Gill Montgomery has come straight from the mortuary. Her mortuary, to be precise. Some rockers wait tables, others teach music or pick up temp work. The Hot Damn! frontwoman looks after dead people.
“It’s interesting,” she muses, of her day job running a funeral home in South East London. “It’s very hands-on. I think you’re either for it or you’re not.”
Stiffs notwithstanding, The Hot Damn! seem like a band you’d go to the pub with. So that’s what we’re doing right now. Sitting outside at a London boozer on a balmy Monday evening, we’re meeting half the pop-rock quartet responsible for about 90 per cent of the colour in today’s British rock scene. Drummer Josie O’Toole promptly orders the pinkest drink on the menu. Montgomery is ready for a pint.
“You want to be memorable,” she says as talk turns to music. “I look at people like Iggy Pop or Alex Harvey, and they’re not amazing singers, they just have something. They make it interesting and fun. I never wanted to be an Adele. I just wanted to be different, be… not boring. If you’re boring, you’re fucked.”
Six-foot tall and slightly wired in her flip-flops, beachy skirt and hoop earrings, Montgomery has ‘something’. On stage she mixes childlike energy with a Billy Idol snarl. At Hot Damn! rehearsals – typically at 10pm, after everyone’s finished work and made it round the M25 to their base in Maidenhead – she and guitarist Laurie Buchanan, an undertaker, compare notes on the various leaking bodies they’ve handled.
Now, over her third beer and a plate of calamari, Montgomery relives the Iggy Pop concert in Glasgow that tuned her into the power of performance. “He was this seventy-five-year-old man, with a spray tan, running around with his top off and his nipples out, shouting at people. I was like: ‘That’s your job?! That’s amazing!’”
Drawing on a cocktail of bright, riffy rock, 80s pop and commanding vocal harmonies, The Hot Damn! are everything that so many new rock bands aren’t: fun, colourful and uncompromising when it comes to songs, epitomised on their punchy debut album Dancing On The Milky Way.
“To me, a band is a marriage,” reasons tiny, liquorice-haired drummer Josie O’Toole (a band manager by day) between sips of raspberry limoncello spritz – her Busted T-shirt, cap and shorts younger than her actual 38 years.
“A really fucking complicated one because you’re married to three people, and it’s a business. You’re in business with your three wives. And it’s a creative thing as well. It’s a business that is haemorrhaging money, to begin with at least, that you have to do for love, first and foremost.”
You’d struggle to accuse them of doing it for other reasons. They toured the length of the UK on just a handful of singles. They sleep four to a bed in Travelodges. They “almost died” on the M6 when an exploded tyre sent their van rolling out of control down a steep Cumbrian drop (they were found by the RAC six hours later, wrapped in space blankets and drinking mugs of brandy).
One night, opening for Hayseed Dixie, they dealt with a power cut by playing a-capella. “Dixie graciously lent everyone acoustic guitars,” O’Toole remembers, “and I played Gill’s Pot Noodles that she bought for tea.”
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It all began in 2019. Meeting through rockers The Amorettes (Montgomery’s old band) and Tequila Mockingbyrd (O’Toole’s old band), with Buchanan on lead guitar, they initially came together to fulfil touring commitments for those bands, after previous members had quit. This effectively gave them a chance to road-test each other, as bandmates and tour buddies. By 2021, and with bassist Lzi Hayes now on board (estate manager at the V&A by day), they decided to start a fresh project.
“I think we both had moments where we were like: ‘Can I really be fucked starting again?’” O’Toole says. “Cos you put a lot of time and effort into building a band, and we were both in our late thirties at this point. But in a way covid did us a favour, because it gave us a bit of time to take stock, and miss it, and be like: ‘Yeah, we do want to do this.’”
Still, they wanted to do things differently. Exhausted by all the ‘serious’, all-in-black line-ups on the rock scene, they opted for a tie-dye colour palette – plus balloons and inflatable unicorns. It worked. They sold about 10 grand’s worth of merchandise before they’d released a single song.
“It’s about making the biggest impression you possibly can,” O’Toole says. “We’re on fuck-all budget at the moment, but we’re lucky in a way with our image. If we get some shitty party canons from Asda at five pounds a pop, and launch two of them at the end of the show, and they look a bit pathetic, it still works.”
Growing up in rural Lincolnshire, O’Toole loved school but became fixated on rock’n’roll in her mid-teens – inhaling the pop-punk likes of Blink 182 and watching friends play pub gigs.
“That was the biggest inspiration I ever had,” she says, “going to the pub and watching these bands, literally two metres away, playing really bad covers of Rage Against The Machine. I thought: ‘That really looks like fun.’”
Studying Human Sciences at Oxford (chiefly to please her parents), she worked hard, played in a covers band with Tony Blair’s son, graduated and promptly moved to Australia to “discover alcohol” and become a rock drummer, ultimately joining Tequila Mockingbyrd. Right before leaving, though, she met the former PM.
“Tony’s like: ‘What do you want to do now you’ve got your degree?’ I said: ‘I want to start a rock band and tour the world.’ And he was like: ‘Fuck yeah!’ Well, he didn’t say ‘fuck’, but he was nodding with approval.”
Meanwhile in West Lothian, Montgomery was a shy teenager in love with the 60s who found confidence through roles in local pantomimes and plays. She wore flares and Afghan coats to school, stole her dad’s albums and immersed herself in the worlds of Janis Joplin, Manfred Mann, The Kinks and The Beatles.
“I was working at a video rental store when I was eighteen, and I just wanted to save up enough money to buy a decent guitar,” she says. “That was my only goal, and to start a band.”
Around that time she was also following 2000s all-girl rockers The Donnas on tour. With almost no other prominent role models of that kind (i.e. women playing guitar-driven rock), it planted the seed for what became The Amorettes, with whom she played for 10 years.
“Back then, The Donnas were the only option. I don’t want that to just continue, but you’re just like…” She sighs: “I’ve been chipping away at this for twenty years, and we’re still a novelty.”
“But it’s not a novelty,” O’Toole counters. “We’re fifty per cent of the population – it’s not really ‘novel’, is it?”
And yet it’s hard to argue that all-female rock groups aren’t ‘noticed’ in a way that doesn’t happen with men. The fact that ‘female-fronted’ gets deployed like a genre, that to many they’re still interesting simply for being four women in a rock band – a fact of biology that none of them are about to lean on for credibility – is a source of discussion, and some frustration.
“Why is it not just normal?” Montgomery hisses as the last-orders bell rings. “I’m not a ‘female musician’. I’m not in a ‘female-fronted band’, I’m in a fucking band.”
Dancing On The Milk y Way is out now via Fat Earth. The Hot Damn! tour the UK and Europe in November. Dates and tickets are on the Hot Damn! website.
