Back in the ’90s, the media made a big deal out of the fact that L7 were an all-female band, as though such a fact was worthy of incredulity.
The fact is, L7 were more interested in rocking out than gender politics – well, that and shaking up the status quo.
For instance, when a Glastonbury crowd turned mean while the band was tied up with tech difficulties, Donita Sparks, vocalist, songwriter, guitarist and leader of the pack rummaged in her nickers, pulled out a used tampon and chucked it in the crowd with the war cry, “Eat my used tampon, fuckers”. It’s safe to say then that Sparks and co. were a wild bunch, making their ‘break-up’ in 2001 a real cause for fans to mourn: who was gonna fly the subversive flag with such flair and nastiness?
Thankfully, in 2014, egged on by Facebook fans, L7 decided to give it another whirl. Sparks led the fray, tentatively reaching out to the others. “Back when the band was originally together, I remember thinking, ‘If anybody quits, it’s over; we’re not doing a reunion show’,” she says. “I think as a younger person I found reunions to be distasteful. Now so many have happened that I’ve enjoyed seeing them. That kind of changed my mind a little bit.
“It was like, ‘Well, shit, if people want to see us I’ll see how everybody feels.’ But if there was anybody who wasn’t into it, it wouldn’t have happened. It was nothing I was pining for – I was not pining for L7 to be doing shows. I think that some bands when they break up, there are band members who really have their fingers crossed for years that they’ll get to go another round, but I wasn’t like that.”
Obviously, the band members did eventually agree to give it another go, even if it took guitarist Suzi Gardner six months to come around to the idea. Since then, the band has hit the road extensively, touring old material and selling out shows all over the joint. Sparks says that the reception to the reformation has been even bigger than she expected, both from audiences and within the group itself.
“I wasn’t sure how we were all going to get along, as far as the band went,” she reflects. “But because we’re not promoting a record, we’re not in a bus for two months: we’re just doing three weeks here, three weeks there, a couple of long weekend in the United States. We like each other, we have a blast with each other in smaller doses. We’re adults, you know? You can only be in a box on wheels for so many days with the same people before things start getting on your nerves, right?”
Sparks says that there was no way the band could have reformed sooner: a series of setbacks including health problems and ageing parents requiring care took up its collective attention span for the better part of a decade elapsed. “Interviewers have been saying to me, ‘So the last time you were in Australia was 20 years ago,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, my god’,” Sparks says, laughing. “It is crazy how time does fly. I think that does happen as you get older anyway. When you’re younger you can remember what you were doing every year. I know for me, when L7 was together, I know what my timeline is by my hairdos and what record we were working on or touring. But these last 19 years, who fucken’ knows?”
Ultimately, financial strife was cited as the major cause for the band’s demise. L7 was dropped by its label and attendance at their gigs started to wane as plastic pop nudged grunge out of the way. Had money not been an issue would the band have stayed together? “I would say that if we’d had a bit more money and a support team, we could have kept going,” Sparks muses.
“I don’t think we ever became a shitty band or were shitty songwriters. I like all of our records. Any other band with the support system could have kept going and gone on to great records. It was very disappointing. We felt very beat down as a band and it was very painful and then the split-up of our friendships became even more painful. People fight when there’s no money, right? It’s like a marriage: if you don’t have money, shit gets fucken’ weird.”
Eventually, the conversation returns to the hell-raising. Sparks has always said that she wanted to infiltrate the mainstream media: too many opportunities for mischief and mayhem would have been missed if they’d stayed underground. “As a child I saw John Lennon and Yoko Ono and David Bowie on afternoon talk shows and shit, these very pedestrian, suburban television shows.
“I just thought it was the coolest fucken’ thing to see Bowie – and I’m not talking about ’80s Bowie, I’m taking about ’70s Bowie, the Thin White Duke – on The Dinah Shore Show. It was like, ‘Oh my god, so fucking subversive’. Even as a kid I knew that – it blew my mind. So the aim with us – it wasn’t even in a political sense so much as in a cultural sense – was to blow some kids’ minds by seeing us on TV getting weird.”
L7 perform at the Metro Theatre on Saturday October 15.
