In a room above the galleries at Dundee Contemporary Arts, hours before the opening of the show. Melissa Logan is sewing; Merche Blasco is soldering contacts. Nadine Jessen, Krõõt Juurak and Faustine Kopiejwski are making preparations, so too the sound engineers/DJs Oli Horton and Steve Dawson, who often work with CoS.

Louise Gray : How did you end up in Munich after Melbourne?

Alex Murray-Leslie (who is busy screwing a guitar shoe together, making fine adjustments): Oh, there was this amazing jeweller – I was studying jewellery at the time – called Otto Kunzli and he came to do a lecture. I was so blown away I wanted to be in his class. Hermann Junger was before Otto, he was a legend. I did jewellery for ten years and then decided it’s not for me, you become so anal about everything. If you don’t do it right, then you might as well not do it. I couldn’t find a way to do it, but I love it. All my friends are jewellers.

[Anat Ben-David walks in]

Anat: Ah, noises. I first met the Chicks On Speed in Israel, in Jerusalem. I was an artist in residence at Habama [stage] theatre, Jerusalem, which is an extension of the school of visual theatre. My friends, the Pil and Galia Kollectiv saw the Chicks in The Face magazine. That was in 99. They did a show there. Two years later I moved to London to do an MA in fine art at Goldsmiths and then I met them again. At the beginning it was, 'Oh, yes, I’ll join you…'

Alex: I remember a show she did with little rooms, like matchboxes. Pil and Galia made the costumes, little models, and they had a serious guy from Sotheby’s to auction the stuff and they got us to play in the middle of all this. In the other room was all Anat’s work. It was amazing, I still remember. She had televisions and animated paintings. It was beautiful.

Anat: Not so much singing, I was doing sound and text and theatre based stuff, but with visual. And dance. I was doing ballet, I was a proper ballerina.

Krõõt Juurak: Oh?

Anat: You didn’t know that? I was doing my class everyday, da, da, da. Modern dance. Krõõt doesn’t believe it. I can show you all the moves. I am hiding it from her. I am shy. Krõõt, you didn’t know that – I was!

Alex: The Chicks started in April 97. I document everything. Me, Melissa, Kiki…

Anat: I am showing her the moves! Krõõt, you didn’t know, you didn’t know I was a ballerina.

Alex: Kiki had this incredible collection of shoes and this is how we...

Anat: I am showing her [a pirouette and grand battement]. Now you believe me.

Alex: ... got her involved in CoS.

Melissa Munich: 1967

Alex: We said to Kiki, 'We need your shoes'. We got her shoes. We put them in the video. She had this shoe fetish – she was a stylist. She was a stylist for Vogue, travelling all the time, high fashion, jet set. We were art students – no one was really into fashion there.

LG: When you started doing your mock band paraphernalia and parties did you have a concept of yourselves as a band?

Melissa Logan: Yes, it was a concept right away.

Alex: We lived together in the same building and we were the Chicks On Speed.

Mel: It was collective, doing these projects, it was performative. The evenings that we did were really a platform where it wasn’t a gallery or the school. It was a place where you could do whatever you want. Something like the Cabaret Voltaire. [I came to Munich because] I couldn’t really study in America any more. It was so discouraging there. As a student you weren’t taken seriously there. In Germany there was a system where one worked under one professor, you exhibited in school.
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LG: There was a confidence that you had a future in art.

Mel: Yes, an old-fashioned European respect for artists that didn’t exist in America at the time – it does now, but it is very much job-fixated and money-fixated. People study art now to make money.

LG: Did the Chicks have a manifesto as such?

Alex: We did, yeah. We had the Box Set. It was more of a Fluxus-like piece, we had our first mix tape in it, our first T-shirt. I think that the manifesto was in a way an interview that we gave, we created a fake interview. We have had many manifestos, they have all changed.

Mel: It was tacky band merchandising, a poster.

Alex: We dressed up like air hostesses for that one, with Kiki doing styling.

Mel: Right away, we said we would do everything and not specialise in doing one thing good. We are just going to do everything and when we’ve done that we are not going to perfect it, we’re going to move on to the next stage. So from the beginning, it was developing new ideas, but not perfecting them. I think we’ve gotten more patient that way, for example, with the shoe guitar – an idea that develops over years and then four years later, we have a prototype.

LG: Do the shoe guitars conform to ordinary ones? Are there four-stringed ones, etc? They have different gauges of wire. The three-stringed shoe has bass strings.

Alex: No, it was more of an aesthetic reason on this one. And also because this one is put through a lot of effects pedals, so we’re relying on it creating a lot of delay for our jam sessions and distortion. It really sounds like a guitar, that one, but we use the others for tapping, hitting against other materials.

LG: But there are some shoes suitable for picking. No fret boards?

