The Future is Now! - An interview with Scotland's Bratakus

In late 2017 I had the idea to start another zine entitled 'The Future is Now!' which would only focus on younger groups who are currently active within the scene. Sadly, for a variety of reasons, the zine has not come to be, and so I will be posting the interviews and articles I did complete here on my blog over the next few weeks.

As always, if you enjoy what you read please share it via social media - cheers!


Bratakus


Bratakus are 2 piece punk/hardcore group from the North of Scotland. They play non-stop and are part of the backbone of the current Scottish scene. Read on to see whats up!

1. Please tell us about the origins of Bratakus, what did your friends make of you as teenagers living in rural Scotland making punk music in this day an age?

B: Bratakus started about 3 years ago. I had been playing gigs as a solo acoustic act, but I was frustrated because that wasn't what I wanted to do. I spent years trying to form bands with no luck, when finally my sister Onnagh learnt the bass and we decided to play just the two of us and a drum machine! Up where we live there aren't that many like minded people. A lot of farmers and game keepers who don't really like bands singing about animal rights and stuff, we have a few good friends up where we live though and they're all really supportive of the band. It's really nice having people who'll help you out whenever. Even down to little things like helping us film our music videos and stuff.


2. The band has really built a name for itself through relentless touring, how well has this worked for you? Do you see the audience growing as you revisit the same places? How important do you see playing gigs vs online presence in building an audience for Bratakus?

O: It's been really great that we've had the opportunity to play so many gigs. We play basically non stop! Our first gig was at the Glasgow Rock 'N' Roll school for girls fundraiser and we met a lot of really amazing supportive women there that have helped us out a lot since then. I think we've definitely built more of a name for ourselves through gigging, neither of us are very good at keeping up with the social media profiles we have for the band, so we rely mainly on people discovering us at gigs rather than online, but we have had some good opportunities through people finding out about us online too, so I think social media is definitely helpful for promoting yourself as well.


3. Your debut LP 'Target Girl' came out last year - tell us about it, are you happy with the results, how has it gone down with your fans? Any interesting feedback? Would you do anything differently if you could do it again?

B: We put our first album out on our family run label Screaming Babies Records in August last year. The name came about partly because of a video I saw of a woman in the 50s practicing knife throwing on her 2 toddlers in their garden which was so bizarre it started an obsession with knife throwing, and also because Onnagh had done some cool drawings of knife jugglers and stuff and we wanted to incorporate them into the album art. We thought Target Grrrl would be a cool name because although it's the name of the girl that stands in front of the target and gets knives thrown at her for a performance, it also reflects on the way women are targeted in the media, the work place and in day to day life. So far we've had really positive feedback about it which has been really cool. If we could go back, we'd definitely do a few things differently, there are some little things like spelling mistakes on the back cover and stuff. The main annoying thing is that some how 3 of the tracks are mixed up in the middle of the album so they don't match up with the track list on the back. They're in the right order on the lyric sheet, so it's fairly easy to work out what ones they are, but it's still pretty annoying! Other than that everything was a learning experience since we had never recorded anything in a studio before. I think we're both pretty happy with how the album turned out considering we had no idea what we were doing!


4. Its great to see you both flying not only the vegan flag but also the sXe flag but it having nothing to do with the 'vegan straight edge hardcore' scene - are you even aware of that scene/types of bands? What drew you towards these beliefs? Are any of your friends up north sXe as well?

O: We've been vegetarian our whole lives, and we went vegan nearly seven years ago now. We always believed strongly in animal rights and when we started to look into what happens in the dairy/egg industry and realised what really went on we turned vegan very quickly. As for being straight edge, we were just never really into drinking and the whole culture that surrounds it. We really like Minor Threat, but other than that we're not particularly into/don't really know much about the straight edge scene or straight edge bands, but we do have a couple of friends who are straight edge up where we live.


5. As well as political numbers your lyrics also touch upon a lot of personal issues - which kind of song do you enjoy writing more?

