Wolf Alice shrugs off growing pains, shoots for the moon
As Clint Eastwood once opined, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Londoner Ellie Rowsell learned hers early on, back when she first stepped in front of a crowd at a local singer/songwriter competition—and tanked. “I did one song, but my guitar playing was just incredibly poor at the time,” sighs the tall, angular brunette, kicking back before a recent soundcheck with her much-buzzed-about quartet Wolf Alice. Its scruffy punk-grunge debut, My Love Is Cool, streets this month. “So, I thought, ‘I’ve got to find a guitarist to help me.’ And I didn’t really have the confidence to ask anyone I knew, so I decided to go one of those guitar forums.”
That’s where the then-teenage vocalist found edgy axeman Joff Oddie, who had just moved to her city for college. Choosing the moniker Wolf Alice from an Angela Carter short story, the initially acoustic duo began touring Britain’s “toilet circuit,” sniffs Rowsell, now 22. “Tiny rooms in tiny pubs on open-mic nights, playing to people who are just chatting and drinking,” she says. Again, she recognized her problem and fixed it: “We thought, ‘Maybe if we play louder, people will listen to us,’ so we went electric.” And then added drummer Joel Amey and bassist Theo Ellis, for extra oomph.
Now Rowsell has matured so swiftly, she views with a certain detachment energetic Cool cuts like “Bros,” “Fluffy” and kickoff single “Giant Peach,” a Roald Dahl-inspired celebration of her surreal life in London. “The stuff I wrote from 15 to 19? Well, that’s when your brain is the craziest, the most introverted, so the tiniest thought becomes immense,” she says. “But I feel like I’m changing now, really finding my feet as a songwriter.”
Ultimately, Rowsell proudly accepts her limitations. “I never gave up—I always thought, ‘One day I’m going to get the confidence to do this,’” she says. “I just didn’t get that confidence until I was 20!”
—Tom Lanham
