Bonus: Bossy Love — I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss: Amandah Wilkinson Talks The Path From Operator Please Teen Stardom To Cult Cool With Bossy Love
Her obsession with the 2001 film Josie And The Pussycats led to creating a teenage rock band, but Amandah Wilkinson has found her own unconventional road to success writes Maria Lewis.
In the late naughts, if you were any kind of self-respecting pop culture connoisseur with your finger on the pulse you knew who Operator Please were. The pop-punk indie band comprised entirely of teenagers had burst on to the scene in 2005 after winning a high school Battle Of The Bands competition and experiencing a fairy tale ascent. With a distinctly Lego aesthetic in bright, colourful, co-ordinated outfits and side-swept fringes, they broke through at a time when music charts were dominated by RnB music from Usher, Lil Wayne, Flo Rida, you name it, making their success story all the more unlikely. “I had a conversation with somebody about this,” says Amandah Wilkinson, the band’s frontwoman and founder. “Pretty much all the odds were against me. I didn’t look the part – this is in inverted commas, by the way – I didn’t look the part, I was underage, the whole band was underage. I was brown so people were expecting me to sing RnB and I played guitar and I sung this shouty kind of pop, punky surf music. There were so many rumours going around ‘oh, they’re manufactured’ and it’s just like ‘yeah,right!’ If someone was to manufacture an underage punk band don’t you think they would just make everybody all girls and all skinny, tiny blondes and white?”
Having moved over from New Zealand to Australia in the nineties with her older sister, Elvira, Indonesian mother and English father, the idea of becoming a teenage rock star was a nonsensical one to Wilkinson growing up on the Gold Coast … right up until she saw a 2001 film called Josie And The Pussycats in cinemas. “I was immediately obsessed with it and also immediately obsessed with the soundtrack when it came out,” she says. “I remember going to Sanity and buying the soundtrack. This was in the midst of when I was a sponge, I mean, everyone’s still a sponge, you know? This was, like,my formative years. I basically learnt how to play every single guitar part and bass part on that record by ear and that was just from playing it over and over again, listening to the lead guitar parts, listening to the rhythm guitar, listening to the bass, and just learning how to play all of it. I would spend hours replaying that record and learning how to play all the riffs on it. It was one of the records that taught me how to play guitar.” The film and the music was “formative” to Wilkinson, dropping in her first year of high school and the proceeding years saw her not only refine her skill as a guitarist and as a singer, but as a songwriter as well.
When she was nearing her final years at Elanora State High School, she decided to put a plan into action. “Basically every year the school has a talent quest or a Battle Of The Bands,” Wilkinson says. “I always quietly played guitar and wrote songs from eighth grade, but I noticed during Battle Of TheBands it was only ever a token girl singer or something or it was just all guys. I was always a confident kid, but I was never confident enough to get up on stage and do something in front of a whole bunch of people. But that kind of all changed. I was like ‘yeah I’m just going to do it’. I was maybe in my second last year of high school and I thought ‘I’ve sat on the sidelines long enough, I can do this’.” So like her school’s very own Nick Fury, she Avengers assembled everyone she knew who could play music, all teenagers, all fellow students. “I saw Ashley, who was the bass player, I used to see him walking around with a bass guitar because he was obviously taking lessons at school,” says Wilkinson. “I just remember his haircut was really … he had an emo kind of hairdo, like, full jet black. He always had great sunglasses on, he had the high white socks, he always had music badges, he had Hole and Death From Love, all that kind of music. I literally just walked up to him one day and was like ‘hi! I’m getting a band together for Battle Of The Bands and we’re gonna play things like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ and he was like ‘oh my god, fuck yeah, I’m in’ …
I literally went around school and picked people who I thought were a bit weird, ya know, because I resonated with that. That’s how we started.”
Operator Please ended up winning their school Battle Of The Bands with the crew “handpicked” by Wilkinson and their debut performance went so well, they started entering competitions outside of school too. “We were cocky,” she recalls, but they were also good as they won those as well and started to gain a reputation in the Gold Coast music scene. “I tried to play local shows and I just hassled venues until they let us play,” says Wilkinson. “Basically after that, Myspace came along, I uploaded a couple of our demos to Myspace, and within about four months or something I was getting phone calls and emails from major labels. I thought it was a prank at first, then realised it was real. I met with a couple of them and we got flown over to America to showcase by six of these labels and (it) kinda went on from there.” As far as origin stories go, it’s suitably some Archie Comics type shit and their rise as a band of underage teens was just as meteoric.
Operator Please’s debut album Yes, Yes Vindictive was released in 2007 with the big hit Just A Song About Ping Ponggoing global. It was one of the most popular songs in Australia for the year 2007, coming in at 18 just behind Wolfmother’s Joker And The Thief at 17, and it helped propel them to cool indie band status. The track was used in a season four episode of CSI: New York and hit the indie charts in the UK too, with the teens winning the ARIA Award – presented to them by Rove McManus and Missy Higgins at the time – for Breakthrough Artist – Single. It might seem like a whirlwind from the outside, but their success wasn’t accidental: it came down to a lot of hard work and meticulous study. “I was a full on nerd about,” says Wilkinson. “I would go to the library and look up how to start a small business and I did all of the homework on how to manage it properly from a monetary point of view at the early stages. Like, how do I make money off this? How do I sell EPs? So I set up a PO Box, everything was DIY, every single thing was DIY, learnt how to screen print, my sister was a designer so she helped with photos and design. There was a very specific kind of aesthetic because I knew that we had to be packaged to look legit … I was like ‘right, everything needs to be done properly, nobody needs to know that we’ve printed this on a Canon Inkjet printer … it just needs to look good.”