B: I very rarely write personal songs because I find them much harder to write, so I'd have to say I enjoy writing political songs more. I find it easier to think of issues to write about because there's so much going on in the world that unfortunately still needs to be sung about. I still struggle with lyric writing for any kind of song though, I'm ridiculously critical of my lyrics considering 99.9% of people can't actually understand them when I'm singing, haha. Because we are away gigging so much, it's getting harder to find the time to write new songs, when I was 14-17 I wrote most of the songs we play on our album cause I could be more focused on it and sit and write a song whenever I had the inspiration, but now I have to sit down and think "Okay, I have a little bit of free time, I should write a new song" and it's much more difficult for me to write songs like that. On the bright side, it's been amazing being able to gig so much!

6. Are there any of your songs that you look back at and think "oh I'd do that differently now" or "did I really write those lyrics?"

B: The lyrics for our song Foodchain from our first EP are pretty terrible, but I was only 13 when I wrote them and I really didn't think anyone but me would hear them, so I didn't try too hard. As I said before, I'm pretty embarrassed by all my lyrics and that stopped me from showing my songs to anyone for ages, until one day I was talking about song writing with our friend Brain (Quarantine, Disaffect, Ruin, Debris, Brian Curran Acoustic) and I said that I didn't play my songs to people cause I didn't like my lyrics and he just said "Neither do I." and I thought, if Brian has been in bands his whole life and still doesn't like the lyrics he writes then what's stopping me? At least now I can disguise them with shouty vocals, haha. (Though I still don't like that I have to print them on our albums and EPs so people know what the songs are about...)


7. As a two piece all female band in a scene full of blokes do you feel any kind of pressures? Have you experienced any prejudice because of this?

O: Mostly we've been really lucky and have met really nice supportive people doing the band. I think the scenes we're part of in Scotland are really good at supporting women in bands. But we've definitely encountered situations where we feel uncomfortable, and where we didn't feel like we were being treated equally. Like we said, for us the good has outweighed the bad. There's a lot of really great people who are doing a lot to help and to encourage women into the music scene right now. So it's important to support these things to help women who have to deal with a lot more than we have.


8. How would you encourage more girls to get involved in the scene?

B: I think the Glasgow Rock N Roll School for Girls is a brilliant way to encourage girls into the music scene, it's a week long event run by volunteers, where girls from age 8 to 16 come in, meet like minded people and learn how to play different instruments, form bands and write songs, amongst other things like zine making and body positivity. At the end of the week there is a showcase and all the girls get to perform their songs on stage and it's really amazing to watch them learn so fast, gain so much confidence and write genuinely great songs in just a week.

Girls Rock Schools happen all over the world now, so find one in your area and either sign up to volunteer or participate. Other than that, just being supportive of the women in bands right now is a massive thing you can do to encourage more women into the scene, e.g. don't say "You're pretty good, for a girl", or just talk about how attractive they are rather than their music, and don't always put them first on the bill, etc.


9. You guys are today's generation - the troops of tomorrow - what do we need to do to make sure we have a future?

O: I think it's really important to sing songs about things that you feel are wrong with the world right now, it's a really good way to spread messages you feel are important, both our parents were turned vegetarian at a young age by bands and what they sang about. Me and Breagha discovered the Riot Grrrl scene through Bikini Kill and that was what got us more into feminism and made us read up a lot more about it and become more passionate about it. So writing lyrics is definitely a good way to spread messages. Also making fanzines or writing a blog or something. Things that seem really small and insignificant can actually help a lot. If you feel really strongly about something find a way to spread the word about it!


10. Finally - whats up with Bratakus - look into your crystal ball and tell us whats gonna happen in 2018

B: : We're slowly getting some new songs together, though it'll probably be a while before we release another LP. We'll hopefully put another EP out before then, we're planning to put out a split EP with our pals Gay Panic Defence sometime soon. We're also hoping to do a European/Scandinavian tour this year, and putting another zine out too, we were thinking of a vegan recipe zine. Plus, we have loads of gigs lined up where you can come and see us. So, keep a look out on our Facebook page for new stuff happening!