Downstairs @ Esquires seems the perfect setting for interviewing the young Megan Burns, a.k.a. ‘Funeral Pop’ princess, Betty Curse; in the dark, slightly smoky and somewhat gloomy atmosphere of the empty club room, Betty Curse’s pale face and heavily made-up black eyes look frighteningly at home.
At the moment, Megan Burns looks like a slightly more extreme version of current trends, with her wildly-styled black hair, oversized top and ripped purple leggings, yet in just a couple of hours time the on-stage transformation to the morbidly-obsessed gothic angel that is Betty Curse will take place. ‘Image is less important than the music right now;’ Burns muses, ‘you’ve got bands like The Kooks and The Arctic Monkeys who just wander on stage in polo shirts and jeans and stuff and there’s no razzmatazz going on! There’s no showbiz…! [laughs] You know what I mean, I think if people come to watch your band the least you should do is give them something to look at, a spectacle.’ Perhaps, however, the love of dressing up and putting on a show owes something to Burns previous life as a film star? ‘I’ve always wanted to make music, so the acting was all an accident really, I just fell into it,’ she explains when asked if there is a link between her theatrical on stage persona and Liverpool-born Megan Burns, ‘my nan made me go to drama classes and stuff to give me a bit more confidence about myself and I hated every minute of it.’ It certainly paid off though; when Burns found herself winning an award at the Venice Film Festival, a London agent soon followed, along with the offer of a part in zombie horror flick 28 Days Later. ‘I really enjoyed doing that; it was something completely different and the people I was mixing with were real artists and I could have a proper conversation with them.’ For Burns, 28 Days Later was simply too good an offer to turn down, ‘I had to do that because Danny Boyle was directing it. I remember when I met him I was just so awe-struck, he just oozed creativity and I thought, I have to work with that guy! So, yeah, when I got the role I was very happy.’ But in a sense, the journey zombie to musician wasn’t necessarily a natural progression, but a return to Burn’s first love, ‘after [28 Days Later] I thought, well, I’ve done everything I want to do, I’ll get an education behind me and I’ll go back to it if I want to… but then the band came along and obviously that was more exciting for me… it was more my of dream and not someone else’s.’
Yet, theatrics and dramatic tendencies aside, the world of Betty Curse is undoubtedly influenced by dramatic characters and popular culture, not to mention gothic music and literature. ‘A lot of the songs have an influence on the stage set and the artwork. You can see on the albums and singles, I’m very heavily influenced by Tim Burton films like Beetlejuice, so that’s why on the album cover there’s a graveyard but it’s all neon and stuff – it’s like a total reference to Beetlejuice. I love Bauhaus and The Cure and Nick Cave and stuff like that, and so lyrically that’s what influences me. So, the music I make is more ‘Funeral Pop’ because it’s really upbeat, but at the same time the songs have always got death or whatever else in them because that’s what I’m interested in, that’s what the literature I read is concentrated on.’
Even the ‘pop’ tag, these days so often identified with Pop Idol and X-Factor wannabies, doesn’t seem to phase Betty Curse, ‘when I think of ‘popular music’ I don’t think of this kind of churned out Louis Walsh, Pete Waterman bollocks, I just think back to like Duran Duran and Cyndi Lauper, and they’re all great bands but they were ‘pop’ and I think the charts are sort of going back to that way of thinking, like The Arctic Monkeys again, they can be number one this week and then My Chemical Romance can be number one - people want bands now, they don’t want Girls Aloud because it’s all been done before. I think it’s good to be ‘pop’ – the Beatles were pop, you know!
But is there a place in the mainstream for ‘Funeral Pop’, and perhaps more importantly, should there be? ‘I don’t know, it’s kind of weird because when I was younger I got so much abuse for it, you know,’ explains Burns, ‘like walking down the street and getting stuff thrown at me just for dressing differently and having dark eye make-up, and I still come into a bit of conflict in certain areas. But I think its good that more kids can be themselves now because it is more mainstream.’
“So My Chemical Romance being number one, for example, is a good thing?” I ask. ‘I think it’s great,’ she nods emphatically, ‘I think it’s saying a lot about the social climate at the moment. People are getting more and more used to the fact that we’re not immortal, we’re all gonna die, so with all the wars and stuff that are going on life is more precious. People are coming to the realisation that we’re not going to live forever, and so they’re listening to music that’s dealing with the ideas of death, and it just so happened to clash with this whole goth movement.’
Betty Curse’s involvement with National Music Week helps to highlight the issue further, as alongside mainstream bands and reality T.V. turned pop-rock stars (such as Rock School’s Little Chris, who Megan assures me was a ‘darling’) Betty Curse were the only band representing the more alternative side of the industry and emphasising that it is available to young people. ‘We got asked if we wanted to be a part of it and at first I was a bit sceptical because… well, I didn’t want to alienate our older fans by becoming this kind of ‘school band’, but it’s amazing; there’s a whole week where kids are learning about the music industry from the artist’s points of view, you know, rather than having some stuffy old music teacher lecturing them on Beethoven and Mozart, I mean I like that kind of stuff too, but you don’t want to just sit there reading musical notes all day, do you? The fact that mainstream artists are actually giving their personal experience of working in the music industry I think it can do nothing but good and I’m really happy to be a part of it because I think we’re are a bit different.’
So, with the album about to be released (just in time for Halloween, naturally) it’s an exciting time for Megan/Betty and the band, ‘yeah, I’m looking forward to it coming out, I mean we’ve have a MySpace exclusive album launch; I haven’t seen it but people keep sending me emails saying, “you’re on the front page of MySpace!” It’s great the feedback we’ve been getting from people who are listening to it online, and it’s exciting because it’s always been my dream to have something with my name on the back, I mean I got excited with the 28 Days Later soundtrack because they had my name on the credits [laughs]. I never believed that I’d actually have my own CD with me as a credited writer.’ It’s also expected that ‘Girl With Yellow Hair’, the follow-up to the limed-edition debut single ‘God This Hurts’ will attract a wider, perhaps even more mainstream audience, much to Burns’ amusement, ‘I’ve had my own way all the way through so I thought I’d give in to this one and let them do the whole mainstream single thing. But then it’s not a totally pushed single, we’re just letting it grow organically and hopefully pick up people along the way, it’s great. At all of the shows we’ve been playing there’s a core group of kids, and they’re aged between twelve right up to twenty. It’s great because they’re all getting it, and it’s girls and boys.’ The current tour reaches its climax with a homecoming gig in Liverpool on Halloween, ‘I’ve got loads of people coming down,’ she giggles, ‘they’re all going to dress up and I’ve got lots of family coming too, which will be quite embarrassing because we’ve changed a lot in our performance. My mum’s probably going to be a bit shocked, she likes me when I’m being a ‘girly-girl’, she’ll be like, “oh Megan, why did you do that?!” But it’s great, I’m looking forward to it.’
For more information on Betty Curse, check out their MySpace page: www.myspace.com/bettycursemusic or the official website: www.bettycurse.com
The album, ‘Hear Lies...’ is released on Monday 30th October, closely followed by the new single ‘Girl With Yellow Hair’ on 13th November.