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April 21, 2008

Monster Bobby responds to Rosay and Becki leaving the Pipettes

if you haven't heard already the pipettes had a major line-up change:

The Pipettes have two new members, Ani and Anna. We are demoing up 20-25 new songs, with an eye to recording a second album in the Summer. We want to tell you all about them, but we're very much head-down working on new material at the moment

This means that RiotBecki and Rosay have left to pursue other musical pursuits (which will be brilliant when they emerge), we wish them all the best, we're all still great friends and news on their pursuits will be closely supported by us.People may be confused by such a drastic change in line-up but please rest assured - if we were to be an imitation of ourselves we would stop. Plus the Pipettes has more members come and go than major labels have A&R men, it's just another day in the office for us (plus we've got to go one better than the Sugababes).

We refer you to the manifesto on our website www.thepipettes.com for a more in depth explanation on the functioning of the band; this was the natural step to take. For a more in depth series of answers, we direct you to the prepared video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU

Thanks for all the continued support over this period and we're incredibly excited to be working toward bringing you a new album that will be unlike anything we (or anyone else) have ever done. We will also have limited edition novelty tee-shirts on sale soon, keep an eye out for them and join the growing thousands who can now claim to be 'ex-Pipettes.'

Love
The Pipettes

This was a response by Monster Bobby, one of the Pipettes founding members, to the Pipettes forum:

ok, amusing though i do find it to see you lot constantly slagging nettwerk off, i feel, nonetheless like someone should leap to their defence just a little when people are getting the wrong end of the stick about things. sometimes you guys have a crazy idea about the role of management in a group like the pipettes. for starters, the "badly worded" statement was written by the band and not by nettwerk (well, we thought it was funny); second, the forum is closing, temporarily, because the whole website is closing, temporarily, in order to be completely revamped and relaunched to fit around the new thing. apart form anything else, i started a big discussion on here a few months ago about what to do with the forum and the general conclusion from most posters on that was it would be a good idea to close down the forum and possibly relaunch it in the future in a slightly different form. i'm sorry if our little statement implied that we were closing down the forum as some sort of punitive measure for bad behaviour. this was misleading and regrettable. as for a PR disaster, well, what did you want us to do? two members have left, this was not exactly part of the plan, but frankly we're dealing with it, and overcoming this little hurdle has given us the momentum to write and play better than ever before. the pipettes was never a group about the identities and personalities of its members, much more about a certain idea, an approach to doing things, involving careful study, analysis and thought. being in the pipettes is, in many ways, and i have said this before, a little like school. we have a few graduates from our school now and we are very excited to see what becomes of them. ideally we would have waited to announce anything until we had something to show for the new line-up. we wanted to say, ok, becki and rose have gone, but listen to THIS, and everyone would've gone f**k me Reg, that's amazing, instead of having to spend months speculating about whether we were still gonna be as good as we were and what have you. but, well, everyone was gossiping, perhaps inevitably, and barding was making a nuisance of himself again like some spurned lover... i personally was all up for letting people talk and getting on with the task at hand, but certain people began to take the opinion that it was getting ridiculous, and pitchfork were sniffing around and saying, 'ello, what's all this then, so we released a statement, and it got on the front page of nme.com, pitchfork and popjustice. now i wouldn't call that a pr disaster. actually, i'd call that quite a tasty bit of press. besides, announcing everything at once seemed to conform to larry david's 'double transgression theory', and as we have recently come to realise that larry david is the only ethical subject in southern california, his advice on managing bad news seemed as cogent as anyone's.

while we're at it, this polydor thing. everyone on here who's at least half-awake has known for sometime that we signed to interscope records in america last year. interscope is a part of universal music group, polydor is a part of universal music group. interscope over there, polydor over here. get it? no big change there. for the one chap on the popjustice forum who is concerned about indie rock bands signing to major labels, well, first off, what is he doing on the popjustice forum with such antiquated rockist views? and secondly, please don't besmirch the good name of the pipettes with a word as sullied as indie, which these days seems to be little more than a synonym for soft rock. actually, according to simon reynolds (in rip it up and start again) the word indie first starts cropping up (to replace the word 'independent' or 'diy' or'punk' or whatever) at precisely the point in the 80s when indie labels started making deals with majors (see Blanco y Negro) and majors started producing little boutique fake indies, so indie, from the very beginning, referred to music that appropriated some of the key signifiers of independent music but was in fact on a major label, if a somewhat concealed major label.

the pipettes, however, nailed their colours to the wall from the off, we are a pop group. a meta-pop group, if you like. we do not script everything we do in advance, although we have considered doing so. however, even if i had written the script for our whole career long in advance, neither i, nor any of the rest of us, would have come up with anything half as funny as recording a second album (second! that's all, just the second one!) with, at least as far as the public eye is concerned, none of the original members. i am grateful for destiny's extraordinary sense of humour for throwing this our way. It makes perfect sense for the pipettes to do all the things that pop groups do, but more so, in a slightly more exaggerated and preposterous fashion, in much the same way that erik satie was best able to poke fun at the french bourgeois society establishment by dressing like the very model of an average bourgeois functionary. according to slovenian lacanian philosopher, slavoj zizek, there are two kinds of rules in any given society. there are the official rules which say you must do this (but really, everybody knows that you don't really have to) and you must not do this (but really everybody knows that you can get away with it) and then there are the somewhat more hidden, unofficial rules of conduct. anyone who follows the rules precisely as written, with no regard for those unwritten rules or the tacitly accepted exceptions to the official rules, is either a psychopath or a revolutionary. such, in some ways, at least, is our approach to pop music. we must, in a sense, do everything wrong in order to know that we are doing the right thing.

Posted by gopster at April 21, 2008 9:56 AM

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