One last shot of gin
Profane, hard-drinking local rockers call it quits with a final show at the Albert
Jen Zoratti

“It was loud, it wasn’t typical and there were lots of bad words.”

According to Quiffs frontwoman Erica Jacobson, that’s why her band was kicked off the stage at Shannon’s Irish Pub in 2005.

A year later, the same sentence neatly sums up what Winnipeg will miss most about the famously noisy group.

Yes, The Quiffs are calling it quits, and the Sept. 23 show will mark the last time the girls will tear up the Albert — and your ear drums.

What’s in a name

To really understand why Jacobson, Gillian Oswald (guitar), Alana Mercer (drums) and Meghan Flett (bass) are ditching the band, we really need to go back to the beginning.

The Quiffs were, quite literally, born one drunken night in 2002 at the Royal Albert and, true to form, they went about things somewhat backwards.

“Erica booked a show and didn’t tell anyone,” Oswald laughs. “Then she comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, Gill, we’re starting a band.’”

Soon afterward the rest of The Quiffs fell into place. Flett graduated from tambourine player to bassist. Mercer — who “moved here for a boy and stayed for a band” — became the drummer after the others decided that her ability to hold a rhythm was good enough. Wanting a name that was feminine but not girlie, the quartet settled on The Quiffs (look it up online).

Setting the date of your first gig before you have a band, recruiting bandmates who can barely play their instruments and naming yourselves after the female body’s strangest phenomenon isn’t exactly the standard recipe for longevity.

If you ask The Quiffs, it was never the point to get signed and get famous. They’re simply four girls who like dressing up, playing shows and drinking gin straight from the bottle.

The end of drunken noise

“It’s pretty freakin’ mutual,” Jacobson says of the split while the four lounge around their jam space, drinking non-virgin orange juice, smoking and reminiscing about the band.

“We’ve been a band for a long time,” Oswald says. “I mean, it was a joke band. It was not meant to score a deal.”

“I’m not a musician,” Flett adds. “People laugh when I say that, but I’m not. I know how to play our songs. That’s it.”

“I haven’t written a new song in a year,” Jacobson continues, “and I don’t work well under pressure. I’m way too average. I want to pay my rent. I want to have good credit. I think I’d be unhappy if we took this any further.”

The Quiffs may have considered themselves a joke band, but according to their fans in the music scene they were far from laughable.

The band’s first and only album is a deliciously sloppy self-titled romp that spits on the idea of what is considered ‘acceptable’ music. Raw, gritty and primal, its fuck-you attitude is probably what scenesters gravitated to, and what they’ll miss.

Though the girls don’t consider themselves punk, their beginnings weren’t too far from those of the Sex Pistols, and their hilarious stage antics and lack of finesse have the honesty factor of London bands of the late ’70s — just don’t tell them that.

“We’re not a fucking punk band,” Flett says. “And we’re not Hole, either.”

A chick band? Go to hell!

After a southward discussion about actual quiffs and Donita Sparks’ infamous bloody tampon (Google L7 + Reading Festival), the conversation moves to feminism and girl bands. The Quiffs have seen their fair share of sexism in their short stint as a group, and the ‘chick band’ label is one they were never into. Apart from the undeniable advantage of being able to rock out in a pair of killer purple stilettos, the differences between all-girl and all-guy outfits aren’t really that noteworthy to the band.

Still, The Quiffs have found themselves slapped with headlines that read “Pretty in punk” and have gotten catcalls at shows.

“I remember one time when people were shouting shit at us,” recalls Mercer. “They were yelling, ‘We love L7!’”

“The worst is when people yell, ‘Take your shirt off!’” Oswald adds. “But, to be fair, Alana does take hers off.”

“It’s a sweaty job” Mercer says. “I’m a drummer. Do you know any drummers that keep their shirts on?

“Girls will come up to me and say ‘I think it’s really great that you’re a drummer.’ And it’s just like, ‘Well that’s alienating. Thanks!’”

This year’s Ladyfest gig in late May was also a contentious event for The Quiffs, who felt like they were asked to play the feminist festival for the wrong reasons.

“That was the only reason they wanted us, not because they liked us but because we’re girls,” Jacobson says. “We don’t think of ourselves as ‘girls who play music.’ We think of ourselves as, ‘We play music.’”

It’s kind of hard not to say a quartet called The Quiffs is anything but feminist or punk, but it’s almost too easy to apply the fem-punk ethos to girls who just happen to make a lot of noise and don’t care what people think about it.

CTV wasn’t ready for a Quiff

For a band that prides itself on making music left uncharted by the MuchMusic set, it was a small victory in a lot of ways when Jacobson actually made it onto Canadian Idol this summer.

“The whole plan was that I wanted to get drunk and go on Canadian Idol,” she laughs.

“So she shows up at the auditions at 5 a.m., still all Quiffed up — and drunk — from the night before,” Flett says.

“She sang our song Fuck Knob and Power of Love by Celine Dion,” Mercer laughs. “Basically, the guy said, ‘You have a voice, but you can’t be drunk for the next audition.’”

The alcohol-fuelled stories don’t stop there.

After hearing about how you introduce a band called The Quiffs to Fred Penner, how Oswald’s grandmother had to write “fuck” on their liner notes and how Jacobson found out the hard way that tomatoes and nylons wreak havoc on freshly shaved legs, it’s clear that Saturday’s show will have to allot time for ‘cry breaks.’

“See? This is how you have to interview The Quiffs,” Mercer laughs. “You just have to hang out and listen.”