Walking through Lancaster on a sunny spring day, Holly Ross has a theory about her home town and its inhabitants. Once towering over the city was Lancaster Moor hospital, formerly the Lancaster county lunatic asylum, which was home to thousands of patients. “People were sent here from all over the place,” she says. “There was a care in the community programme and people settled locally, so you had this real collection of characters – amazing artists who burned themselves out on acid and ended up here. There was one pub they all used to congregate in, a real bunch of outsiders and freaks – and I use that as a term of endearment because that included us.”
For the best part of 20 years, Ross has been making outsider art in the duo The Lovely Eggs with her husband, David Blackwell. The pair play psychedelic punk and infectious garage rock, and – despite playing sizeable UK venues and attracting collaborators such as Iggy Pop – are a fervently DIY operation. They run their own label, and have no manager, booking agent or publisher. They often make their own music videos, build their own instruments, host their own book club and, in 2023, they launched their own TV channel. Eggs TV broadcast a hugely ambitious six-part series featuring everyone from comedian Stewart Lee to Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye. “That was such hard work,” says Ross, as we form a production line to pack up hundreds of their latest 7in single Nothing/Everything at their storage space. “But once we dive in, we’re committed to the idea. Even though it might kill us, we can’t let go.”
Another idea they’ve seen to the bitter end is creating custom-made scratchcards they are sending out with records enabling fans to win prizes. “Ironically, they cost more than actual scratchcards to produce, so we’re losing money on the single to do this,” Blackwell says as he places them inside 7in sleeves, surrounded by records, merchandise, instruments and various vintage trinkets. “But it’s all about the art and the idea. We always think about the financial and practical factors last.” The pair have a real, sincere and deep-rooted belief in committing to The Lovely Eggs as an all encompassing artistic endeavour. “It’s not a career to us,” Ross says. “It’s never been a job. It’s a lifestyle, a way of life, an ethos, a commitment to creating.”
The pair have been making music in Lancaster since they were teenagers at the Lancaster Music Co-op, a nonprofit organisation that offers affordable equipment, rehearsal and recording space. The building is currently closed and the pair have been in a five-year long battle to save it. An agreement was struck with Lancaster city council for Ross, Blackwell and local volunteers to take it over and raise a further £600,000. Which, remarkably, they have. But Ross says the bureaucracy “imprisoned me for two years. That’s how I felt. I felt put in jail, emotionally, every day doing that pen-pushing shit.”
The experience echoes through their seventh album, Eggsistentialism, out next week. The opening punk thrash of Death Grip Kids comes with the scream of “shove your funding up your arse”. But as it unfurls, the album is less grungy guitars and furious railing against the system, and more electronic and expansive as it explores themes of loss, fading memories and survival. “It’s a very vulnerable record,” says Ross. “To let people see that side of you is quite hard – it’s difficult admitting things have been really tough. People think that we’re such resilient people but sometimes you’ve got nothing left to give. The album is a snapshot of when we were at our lowest.”
However, despite the hard times, the Lovely Eggs are not just surviving but thriving. Next week, they will be back at their huge storage space packing up over 1,000 vinyl pre-orders for their album before they head out on tour. It’s important for them to stress that a genuinely successful, self-sustaining and profitable band can be achieved purely on your own terms. “The music industry is smoke and mirrors,” says Ross. “You don’t need to be on a label. All that really creates is money to spend on marketing – the rest is bullshit.” From: https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/may/09/the-music-industry-is-smoke-and-mirrors-how-diy-duo-the-lovely-eggs-are-keeping-the-north-weird
