Kitty Daisy and Lewis
Kitty, Daisy & Lewis are so old school, that they might not even believe in the metric system, with the Kentish Town trio bringing a retro vibe so cool it’s made Jools Holland, David Lynch and Chris Martin drool over their sound.
Now the triad of siblings have teamed up with Walkers for an exclusive cover of Johnny Cash’s ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ for their latest advert.
While she was in the FemaleFirst offices taking over the website for the day, Bowie Jane grabbed the London threesome for a chat about the track and their musical family band.
Bowie: So you guys say you’ve been influenced by family traditions, but what are those?
Kitty: Yeah, we all sort of grew up playing with each other and our dad used to play with his family as well. He came from a big family and I suppose it’s been passed down to us. They all used to gather around the guitars and pianos.
Daisy: I think he had a dodgy school band in the seventies! He played all sorts of stuff.
Lewis: He could only play a few chords, but he knew all the songs. So he was able to teach us what it was like to play a few and we all worked it out from there.
Bowie: You all play multiple instruments though, so what can you all actually play?
Kitty: I play guitar, drums, harmonica, banjo, ukulele. And sing from time to time.
Daisy: Piano, drums, accordion, xylophone, basically anything with keys!
Lewis: I play kind of the same as Kitty, but I sing a little bit more.
Bowie: Do you play by ear or can you all read music too?
Daisy: Yeah, we all learnt by ear. We tried to learn how to read music, but we just weren’t able to get the hang of it.
Bowie: You’ve got such a distinctive style, but what sort of music were you all brought up on?
Kitty: There’s so many that we grew up listening too.
Lewis: So many eras too. Our mum used to play lots of sixties and seventies stuff and our dad used to sing older songs that he grew up. As we got older, we went out there and discovered different records for ourselves.
Bowie: You’ve been working with Walkers lately, what can you tell us all about that?
Daisy: Yeah, we were asked to record this track for Walkers and they decided on that as the song choice because it’s all about travelling. Now that they travel around the UK getting all natural ingredients for your crisps, it just seemed to fit. Some of the people who’ve done it before have always sung it with American places, so naturally we thought it would be great to swap those with British places.
Bowie: You guys are also pretty close with Rob Da Bank, so how did that relationship start?
Lewis: It was some corporate gig, for Topshop I think, and he was there and so we were there, so it just kind of happened. I really don’t remember too much else apart from that, I think we were all just there saying “Who’s this hairy man?” (laughs)
Kitty: His label’s been really great to us too. We’ve done Bestival most years, and we’ll be doing it again this year too.
Bowie: In your videos it’s always just the three of you, but live are there other people you bring on?
Daisy: Well, our parents are always a part of the band. Our mum players the double bass although more recently she’s been playing more the electric bass.
Lewis: Dad plays the guitar too. We just said that we needed a bassist and a rhythm guitarist and they stepped up and helped us out.
Bowie: You guys toured with Coldplay, what was that like?
Daisy: That was back in 2009 and that was all across America.
Lewis: It was amazing; we were playing stadiums with 30,000 people in them. It went down really well, people were loving us.
Bowie: Did you three get to hang out a lot with Coldplay then?
Kitty: Sometimes, but not too much. They were really friendly guys though and were really good to us. They gave us champagne on the first day so that’s pretty cool.
Lewis: The tour bus was more like an off-licence on wheels though! Every time we went around a corner all you heard was the bottle rolling about.
Bowie: So, what’s next for you guys, where are you off to?
Kitty: We’re off to Australia actually. By the time people are reading this, we’ll be there already. We’re performing all over the place, Melbourne, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sydney so that’s going to be great.
Kitty, Daisy and Lewis have covered the Johnny Cash song 'I've been everywhere' in the new Walkers Home Grown advert starring Gary Lineker. See the ad here www.youtube.com/walkerscrisps.
This wasn’t the only thing we got Bowie to devote her prodigious set of powers to, as we also got her to have a crack at doing some single reviews, give us an interview herself as well as play a live acoustic session.