Alex: No! Sorry! Next time! They have pre-recorded sounds. One guy who works with Cristian Vogel had an amazing plastic thing with a laser beam in it that would make the strings vibrate. Amazing gadget! We made them as part of this experiment, a progression of the high-heeled shoes, but really this is just one version. There is a relationship with Lady GaGa, we’ve spoken to her stylist, and showed her the first shoe and it was declared a little conservative, so Max said we have to make a wow shoe, because the other one wasn’t so wow. This is his word. The wow factor. But what I am trying to say is that after this, maybe we’ll go on to do a different type, because this does connect to a language of fashion and style that is happening right now. It’s actually something Grace Jones started off, the wow factor,

LG: But there is an inversion of history here.

Alex: Totally!

LG: Once people would have tried to shoehorn you into a nascent electroclash and then Lady GaGa appears.

Alex: Let me tell you something. You know a guy called Paul Zone? Unknown, but he knows everything. He was around for a lot of periods of music. He was 11 and hanging out with everyone in [70s] New York. Joey Ramone said to him, 'If you want to experience life, you have to learn to cut hair first.' So he taught him to cut hair, and he did styling for them all, went into styling, worked with Lydia Lunch. And took photos. He went on to be in Man 2 Man, the electro band, “Male Stripper In A Female Bar” [she sings] through a lot of style from glam to punk to post-punk, this supergay Hi-NRG, very Moroder inspired. I talked to him and he said that the movement never succeeded because songwriting wasn’t in it, and that’s why …. Waves, top of wave and then it crashes….

Alex: Some of the slogans downstairs are from there. 'Don’t do it yourself, do it with everybody else.' We made a manifesto with us and Douglas Gordon, Kathi Glas, AL Steiner, Anat, 'If you can’t say it in one sentence, it can’t be sold.' That was from Super magazine.

Mel: Another was 'We might take off our skirts, but we won’t put on any pants.' The first song we did was Daniel Miller’s [of The Normal] “Warm Leatherette” with DJ Hell [aka Helmut Geier]. The first Chicks retrospective was in 2004, in Wolfsburg.

Mel: A curator had invited us. We had known him since Munich where as part of the art programme they had introduced an electronic music workshop with Cologne minimal Techno composer Jörg Burger. Alex and I decided that we would become electronic musicians [laughter]. There were all these serious Cologne guys. It was 98.

Alex: 97!
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Mel: This was our first time making electronic music with these minimalists. Alex and I were saying it has to be louder and there have to be vocals

Alex: Jörg thought we were freaks.

Mel: He was famous, part of the Kompakt posse. So anyone on the course thought we were a little bit crazy, we were running around recording vocals.

Alex: Jörg didn’t take it seriously. Until later on.

Mel: At art school Alex’s prof supported us, but I was in a different school. We were doing performance and going on tour with the Seppi bar and bringing it into museums and sometimes have a container and ship it next to an opera house. Using what open space there was around. When it went in this direction, my professor said, 'If you are collaborating with people, you should be collaborating with people in your class, because the class is your family and you should certainly not be collaborating with people from different genres.' So this whole elitism was there. Eventually he said, 'I’m not going to give you a diploma' and then I went to Scotland and stole a book –– shit, what is his name? He paints beautiful murals, I knew his room-mate – The Assault On Culture by Stewart Home. I read some of it and thought, wow, this is great. And I didn’t give back the book and I felt bad. I photocopied the book and then I heard that Stewart Home was in town, in Berlin, so I went to the café where he was, said hello, and said I really like this book, would you sign it for me? It was a plagiarised copy. I know you write about plagiarism, so I have got this – he said 'I have a family to feed!' So I took his shipping address, sent him some records, some T-shirts for his kids. I said, when I got kicked out of art school The Assault On Culture was a very important next step to understand what my history is. He sent me a diploma back. It said, 'You have passed the Stewart Home test. Everything you do or touch is avant garde art.' It is really special that he is here again. Alex graduated with honours. But I have my diploma.

LG: What made that step into the performance genre possible? Where you interested in people like Martha Rosler, in live art?

Mel: No, performance is also really hard. It’s a part in art that is at its maybe pre-pubescence, or teenage stage, but it’s never been developed fully. It seems that there was also a lot of space to do things. It was extremely out – now it’s really popular again but at the time it was quite ignored and there was so much room for action, for situations, for breaking out of the stereotypical positions that really attracted us. It had this non-confining, non-definable thing.

LG: And in the mid-90s when you were beginning it was highly politicised, whether it was around gender, sex…

Mel: There was a lot of this urban art that was very dry, very conceptual, but the performance stuff? [Marina] Abramovic was very minimal, it was very boring at the time. It was a bit of a nothing space. What happened was that I used to sell quite a bit of my painting, and eventually I sold I think 24 paintings that I had painted in two days; after that I couldn’t paint any more.

