a girl drummer, but it quickly became obvious that Joe was a Wild Flower and we had to keep him. The name comes from wild flowers growing up where you least expect them, in the bleakest of circumstances, and thriving. And rock’n’roll has saved all of our souls.
Jessica: I’m Portuguese, but not by birth. My parents moved to the USA where my sister and I were born, and I was the first in the family to go back to Portugal. All of the band individually ended up in Portugal for our own reasons, and I think when we met we were all going through a rough time in our own lives. Joe was going through a divorce, I was generally lost. The timing of it all felt very right.
LP: With your many projects going on, why is this band that is touring?
Joe: The personalities of the three of us work well together. Natasha and I are able to travel together as a little unit, and then we can bring Jess in. We’re all easy going, easy to travel with, and always want to do fun stuff.
Jessica: I think a lot of it has to do with – given the backgrounds of Joe and myself – that we’ve been in touring bands for all our music careers.
Joe: Most of our adult lives.
Jessica: So we have that knowledge of dos and don’ts, as far as trying to take it to the next level. And now Natasha has become a booking agent overnight.
Natasha: The music and the audience interaction, the response of the audience, it’s just a joyful thing. You’ll see when we play. It’s just the combination of people, it’s interesting for people to watch I think.
LP: Who does the writing?
Joe: it’s definitely a blending of the three. Jessica is the main songwriter, she brings the most to the table, then Natasha has been writing songs over the past few years, and I contribute whatever I contribute. I’m just the drummer.
Jessica: He’s so much more than that. The very first Wild Flowers song was a collaboration between Natasha and I. She had some lyrics, and the melody kind of wrote itself. It’s a song we still play, called Just One More, dedicated to Paul. So he’s kind of a fourth member.
Natasha: The gig that we’re playing at Copacabana in Phnom Penh on the 25th of January – on that day it will be exactly two years since he died. He told me to keep playing music but I don’t think he expected that it would take me to Asia. He’s on my shoulder, he’s along for the ride.
LP: What other touring have you done thus far?
Natasha: We toured the UK last year, which was like a homecoming for me, going back to show my friends and family that it’s okay, life goes on. My three stepsons all play music, and for a couple of gigs they formed a tribute band playing their dad’s music from his old band. It was a really special time, going back with a new chapter. We managed to book some interesting venues.
Joe: Nine shows in all I think.
Jessica: We met a lot of Natasha’s family and friends – and old boyfriends. We’ve been a band for such a short time – this is our third tour already. The first one we went to the south of Portugal, an area called Algarve. We just packed a van and drove down there.
Natasha: That was proof of concept. Joe has done a lot of DIY touring but I had no experience and I didn’t know this was possible. But when he said let’s go on a tour to Algarve it happened, just like that.
Jessica: At the time I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to put into this band, I didn’t see the big picture yet. Joe said let me prove it to you. We booked the tour, and we did it. And now here we are.
Joe: All our touring has been totally DIY. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but we’ve managed to make it this far. It’s the only way I know how to network, just start talking with people, and people who know people, and eventually you talk to the right person. And the people you meet along the way – we’re looking forward to playing at The Noise House in Bangkok, and then Fatty’s, we already played their open mic one night. Like finds like. If you do this long enough you find the right group of people and it all seems to work out.
Jessica: Which is not to say that we’re not interested in having someone else do all this work for us. We’re trying to prove that a booking agent would want to get on board with what we already have developed. This is just the tip of the iceberg, the kind of shows we could play. For now this is great.
Natasha: Apart from sharing bedrooms.
Jessica: We’d like to be able to fly with instruments. For this tour we’re relying on the kindness of strangers.
LP: Why Southeast Asia?
Natasha: The honest truth is Joe hates Christmas, and we wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t Christian. None of us had been to this part of the world before, and we wanted to, so why not?
Jessica: Joe found the Phangan Rock Festival on Koh Phangan and applied for it, and we got in. So okay, we have to build a tour around that. But most of all it was a part of the world that we wanted to go to.
Natasha: We all like Thai food and now Cambodian food. Joe and I had a taste while were at the Fish Island festival over new year, so I think Cambodia is going to be a highlight of our trip. The soul of the people, the smiles of the children, the joy of the music is just inspiring.
LP: Where can we sample your music in advance?
Jessica: We have a self-titled EP that we recorded in Portugal with a friend of ours, Nelson Rodrigues. You can find all the links at wildflowerspt.com – Spotify and YouTube and Bandcamp pages – we love Bandcamp Fridays.
Natasha: We have some merchandise with us. If it’s all sold by the time we get to you then we’ve done well.
Wild Flowers are playing on Wednesday 24 at the Laundry Bar in Siem Reap, then in Phnom Penh at Copacabana on Thursday 25 and Oscar’s on the Corner on Friday 26.