Sixties vs. Seventies, boys vs. girls, pop vs. rock – and yet the two girls and two boys, who meet for the first time at the wieninternational.at interview, have more in common than a first glance might suggest. A conversation with four young musicians who are just about to become … well, what really … famous? Stars?

Yes, the title may have become an overused cliché over the past few decades but it just fits so well here that there really was no way of avoiding it. Because this article is about two very young bands who use the music of the past to start out into their very own musical future.
The two young and cheerful ladies who sit down at the table in the cosy café are not yet 20 years old, and the two young lads with the slightly sceptical look in their eyes are barely older. And yet the music that has influenced them the most, as their own songs clearly show, is a good 40 to 50 years old.

MonaLisa Twins

The two girls by the names of Mona and Lisa are twins, and they are currently making a name for themselves as the MonaLisa Twins. Singing and playing guitar and drums, respectively, the two sisters are the public, visible part of a musical family business. Their music is strongly influenced by the (early) 1960s, with pop and beat sounds always shining through – music from an era when the Beatles were still looked at as long haired rebels.

Kaiser Franz Josef

Sham and Paul – one plays guitar, one plays bass, and both sing – are two thirds of the band Kaiser Franz Josef (KFJ, German for “Emperor Franz Joseph”). Contrary to what their name suggests the band are currently gathering a fast-growing fan base with their nature identical 1970s guitar rock combined with fresh, pop-oriented melodies. Like the twins, they are also trying to make music their profession.

Professionals?

But at what point can you call yourself a professional musician? Is it a question of money? Without a second of thought Mona says: “It is a question of attitude. You are a professional the second you decide to make music your full-time job.”
Sham nods in agreement. “That’s exactly what I think. Most people think it’s all about the money, however. But musicians never have much money anyway. (laughs) So it can’t be that. It’s the attitude.”

Confident and in control

This “professional attitude” is certainly something that the boys from KFJ and the musician twins have in common, though they have arrived at this point in different ways. Lisa: “With us it has been a long process but in fact it was the moment when we dropped out of school and decided to focus only on our music.” Of course, it tends to help to have a father who has a home recording studio and a stepmother who takes care of things like booking, management and promotion. At a casual glance you might think that this is a case of parents living their dreams through their children. But once you talk to the confident girls you realise that it’s not like that at all. The two sisters know what they want and what they don’t want, and they know how much work and effort it takes to reach these goals. They are not dreaming naïve adolescent pop-star dreams but prepare for the strenuous routine of a musician’s life and that means practise, practise, practise: playing their instruments, singing, composing, arranging, recording, and playing in front of live audiences as much as possible. They have just released their debut album “when we’re together”, on which they’ve written and played all songs themselves. And even if some songs sound surprisingly familiar it is an excellent, charming pop album, something that has completely fallen out of time. Retro but not vintage, so to speak.

A lucky chance

The young “emperors”, in their turn, have recently taken their Matura (school-leaving) exams (“…just had to rehearse at night…”, says Paul casually) but don’t have an album under their belt yet. That’s currently in the making, though. Their career highlight so far was their support gig for AC/DC in 2010. Paul: “That was pure chance. All other bands who had been contacted already had lots of songs and albums out and were all well known. Our management simply sent the organisers one of our demos, and they said: ‘We’ll take them.’ We didn’t even know about it. Only when everything was agreed our manager came to our rehearsal room and told us: ‘You will be supporting AC/DC…’” And that meant an audience of 92,000. “…Nothing but people as far as you could see. Cool!”

Advantages and disadvantages

Now the focus is on creating the future. The main question is: for whom is it easier to be successful in the music business? Are women in the advantage, or is it – as usual – the men?
Lisa: “There is often a lot of scepticism at the beginning, along the lines of: ‘There’s these two nice girls, how good can they be… But when you play a cool gig, people tend to be positively surprised – probably because they didn’t expect us to be able to do that. As girls we are rather alone in the music business.”
However, this is seen as an advantage by the boys, as Sham explains: “We are surrounded by a sea of young men who want to make music. Therefore we have to put all the more effort into it. We’ve had to work for everything we’ve got.” And then Paul, who has taken his school-leaving exams in 2011, adds: “And we are relatively old now, too, so we don’t have the advantage of youth anymore.”

Sixties & Seventies

Speaking of youth: why do they only play music that is so much older than they are?
Sham: “Because this music still has a certain rawness to it. I know it’s a cliché but at that time you didn’t have so many technological possibilities in a recording studio. You couldn’t tinker around with a song until it’s perfect, you can hear mistakes even with the best of musicians. The music of that time contains all these details that are usually filtered out today.”
Mona: “We have chosen this type of music because we think it is the coolest music and because there isn’t enough to it – not enough songs that we would like to hear. So we said to ourselves: Lets write it ourselves because otherwise no one will. We are happy to take charge of that.”

The future

The four young people quickly get talking, asking each other questions about how they deal with this or that. Soon you feel as if you were listening in at a professional musicians’ meeting. Kaiser Franz Josef don’t hesitate to confess that they think the girls’ music is good, and the MonaLisa Twins also like the music the boys make and get all starry-eyed when they hear the AC/DC story. Maybe these four young people really are the stars of tomorrow. And even if they don’t make it to the top it won’t be because of them, their skills or their dedication. Maybe in this case “back” really is the way into the future. We keep our fingers crossed!