Up Yours! is the first song by The Verinos and here’s how it happened …

On 24th May 2021, Vim and Vixen booked a room at Leicester’s LCB Depot in order to write songs for a new band. We wanted to do it in public, so people could see us song writing as they walked past. We wondered whether any cool-looking women might walk past and then we could run out and recruit them for the band. It cost us £6 an hour but we got free wifi, a flipchart and when we bought Grays coffee, it was delivered to us in the middle of the meeting, so we felt like real creatives.

We didn’t know who else would be in the band, so had to write a simple song with just one chord. That chord was E, and we guessed the singing had to be a bit shouty. Vixen played her long-form melodica and Vim played all the different versions of E chord that she could – mainly ‘cowboy’ E and barred E at the 7th fret. Then we made a list of the kind of things people might say to us if we got on stage with a band of older women who couldn’t play very well. We knocked it into shape and a 1-chord song was born.

What the hell do you think you’re doing here?

Who let you into this song?

What on earth do you think you look like?

What have you got to say?

Up yours! Up yours! ………. Up yours!

Get over it! Get over it! Up Yours!

Why oh why are you even bothering?

Aren’t you embarrassed …at all?

Get a grip; exit by the gift shop,

What can you be thinking?

Up yours! Up yours! ………. Up yours!

Get over it! Get over it! Up Yours!

Once we’d got the band together, after our first rehearsal on 5th July 2021, Up Yours! was sounding great, especially with the call-outs and general mayhem, but the one chord was quickly expanded to a classic 3-chord sequence over the next few weeks, because bass-player VD complained that playing just E was boring. So welcome A and B and fancy keyboard parts, and by August, we introduced a key change at the end of the song .. “Just play the same pattern two frets up”

We booked a recording studio 4pm – 8pm 6th September 2021.

3pm With Vi still at work, four of us met and talked about how we were going to do a speedy session. Then we had a cold drink at The Tree.

We recorded the instrumental parts for two songs all together playing live and then added the vocals afterwards, when Vi arrived. For the shouty bits, we all stood at a distance round one microphone.

With a rough mix, we were ready to film a video, but the light was going so we quickly went onto the fire escape and played the song again.

We’re amazingly grateful for studio engineering and photography skills of Wong and Hancock which made this easy for us. And we’re back in the studio in early October!