Norwich bands LADY DI and MEGA EMOTION are pleased to announce the rescheduled release of a split album, with I Know You Know I’m Perfect / Move, Motherf*cker now set for release on 18th September 2020 via Fake Feelings.
The band are also pleased to announce a special album release show at St Pancras Old Church in London on 8th October 2020, with each ticket sold as a pair of seats in your own socially-distanced zone. Tickets are only available in advance: https://tinyurl.com/ladydilaunch
All audience members will be asked to use the provided hand sanitizers on entry/exit of the building, with a request for audience members to wear masks/face coverings throughout the performance and in the building. Organisers also ask that if you have any symptoms or a fever please do not attend the event – if you have purchased a ticket and start to feel unwell please email alex@barefeetrecords.co.uk and a refund or ticket transfer will be arranged.
This very special—and quite literal—split vinyl release is the debut album from both bands. It might not be immediately apparent, given their disparate sounds and influences, but Mega Emotion and Lady Di are actually alter-egos; two very different bands made up of exactly the same personnel: Lisa Horton, Iain Ross and Jan Robertson, all former members of Norwich art-rock/indie pop outfit, Bearsuit (Fortuna Pop/Fantastic Plastic).
Following early radio support from John Kennedy at Radio X for the Lady Di lead single ‘AAAAAA’ (listen here), the band are pleased to reveal a video for their new single ‘Peanut Cup’.
“We’re a musical Sliding Doors,” explains Ross. “We’ve slipped into two different parallel universes. Both bands are Gwyneth Paltrow, but with either punk hair (black) or techno hair (blond). We started Mega Emotion first – but it’s very electronic and we missed the simplicity of an indie punk show. So we started another band, swapped instruments, and called it Lady Di.”
Mega Emotion are the robe-wearing cult that formed after the Y2K bug failed to usher in an apocalypse. They build dense layers of sound that loop both live and electronic drums against synths and scuzzy guitars. They’ve won Steve Lamacq’s roundtable, been playlisted across BBC 6Music and supported the likes of Acid Mothers Temple, Shonen Knife, Thumpers and Lonelady, comparing their sound to Metronomy, New Order, The Knife and Battles.
Lady Di, on the other hand, play grungy, dumb-ass punk, inspired by the likes of The Breeders, Urusei Yatsura and The Lemonheads.
Commenting on the unusual choice of name for the latter project, he continues: “The name can be pronounced several ways and is not supposed to be disrespectful to the memory of any person, living or dead. The worshipful cult around the princess and her saintly, feminine image is very strange and kitsch to us—however, we love the weird iconography. Jan found a photo of Princess Diana on the floor once, all trampled and faded: it was a sign. Also, Lisa cut my hair once, quite badly, and it resembled Diana’s 80s feathery barnet in all its glory.”
Whilst with Mega Emotion the trio bring psychedelic stage-wear and icy electro-pop to the table, in their guise as Lady Di they offer up quite the opposite: plaid shirts, drunk summer nights and melodic grunge punk. The line-up for both bands might be the same, but the two trios have very different work and style ethics. “For Mega Emotion we wear robes and crowns of flowers,” explains Horton. “We paint our faces and put stars through our hair. We go wild swimming and perform rituals. Sometimes we dress up as jellyfish or psychedelic beekeepers. It’s very surreal.”
Where Mega Emotion are musically abstract and ethereal, Lady Di are direct and literal, with songs about real people. But there are recurring themes that run through the music of both bands—environmental apocalypse, alienation, confronting the patriarchy, but also searching for optimism and finding love as the world self-destructs. All of the tracks for both albums were recorded by Magoo’s Owen Turner in the wilds of Norfolk, at Sickroom Studios, lending a further crucial continuity to these unusual musical bedfellows.
“We recorded Mega Emotion’s ‘Move Motherfucker’ in the depths of winter. It was freezing cold and very bleak in the studio,” explains Robertson, “Then we recorded Lady Di’s ‘I Know You Know I’m Perfect’ in the middle of summer, drinking beers and hanging by the pool in flannel shirts. The difference in the weather is a very obvious but absolutely true metaphor for the contrasts between the bands. You can hear rain and thunder and snow on the Mega Emotion tracks, and blazing sun on Lady Di.”
I Know You Know I’m Perfect / Move, Motherf*cker is released on the rescheduled date of 18th September 2020 via Fake Feelings