Amy Love and Georgia South
(Picture: Corinne Cumming)Backstage at the Le Transbordeur concert hall in Lyon, France, Nova Twins have just finished a final soundcheck ahead of their next live show. The heavy alt-rockers, made up of childhood friends Amy Love and Georgia South, are in the middle of a headline tour and are busy making a name for themselves as one of the most unique – and loudest – alternative acts on the UK scene.
While they’re now the rock act of the moment, when the duo kicked off in 2014, they were largely ignored by a music industry unable to understand why two mixed race women wanted to make genre-defying rock music that fused punk, metal, hardcore, rap and grime. “We had a lot of rejection”, Love recalls of the time. “The industry was like ‘What is this? Where do we put this band? When we showed up to festivals, we’d be the only women and people of colour on those bills.”
Despite a loyal, growing fan base, the music industry was slow to catch up. The pair were frequently encouraged by record label A&Rs to ditch rock and instead pursue a career in pop, soul or R&B – or music made by “women like them” South recalls. “It was very confusing to us because we had a vision of where we wanted to go,” she says of these “disheartening” early setbacks. The pair had been making music since their teens and knew exactly what kind of sound they wanted to create.
The pair bonded over an eclectic mix of music – from jazz to hip-hop, rave to metal. “We could be listening to Melody Gardot, Gregory Porter, Missy Elliott, The Prodigy,” South smiles, recalling their teenage years warmly. Love says meeting South and moving away from her home in Essex to London (where South grew up) was life changing. “I was one of the only people of colour at my school. Moving to London was like ‘Wow’. I was 16 and it was such an eye-opener in terms of music, culture, everything.”
Love says their backgrounds were responsible for their desire to connect different genres and cultural touchstones. “I’m half Iranian, half Nigerian. Georgia’s Jamaican English with Australian roots,” Love begins. “We always said having mixed backgrounds played a really big part in that because growing up, it was never that we had to be one or the other – it was always freedom,” she says, explaining this is why they recoiled when the music industry tried to stereotype or pigeonhole them musically.
“I think very early on, Georgia and I had a conversation where we said let’s just make the music we want to make,” Love says. “We didn’t want to conform to anything – we said f*** that, let’s just do it on our own terms. We discovered our own self-belief and stopped letting anyone sway that in any other direction. The only way we could survive was by being like ‘Okay then, f*** you, we’re carrying on anyway’. So we did just that.”
That fearlessness paid off, with the duo’s acclaimed debut album Who Are the Girls? earning them critical acclaim and a legion of new fans – including some famous ones too, like Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello and Bring Me The Horizon, the latter with whom they collaborated recently. Bands as varied as Wolf Alice, Sleaford Mods, Enter Shikari and Yungblud have all invited them to be tour supports, showing just how many different fan-bases their music can reach. Earlier this year they got two nominations at the NME Awards, for Best UK Band and Best Band in the World. Rock finally seems to have caught up too, with more willingness to take a chance on bands doing something genuinely new and exciting with the genre.
“The only reason people were saying rock was dead because it wasn’t as inclusive, as diversified, so it was getting the same, stale repetitive stuff,” Love says of the scene that was rolling out similar headliners at festivals year after year. “Rock isn’t dead. There are so many women driving it forward now and it’s the freshest sounding stuff we’ve heard in f***ing years... We played our hearts out on those stages every time: we left an impression that rock doesn’t have to be for the boys. Now, it’s finally starting to push through.”
The duo performed early gigs around the punk circuit in London wearing eye-catching homemade outfits that stood out aesthetically as much as their music. Today, Love is wearing a leopard print hat, bright neon green necklace and matching coat, plus bright-blue-and-white striped trousers. South’s mass of neon red curls tumble over her bright bee-like yellow and black faux fur coat. While their style was meant to mirror their music (“It was about us thinking, what can we wear to feel like the music?” South says), at first it was seen as another way for them to be excluded: they weren’t seen as serious musicians despite writing their own songs and playing instruments, South on bass, Love on guitar.
“They were like, ‘You need to dress in black!’” Love says. “People would assume we would be more pop or not as serious just because we wanted to wear colourful outfits.” They faced questions daily about their looks that their male counterparts did not, “Men can wear bright coloured clothes and it’s totally fine,” South says. “If you’re a woman, they assume we don’t play our instruments just because we dress a certain way.” Love continues: “David Bowie wouldn’t have ever been told that, nor Elton John, The New York Dolls, nor Prince.”
New album Supernova is filled with plenty of similarly empowering messages for women, like on fiery gothic standout ‘K.M.B.’ where the patriarchy gets a reckoning and electro-anthem Cleopatra – a bold call to action that sees Love declare she’s a “boss bitch”, a “warrior” and a “fighter”. Puzzles too sees them smash taboos on a track where women talk about enjoying sex. “We just thought why not make a heavy sexy song? It’s about not shaming other people,” Love says of the track. “If we cover up, people are like ‘Oh, you’re good girls’ and we were both like ‘Hang on a minute!’ If we want to wear a bralette or a skirt or anything then we will. If we want to talk about sex, then we will do that too!”
Cleopatra was written under lockdown after the Black Lives Matter protests. The song, like so many on the album, interrogates race alongside gender, with the pair saying that the protests made them challenge discriminatory behaviours more determinedly. Opening track Antagonist is perhaps the most vociferous and sees Love declare “I’m feeling like a riot / If it’s a cure to the cause” over South’s thundering bass.
“The Black Lives Matter [protests] were a big part of these [songs],” Love says. “It was also just us opening a big can of worms having many discoveries too. Some of the things that we didn’t even notice like micro-aggressions – things we’ve always been told are just the way the world is, we started to look at them and go: ‘Hang on, that’s not okay.’ You do have to call it out. People used to look at us and be like ‘They’re moaning, they’re being angry black women’”, she explains, saying whenever they would challenge the status quo, they were met with such oppositional, prejudiced comments. “Black Lives Matter made people take things like this a lot more seriously.”
The pair were buoyed by the movement and used their social media platform to call out the MOBO awards for not having an alternative/rock category for Black artists. In an open letter, they argued that the inclusion of such a category would “widen the representation that ourselves and so many others didn’t have growing up.” The MOBOs responded and the pair reveal they met with the founder of the awards, Kanya King, to discuss the issue more. “It was such an empowering talk”, Love says. “We’re still in talks and hopefully things will change”, she smiles.
As well as re-writing the rules of rock, the pair are also firmly set on being change-makers too, working to ensure that the music industry is a more open and diverse place than the one they arrived at, via their ‘Voices for the Unheard’ platform. It’s a space to showcase marginalised alternative talent online – several of these acts are now on tour with them.
“I think we started off very naïve,” Love smiles, South nodding in agreement. “We were two girls wanting to make music and we just like ‘let’s go and make music – it will be fun, we’re going to be welcomed with open arms!’ Well, it wasn’t like that,” she laughs.
“What we don’t want is the mainstream picking what they want from these bands [coming through now] and not actually lifting up the bands who are creating this scene. This scene is ours, it’s all our peers, it’s all the people we’ve been coming up with, all the amazing women we’re seeing on the scene. It’s coming up together, but sticking together as well”, they smile. “It’s our time, and theirs too.”
