Sky Valley Mistress on UNCUT, hearses, beer & wrestling nicknames

The UNCUT event, created by Jack Herbert and Jonathan Towers, will shine a light on four acts who the pair hope will become Burnley’s 'flagship' original bands that the town throws its support behind. The pair’s event will showcase Zoltar, Harris Rafferty, The Voy and the aforementioned Sky Valley Mistress. “We were really excited (on joining the bill) until about a minute ago when I found out that Devil Wears Prada 2 is out the same day. "Fuming", the very chatty Max "Leather Messiah" Newsome joked when speaking to the band on Zoom.

“We're just really keen on any opportunity to support local live venues which are like, you know, the guys at Penny Blacks and the UNCUT and the whole festival. Like make it something that every person who's local, whether it's not necessarily our show, but like the whole of the festival is like just geared towards getting people in front of live music, which, you know, is something that we really strongly stand by as well,” Kayley "Hell Kitten" Davies, the band’s frontwoman, stated when asked about how happy the pair were to be on the bill.

Sky Valley Mistress, who describe their sound as desert rock, have been heavily influenced by the likes of Queens of the Stone Age and even derived their name from the Kyuss album ‘Welcome to Sky Valley' – a project involving Josh Homme pre-QOTSA. But for those who have never seen the two-piece perform live, what can you expect from their set?

“I want people to enjoy human connection and enjoyment and fun,” Newsome said. “No one goes to a gig and goes, 'Can you believe that person's dancing? Like, we're in a dark room together listening to rock music. The whole point is I want people to move, shake, do whatever they want to do to make themselves feel good. And because I feel like we're really blessed in that we get to be the soundtrack to people's nights and we are the facilitators of fun. And I am doing everything I can to be the jester on stage with an electric guitar to make sure that, look, like, if I'm doing this, everyone's watching me; no one's watching you.

“Like, you can do what you want. And I just want people to, yeah, hopefully come and realise that, like, not just our gigs, that these spaces are a place where you can just freak out, have fun and just enjoy yourself,” the band’s guitarist and drummer finished.

The unique dual-drumming set-up

On stage, Newsome and Davies maintain a unique set-up. Following the pandemic-enforced sabbatical, guitarist Sean "Starsky" Berry and bassist Russell Russell opted to leave the project, leaving Sky Valley Mistress as a two-piece and with a conundrum. Newsome admitted that there was a reluctance to replace their departed bandmates due to logistics and the lack of suitable replacements. But the pair needed to evolve to continue as a live act, and they found the perfect solution – a dual-drumming set-up, allowing both bandmates to handle the responsibility of driving the rhythm.

“On one wildly deluded evening, I came up with this contraption because it was like, well, ‘Kay, you can't play the guitar. So you've got to play the drums, but you're the frontwoman. So you've got to stand up, but you can't stand up and do the kick drum, right?’ So I'll do the kick drum; I think I can do both of those,” Newsome, who handles the kick drum duties, remembered. “After a couple of weeks, we agreed that that's what we were going to do. We agreed to a gig that was four months later, forgetting that we'd come up with this idea and we'd never practised it or tested it.

“About a week after that, we both suddenly just nearly died of panic, going, 'What have we just agreed to?' We're about to play to like 300 people in London. But I think that helped motivate us; we had to make it happen. And as well, I don't dislike bands that use click tracks, samples and backing tracks. I understand why they do it, but that's just not the kind of rock and roll we like to play. I like to play too fast. I like to play too loud. It just gives us the most direct connection to the thing that we're doing,” Newsome finished.

For Newsome, the set-up brings with it additional responsibility, requiring him to operate both his effects pedal and kick drum with his right foot, something which needs expert-level precision and timing.

“All the pedals are all set up the wrong way around because I put the ones that I use the most frequently close to the kick pedal. Yeah, it's a little tap dance, but it's fun and it's exciting. It's like, that's what I like about rock music: there's got to be an element of danger with it. And operating on a knife edge and occasionally getting cut is the kind of thing that makes you realise that it's still real. Those mistakes and those things that other people would say go wrong, they're what make the show,” the guitarist and drummer finished.

Touring in a hearse

The two-piece, who tour in a 1995 Jaguar Daimler hearse with a V6 engine, fittingly named the ‘Thundertaker’ and claim their second studio album – 'Luna Mausoleum' – is their soundtrack for driving it to the Moon. “It was like, wouldn't it be funny if we did this and then a quick eBay search later and being the only person bidding on it secured that deal,” Davies said when asked how touring in a hearse came about.

“We went to Chester and bought it off an ex-funeral director who had a lot of expensive cars. And after he gave us the tour, we came back to the Jaguar and we were like, it's not very impressive. And then it was meant to be like a play on the Northern thing, The Undertaker, Thunder Taker and stuff. Apparently I love wrestling,” Newsome joked.

Having their own limited-edition beer and wrestling-esque nicknames

‘The Thundertaker’ idea has been a triumph for the pair. Additionally, it has since evolved from simply being their preferred vehicle when it comes to their pursuit of getting to the moon into a limited-edition 4.5% strength blonde ale beer, according to Davies. The opportunity for their own beer came about thanks to a chance meeting with two “slightly drunk dudes” at one of their live shows, according to Newsome.

“They said we should make beer together. And we were like, yeah, cool. That'd be sick,” the guitarist and drummer reflected. “And then about a week later, they sent us a big old email with loads of information on how they do it. And we were like, all right, cool. What's this going to cost us? Nothing. Brilliant. We're in. And we said that we'd like a blonde ale that was a bit lighter. Usually, I'm drinking them pretty quickly on stage, and that's exactly what they did. Fresh Belgian ingredients. I did drink about 10 pints once. I didn't get a hangover,” Newsome joked.

In keeping with the unintentional wrestling aesthetic, the pair have adopted the nicknames 'Hell Kitten’ and ‘Leather Messiah' – names that sound like they’d be perfectly suited to WWE wrestlers in Vince McMahon’s time running the company, something the pair both laugh at. But how did they come about?

“I think it was because I've been in bands before, and I got Kay in, and I knew she was an incredible singer, and I just said to her, I was like, 'You've got to be like a Hell Kitten.' It didn't come initially, but when Kay has a microphone, she's quite intimidating,” Newsome stated. “I mean, I feel like you've softened over the years a little bit, but she used to prowl around the stage. So that was kind of where Hell Kitten came from.

“And then, Leather Messiah came from the David Bowie song where he actually sings like a leper messiah. And I misheard the lyrics, realised I had, and I think I'll have that one. Thank you very much. Because of all the space themes, spiders from Mars and stuff, it's not so much claiming that I'm a leper messiah. It's a bit of a tongue-in-cheek nod to the greats and who we really want to become,” Newsome finished.