Having a bite to eat with - Zombina and the skeletones

Introduce yourself to our readers

Zombina: Hello! I am Zombina,
from Zombina And The Skeletones!
Doc: And I am Doc Horror, one of her Skeletones!



Hello Zombina! You just played a great gig here in Finland.

Zombina: Yeah! It was great, wasn’t it? It was such fun. We played the Lumous festival,
the crowd was amazing! I didn't know anyone had even heard of us in Finland,
but loads of people were actually singing along! They knew all the stops, too!

Doc: Even we don’t know where all the stops are!

Zombina: We enjoyed the midnight sun, it was really confusing.
Everyone had cool rock n’ roll cars and there was a sauna in the back stage.
You don’t get that in the UK!

Doc: It was a silly idea to take a sauna before the show, though.
You really need the body moisture in order to play guitar and dance around.
I nearly fainted several times

To someone who doesn´t know Zombina, how would you describe your music?

Doc: New wave horror pop rock n’ roll?
Zombina: Evil doo wop harmony surf punk?
Doc: We need to figure out a convenient tag soon
Zombina: We play real pop songs with catchy melodies and three or four part harmonies,
but loud and fast with punk guitars and crazy organ playing
Doc: We’re sort of loose and sloppy but we’re also extremely tight
Zombina: The lyrics are dark and gory but at the same time funny and cute
Doc: Why, we’re a mass of contradictions!
Zombina: We don’t sound like anyone else, so we have a hard time explaining it to people.

Bands that have inspired you the most? I can hear some ramones and misfits there along with
rockabilly sounds.

Zombina: That’s definitely where we started from! The Ramones, The Misfits, The Cramps, The Rocky Horror Show, old school punk and old rockabilly and sock-hop rock n’ roll stuff...
but there’s all sorts of different sounds in the mix now.
We used to listen to lots of metal and alternative rock when we were kids, Nirvana,
Black Sabbath, Rocket From The Crypt

Doc: ... then we went through an eighties goth phase in six form and got into Bauhaus
andthe Cure and stuff like that, then we went on to the quirkier end of new wave,
like Oingo Boingo and the B-52’s and from there back to sixties garage,
girl bands like the Shangri-La’s and the early origins of horror rock like Screaming Jay Hawkins,
and Screaming Lord Sutch

Zombina: And the other Skeletones are into completely different stuff, again Jetson loves
Prince, Jonny Tokyo collects Beach Boys albums it all ends up in our music eventually!

You´ve been playing with such legends as The Damned, how did that go?

Doc: We’ve played with so many of our heroes now, we get cool autographs all the time.
It’s one of the best things about being a Skeletone.

Zombina: We’re lucky to have picked role models that won’t disappoint you when you meet
them! The Damned are lovely, so are The Meteors, The Misfits, Dinah Cancer, Frankenstein,
Wednesday 13. They all turned out to be super friendly. The Groovie Ghoulies are so nice
that Kepi actually stepped in and played drums for us when we opened for them in Edinburgh
and Kit fell ill... What other rock singer would do that for the support band?
He took one of our CDs and learned the whole set just by listening to it. He’s a hero!

Zombina and the skeletones come from Liverpool, how´s the scene there?

Zombina: It’s pretty extensive. There’s millions and millions of bands to choose from there’s something for everyone here.
I recommend aPAtT for weirdness, Blue Demon for
rockabilly and The Down And Outs for punk rock, but there’s just so many. If anyone wants a
fun rock n’ roll holiday, visit Liverpool and pick a couple of random shows. It’s a very musical town.

Could you shed some light to your songwriting, how does the zombina tunes come to life?

Doc: In most cases, I’ll put on a horror movie and switch off my brain, after about ten
minutes I’ll write a song title down, usually something stupid like, Zombie Hospital
or Robot Tigers Rule The Night then after another couple of minutes it just seems obvious
how the song should go. If I can’t finish it there and then I get Zombina to come round
and fill in the gaps. Then we all get together to sort out a good arrangement.
Jonny Tokyo is good at figuring out harmonies usually we’ll just keep playing
it until it starts to make sense.

I read somewhere that youre gonna release a new CD next year, what can we expect?

Zombina: The new CD is called Death Valley High, and it’s actually out in December,
just in time for Christmas. It’s a concept album, not in a pretentious prog rock way,
but in a way that all the songs together tell a story.
It was originally supposed to be a film! We had an idea for a screwball horror musical sort
of like Class Of Nukem High meets Carrie meets RockN’ Roll High School,
but it didn’t work out. It was a bit over-ambitious, we didn’t really
have the budget we needed so we just condensed it into a killer album instead.

Doc: It is sort of experimental, though. There are a lot of synthesisers going on and it
shifts styles from song to song. It might sound weird to people who’ve only heard Taste The
Blood but it’ll make more sense if you’ve heard Monsters On 45,
which is a compilation of all the singles we put out in the last three years.

Horror movies are close to your heart, what do you think about the modern horror movies, to
me 99% is the same hollywood crap or re-makes.

Doc: Yeah. I can’t believe the cheek of some of these remakes.
How can you even think that you can improve on Texas Chainsaw?
Dawn of the Dead? The Wicker Man? Fucking Psycho? You can’t!
If you mess with a classic you can only make it worse. They should try remaking
something that sucked in the first place, like Nymphoid Barbarian In Dinosaur Hell or Eegah?
Something where there’s still a little room for improvement. Orgy of the Dead.
They could just keep remaking that film over and over,
it doesn’t even need to be good to be good!

Zombina: The old films are still the best, but it’s unfair to say all modern horror movies
are crap. I didn’t mind the Chainsaw remake, I prefer the original but it wasn’t the worst
thing ever. The Wicker Man looks like it’s gonna be a waste of time.

Following the question above, who is your favourite horror actor of all times?

Zombina: Lugosi all the way. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.

Doc: I’m gonna be equally groundbreaking and original and say Karloff.

Let´s talk about your fanbase, since there are lovely girls in the band, are there many
horny men in the front row?

Doc: There’s only one hot chick left in the band now that Kit’s quit, but yeah,
the boys like Zombina She won’t answer this question. She’s gone shy. That’s not like you, Zombina, you just did that top ten songs to fuck to interview for Bizarre

What about horny females?

Doc: Yeah, the girls like her, too. She’s way more popular than any of the boys are with the
female groupies. It’s not really fair... all these girls rush up to us when we come
off stage and the me an the other boys are going ‘Hello’
and then we realise they’re not even looking at us, they’re going straight past us to drool
on Zombina. It’s humiliating.

Where do you see yourself and the band in the future?

Zombina: In the centre of some mass orgy by the sounds of it. Doc’s totally exaggerating!
We want to be able to just keep doing this forever. We’re having an unbelievably good time.
Thanks to everyone involved with Lumous and everyone who came for making us feel so welcome!

Ok, that´s about it, thanks a lot for the interview and break a leg in the future.

Zombina: Okay! I’m on my way to the future anyway. I’ll break as many legs as I can.


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