HOLLY GOLIGHTLY’S whole career is a mistake. “It was totally unintentional,” admits the British singer/songwriter by phone, while searching for a decent cup of coffee in Mississippi. “The first EP I did was a total fluke.”
What happened was that, in 1995, Golightly was fooling around in a recording studio with her friend Mick Hampshire, of ’80s garage-rock revival leaders Thee Milkshakes, and the results got accidentally tacked on to end of a tape that was being shipped off to be pressed.
“That reel got sent off to Vinyl Japan, and my thing was still on it, it never got edited off,” says Golightly. “The guy at Vinyl Japan said, ‘There’s this thing on the end of it, what is it?’ They said, ‘Oh sorry, you weren’t meant to get that.’ And he said, ‘No, I want to put it out.'”
Thus was born Golightly’s solo career. As she sees it, the only way to go was up.
“It’s come a long way since then—now it’s actually intentional,” she says. “Now I mean to do it.”
After a slew of singles and albums that makes Madlib look lazy, Golightly has most recently teamed with Lawyer Dave, who performs under the moniker “the Brokeoffs” and has played bass on her American tours for years. The duo come to the Blank Club on Friday.
Their first album together, You Can’t Buy a Gun When You’re Crying, was a raw slice of dusty, spooky country that would have fit in as comfortably on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack as it would next to Golightly’s past albums of bluesy roots-rock.
It was also—what a surprise—a complete accident.
“Originally we were just going to go out and play some shows as a duo, it was a bit of a silly idea. It was going to be more for our entertainment than anything else. And now look what’s happened,” she says.
Their newest album, Medicine County, is more polished, and perhaps more in line with what fans expect from the woman Spin magazine called “the U.K. garage-rock queen.”
“What we did with this one was picked more raucous songs for some reason. There’s not so many ballady songs on it,” she says. “It’s a bit more spiky.” Though she’s always had a country streak, Golightly’s reputation stems from her early days fronting Thee Headcoatees, a retro girl-group that was one of the projects put together by U.K. artist and one-man music factory Billy Childish. As probably doesn’t need to be stated at this point, it was unplanned. Her passion was for training horses, and she had absolutely no intention of having a music career.
“I went into that tongue and cheek, the same way I do everything, really,” she says.
Thee Headcoatees did some outrageous stuff, and it seems like you’d have to have a lot of guts to get up onstage and sing a song like “Come Into My Mouth.”
“You do, but you don’t, because you’re a bunch of people doing it together. There are a lot of people to hide behind in a seven-piece band,” says Golightly. In fact, it took her quite a while to be comfortable onstage.
“When I first started playing live, I was quite shy,” she says. “I was quite self-conscious, because I wasn’t really that good at it. I hadn’t really found what I was good at, in terms of playing and singing at the same time and things like that. Because we didn’t do that in Thee Headcoatees, we just had to sing and dance around, really, and play percussion and mess about generally. When it was just me with my band, I was much more aware that I had to hold it together. So I got really practiced at it, but I really missed there being other people to sing with. Really missed it.”
One of the things Golightly has carried over from her days with Childish is a talent for great cover songs. Thee Headcoatees bashed out fun versions of songs like the Sonics’ “Strychnine,” the Ramones’ “Swallow My Pride” and Plastic Bertrand’s “Ca Plane Pour Moi.” Golightly sometimes reaches back for rare soul and R&B songs, and though she claims to have no working knowledge of contemporary music, she does a fantastic cover of Pavement’s “Box Elder.”
“I think that song was put on a mixtape for me by somebody. It’s not like I’m particularly familiar with their other work. I just liked that song because it sounded like a Buzzcocks song, and I thought it ought to sound more like a Buzzcocks song, so that’s how we did it,” she says. “It’s quite a funny song. I don’t really know what it’s about, I don’t know what they’re talking about. But does anybody know what they’re talking about?”
Who knows what Golightly’s next 287 albums will sound like, but one thing’s for sure: she’s not sweating it.
“It’s only music,” she says. “How badly wrong can it go? Nobody’s going to die if you play the wrong chord.”
HOLLY GOLIGHTLY AND THE BROKEOFFS perform Friday (April 16) at 9pm at the Blank Club, 44 S. Almaden Ave., San Jose. Tickets are $10. (408.29.BLANK)
