It is my sad duty to inform the readers of this magazine of a serious neglect that has spread across the music scene. A willing neglect of the bands who aren’t in the here and now; the ones that aren’t the Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls. There may as well be no other sources of music or entertainment, as these boring, trashy pop groups have taken over the airwaves in both North America and Europe.

            As I come from the country guilty for the spawning of the Backstreet Boys, I want to give my sincere apologies to a band who put out their very last album this week. Kim Kissably and the Red Lips Sextet were basically unknowns to the American mainstream ears, but they had their way with Britain, and they had a powerful presence in the American underground. They released, in total, three albums as the original band. It’s regretful that their last album goes only under the name of the Red Lips Sextet.

            Kim Kissably is a year dead today. She was only 25, and at that young age, the oldest of the group. She had one multi-platinum album to her name, five top thirty hits, and one top twenty hit (the only song co-written by one of her band members). For those of you who paid attention to the radio waves back in the early ‘90s, you may remember Teaching Spiders to Cry.

            Kissably and her girls lived a grrl punk fairy tale. It started in with two schoolgirls dabbling in extreme feminism and bisexuality, and slowly built on from the dark corners of clubs and city streets. In only months after Kim’s would-be graduation, they had been signed by Beggar’s Banquet (and Kim, having been distrustful of his intent, told the agent off), and their first album came out in early ’91.

            Torn Horses was a little risqué, even for the Brit punk scene. It was literally dripping with Kim’s ultra-feminism and severe left wing beliefs. The world described in Torn Horses would see every man shot (or put into slavery) while every woman would live only to help each other (and abuse the men). Kim never admitted to any specific bad cases with her father or past boyfriends that would make her hate men so much, she was just always adamant that “anything with a [dick] just isn’t worth it!”

            While touring British clubs to promote Torn Horses, Kissably and the Sextet made bootleg history. While their albums were never the best selling in the world, Stone’s Throw 29.07.91 became the hottest ticket on the British and American black market for years, and its sale only started to die down when the band split up five years later. It was an insane night, and one that any true fan would completely regret having missed. Kissably got drunk and her lead guitarist, Elke Fairness, popped some acid so she wouldn’t humiliate herself alone.

            Needless to say, after the spiders the size of a human head started crawling out of the ceiling, things got interesting. Kissably spent her entire night ranting into the microphone, forgetting that she was supposed to be performing songs, while Fairness took wild swings with her guitar at the spiders that only she could see. The rest of the Red Lips Sextet played along with them. It was a night of noise and mayhem; something that I would kill to have been able to see.

            That night got Kissably and her girls jailed for a week and fined heavily, as they trashed The Stone’s Throw, the club they were playing. It was perhaps the most perfect popularity stunt they could have pulled, though, as their second single from Torn Horses, Ducking Out of Danger, shot all the way up to 27 on the British charts, and even peaked at 40 on the American charts.

            In only another year, their second album, Blackened Princess came out. The girls decided to go more for image on the tour for this one. There wasn’t a night that Kissably didn’t start off in her schoolgirl uniform (she almost always lost the top before the gig was over); Fairness made black and red her only statement; Geneveve Hardly shaved her head and took up an interest in chains and piercings, while still sticking to her traditional pure white clothing; Chatha Darling devoted her wardrobe to pink and the wonders thereof; Ebony Darkness became the most ethereal goth to have ever touched a punk band; Jessie Founders moved from being the good one to being the fashion model, anorexia and all; and Heather Hunter made it even more of an effort to look like she had just crawled out of the trash can, onto the stage. The entire band clashed, through their fashions and their personalities, which is what gave them the power they had over the crowd. All of them had different aspects of appeal, though it was never doubted that Kissably was their leader.

            At the end of the three-year tour for Blackened Princess (mostly including every European rock festival that the girls’ manager had ever heard of), Kissably met the man who would change everything. She had become pretty well known to the festival goers, who could sing along to at least the three songs with radio play off their second album (those being Teaching Spiders to Cry, which hit 13 on the charts, Darkling Asking, 22, and Forbidden Guilt Trip, 29), and one of them accosted her back stage at their last British festival.

            His name was Dave Lastman, and he was probably the only man who had ever even had a chance of winning Kissably’s heart. That he did, and he did it well. It caused tension between the band members, who felt threatened by the presence of this man. Kissably never acknowledged her band mates’ feelings about him, and had even said in an interview “Yeah, I guess I love Dave; I mean, everyone loves Dave. He’s bringing us all that much closer together. It’s been years; we need a male influence in this [band].” The day she met him marked the end of their tour for their only multi-platinum album.

            Kissably’s close friendship with the group’s bassist, Founders, was hurt by her new relationship with Lastman. The Sextet’s third and last album was written and recorded with tension and hostility. Bright Eyed Naïve, released in ’95, never gained the popularity of Blackened Princess or the reputation of Torn Horses. There were two songs that grabbed some radio play, Finally a Man (which hit 21 on the British charts) and Token Whore (30), but the rest of the album was basically forgotten. There was a yearlong tour that ended up being cut off short when Lastman proposed to Kissably and Founders left the band for good.

            Lastman’s proposal was turned down after careful thought from Kissably. She explained why in her only interview with Rolling Stone, which was the last interview she had. “The biggest problem was I loved Dave. That seems like the perfect reason to get hitched with him, but it was the perfect reason to not. I loved him because he reminded me of someone. That someone was [Jessie Founders], who I lost because Dave fell in love with me. This whole love thing with Dave broke my band up. I’d rather die alone than stay with the person who did that to me and my friends.”

            And die alone, she did. After the hostile break-up of Kissably and the Sextet, she fled to the United States in search of some reprieve. She ended up founding another, smaller punk band in New York, but nothing there really kept her captivated. As was explained in her suicide note, “I came here for a distraction, but there was nothing to distract me. I’m here in the bloody US of A, the land of bloody opportunity, but there is no opportunity. And there’s no reason to stay.”

            As a bitter irony, Kissably shot herself the night before a representative from Attic Records was going to sign her new band, Kissy’s Chicks. The opportunity she had wanted but couldn’t wait to get.

            Now, a year after Kim Kissably took her own life, Dave Lastman and Jessie Founders joined forces to bring the Red Lips Sextet back for one more album; new versions of their old songs, with Elke, Jessie, and even Dave on vocals. The album is called Kissably Good. It opens with Jessie singing Teaching Spiders to Cry, and ends with Kissably’s original version of the song.

- written by Anorea Wells, of New York Life

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