On another level, a big part of her ambition was also a drive to bust out of the mould she felt was predetermined for her. “I’ve always been a curious person,” says Wilkinson. “Even from that age I was like ‘there has to be something more than just going to university, spending five years there, then going out and getting a job and working the rest of your life’. There has to be something more. That was the curiosity, that was the question, and me daring to do something that everybody said that I would fail at. There was a little bit of ‘I will show you’ … My drive was I wanna go out and be able to see the world, how am I gonna do that? I’m gonna try and do it doing something that I really love to do. I even think back now and I don’t know how I did it, but I think it was that curiosity and that desperation to leave the nest and discover.” Wilkinson and Operator Please certainly got to do that, as they weren’t one hit wonders. Their debut album was packed with bops, with Get What You Want also breaking big not just in Australia – where it was a top 30 hit – but internationally once it was used in an ad for the airline Virgin Blue and in video games UEFA Euro 2008 and Test Drive Unlimited 2.
Leave it Alone rounded out a trio of majorly successful songs for the band, who were getting rave reviews from key pop culture figures at the time like Zane Lowe in the UK and Perez Hilton in the US. Their music was used on cult television shows like Chuck and they toured colleges in North America and all through the UK and Europe with acts like Bloc Party and Maximo Park. They began playing bigger and bigger stages on music festivals like the Big Day Out, Splendour In The Grass, Glastonbury and Leeds Festivals, with better and better time slots. “Honestly it is the stars aligning, it is,” says Wilkinson. “When I see young bands now taking what’s happening to them for granted, I feel like walking up to them and shaking them and being like ‘no, you need to hold on to this and work it for as long as you can’. Because those opportunities don’t come up every day and when they do, you have to take them and go for it … It was crazy. I’ve been to so many places and I’ve learnt so much and you learn so much about relationships and about yourself. It is lightning in a bottle. I think a lot of the thing is when you come down from it as well you need to learn how to manage that too. Man, I could write a book.”
Amongst all of their touring, album promotion, music videos and media interviews, the band was also writing and recording new music for their second album – Gloves – which would drop in 2010. It was a more refined sound and more refined look, while staying true to their roots and kinetic energy as an act. Yet behind the scenes, the teens were now moving into their early twenties and dealing with all kinds of different pressures that come with the magnifying glass of fame. There had been a line-up change as members reassessed their dreams and goals as young adults, while Wilkinson was dealing with intense scrutiny and bullying from within the Australian music industry itself. “Even when I first started it, I always had a thick skin and it just kept growing thicker,” she says. “It kept growing thicker. But I’m really grateful that I didn’t lose my sense of self.” Their first song off their new album – Logic – kickstarted the touring and promotion cycle again, with the follow-up track Back And Forth gettingfeatured in a movie for the first and only time: comedy For A Good Time Call, which premiered at Sundance in January, 2012. Just a weeks later, however, Operator Please were coming to an end. “It was so weird,” says Wilkinson. “I mean, there were some kids in the band who hadn’t finished high school. We ended the band at the time in which we would’ve naturally gone to university. It was kinda great because they got to see all of this stuff. I was at the age where I would’ve gone to university, you know? So it was this weird high school-uni growing up thing, like taking a seven-year gap year or something … Going through the ins and outs of a major label is weird. The whole thing - let’s not sugar coat it - the music industry is fucking strange. There are so many elements to it … like after the band kinda finished and – well, I’m confirming this now because we just quietly went on hiatus – after everything, we decided we were gonna give it a rest for a while, cos we’d been on tour forever, ever. Man, I think there were a couple of years where I maybe spent a week in Australia and then went and flew back out. So after everything died down for us, we kinda decided to go our separate ways and do our thing.”
For Wilkinson and her sister, that meant a new country, a new scene, and a new start in the UK as songwriter for a myriad of massive acts as well as herself. And with only two band members from Operator Please still in the music industry – her and drummer Tim Commandeur – it’s unsurprising that she couldn’t stay away. “I’m just a sucker for a pop song,” she says. “That’s what I write, I write pop songs. I was writing all of these pop songs that didn’t really fit Operator anyway and so I just kept them for myself.” That treasure trove of tracks proved to be fortuitous when Wilkinson crossed paths with John Baillie Jr of Dananananaykroyd at Fat Sams – a staple pub in the Scottish city Dundee. Friends for over a decade now, the pair began collaborating on new music together and formed the act Bossy Love. “I think this project for me has been all about getting back to the roots of doing exactly what you want and not having any interference,” says Wilkinson. “But that’s why clichés are clichés … you go back to doing what you want and you go through a discovery of realising that if you’re not being truthful with your music or with your art or anything that you do, then it’s really hard to be yourself. It’s not to say that I wasn’t doing that in Operator” I was being myself one hundred per cent myself and I got crucified for it. And when a lot of people ask me ‘how do you feel about that?’ I needed that, because it taught me that I could stand in the face of adversity always and that I was cool with being me. I don’t need everybody else to be cool with me being me, that’s fine, none of my business.” Bossy Love have been quietly slaying the scene over the past seven or so years, building a cultish reputation as they toured the UK and Europe with consistently stellar releases. The Guardian called their music “infectious, like Prince on a trampoline” and named their album Me + U one of the best albums of 2019, meanwhile BBC Radio 1 have dubbed them “one of the most exciting bands on the planet right now”. If that’s not a happy ending, it’s at least a self-defined one.
This article is a written version of the Josie And The Podcats bonus episode Bossy Love. Josie and the Podcats is a limited podcast series hosted by best-selling author, screenwriter and journalist Maria Lewis, and produced by Blake Howard of One Heat Minute. New episodes release every Sunday, with bonus episodes during the week.
