Interview: She Drew The Gun
13th March 2019
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The National Student speaks to Louisa Roach from She Drew The Gun in the middle of their headline tour of the UK. Originating from Wirral, on the opposite side of the River Mersey to Liverpool, she’s looking forward to playing the 6music festival, which takes place in the city at the end of the month.
spoken word I guess in recent years, Kate Tempest and artists like Toria Garbutt; I listen to that".
She Drew The Gun are taking fellow associates of the Liverpool scene, Man And The Echo with them on tour. Louisa describes the support band as similarly political in approach with musical influences from Talking Heads.
The lifestyle of a touring musician, however, was not the career path Louisa originally envisaged and she discusses figures and moments that motivated her to become a songwriter for a living comparatively late in life: “I’ve always loved music and there are certain things that I remember that really inspired me to pursue it, one of them is when I heard ‘Working Class Hero’ [John Lennon] for the first time". Lousia also mentions Malvina Reynolds who "was a folk singer who decided to pursue music in her 50s [...] she became a protest singer. I’ve just decided I don’t care what age I am, I’m just going to do it.”
This naturally leads the conversation towards what Louisa did before she got involved in music professionally with She Drew The Gun:
austerity is a tool; it’s not a necessity, it’s a political choice. I think you’ve got to resist the narrative that comes out of the media […] I think the media is a massive part of the problem. It’s too easy not to care and to kind of be a bit like, ‘Well as long as I’m all right, it doesn’t matter about anyone else’.
Louisa adds that, for her, resistance is essentially about “not just going along with the flow of the information you receive, but stepping out of that and saying – what’s going on?”
She Drew The Gun are on tour across the UK. Their latest album Revolution of Mind is out now on Skeleton Key Records.

Image by Paul Hudson via Flickr
Louisa explains how the recording process of her latest album Revolution of Mind differed from 2016’s Memories from Another Future and how the songs evolved from rough, home recordings rather than going into the studio and building the tracks from scratch. 2018’s record “was quite different from the first one. [With Memories] I met James Skelly from The Coral […] we started writing together and then that turned into the first album. We’d record the guitar and vocal and build the track around what I had. This time I made demos before we went into the studio”. Both She Drew The Gun studio albums incorporate spoken word and spoken word influenced lyricism. This is also an element the band weaves into live sets. Louisa delves into some of her inspirations from performance poetry and the world of hip-hop: “I think 2 Pac would probably be my favourite rapper from back in the day […] And then with- Article continues below...
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