Mel: Yes, because it didn’t feel creative any more. It felt like I was making a product and I knew I wasn’t studying art. This was the breaking point of realising that that’s not what art is, and then the realisation of developing new things – this adventure – was what art is for me. And not being alone in the studio, that wasn’t the attractive part, although it’s quite romantic. That was the breaking point for me. This realisation that isolation is the enemy – that was another slogan – because of course you get together as a gang and in the number of people there is a certain power you have. Very soon it came to this group thing. A lot of people don’t know how to function in groups. We would organise things, especially Alex. Alex is the insane organiser of things, especially getting funds. Even though we weren’t from Germany, we would get the German government to fund our flyers. We had jobs to get us through school, scooping ice creams, then moved up to hanging shows, hung up Bosch and Warhol, doing these long hours, talking all the time. We would use their offices to do our sneaky things, use the fax, make long-distance calls at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. This really weird marble building made by Hitler as the centre of art for the world, with all the Nazi furniture in the cellar.

Mel: A group, a clan.

Alex: A project.

Mel: A like group.

LG: It feels like a group with a semi-permeable membrane, people come in and out.

Mel: That’s a new development though. In the very beginning it was like that, but because of the music it became three very fast. Me, Alex and Kiki. That was OK, but then it had, it seemed, a good development. Three people have a certain dynamic, but after a while, things begin to block. You begin to anticipate what someone will say before they say it. You see this in groups sometime and it can get negative and aggressive.
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LG: Has it happened organically? Eg with Anat, you saw her in Jerusalem, she saw you a few years later.

Mel: Everything has its story. With her, for example, it’s happened over years. She started coming on tour and doing visuals for us. Then I had a baby and she stepped in doing live performances. And then we worked a lot with her, but then it also became difficult the extent to which one is a member and she has worked more on her solo projects for a while. She now works with us as a collaborating artist. It was hard to find a structure to function in this way. Very fast, one falls into hierarchies and a pyramid structure with – yeah, us three at the top and then the others. After having a kid, I wanted to also concentrate on other art projects and then push to collaborate with other artists and slowly break that down. Slowly we found other structures of working – in circles of overlapping concentration like a Venn diagram, yeah. That helped a lot. Then we thought we should become more democratic and that got really messy and really hard. So we said, OK, Alex and I are core members, the others are part-time members.

LG: At this moment in time, your part-time members are…

Mel: It’s not so clearly defined. We have AL Steiner in New York, but then Kathi [Glas] has a baby but she makes the outfits from Berlin, so it’s actually really messy and sometimes it makes one’s head hurt, but it’s also good that way. We feel alive. So AL Steiner, who’s an artist and activist, will say, 'I need music for my video' – she’s just made a feminist porn video that is showing at PS1 – and she needs it in two weeks. So we send over stuff, but we also say, we are sending a box over for the Armory [exhibition], please go and put up the installation for our gallerist. It’s like that. It’s not clearly defined in a business way.

LG: When I was talking about live art I was thinking how politicised it was then – that a group of women could never be spoken about outside this process because a male group is the default option so often.

Mel: Yes.

LG: How do you feel about this? Can CoS work in a way that men don’t and what might that be?

Mel: OK. Yeah, from the first interview, we have been asked about feminism being female, and we were really confused by that. That was the first reaction because you don’t realise that, you don’t have a word for that, you do what you do. We were confused and aggressive: what do you mean, we’re feminists? We’re just making our work. And then, at the time, I had a really political boyfriend, who said, yes, you guys are really political, if you’re not feminists you can’t do what you want to do. It doesn’t mean that there’s a definition and you have to fit with it – you can make your own definition of it – and then it was oh yeah! But it took that step. It happens to a lot of women, that they are cornered by this cliché, that they are being told what they are and they don’t have the power of their own definition.

LG: The world re-orientates itself and you see it in a different way. You cannot unsee it.

Mel: Yes, you step over a line.

Mel: We get along with them very well.

Alex: We have their Herstory to read on the toilet.

Mel: AL Steiner, the NY member, hijacked some of their work, their Advantages Of Being A Women Artist poster. She scratched out women and put in lesbian – made it more radical, thought they weren’t being radical enough – and then exhibited it. I think some of them laughed at it, others were, oh, she’s hijacking our art.

Alex: Frieda Kahlo liked it.

LG: When new collaborators are drawn in is it through your action or theirs or are you looking for a particular talent?

Mel: Um, I don’t know. It is all so different, I can’t say in general.

Mel: Alex found her on MySpace as Lady GlaGla and we invited her to Girl Monster in Hamburg. I was surfing around and I found their single, just released on vinyl, they looked like they were falling over. Their energy reminded me of The Slits. I saw her drumming and thought we had to ask her to be in CoS. We never actually invite people, but I said "Do you want to come on tour with us next week?" and she turned round and said sure. Ann Shenton [of Add N To X], she worked with us for a while.
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LG: Anat, you were with Habama in Jerusalem.

Anat: [The Chicks] came to perform in the theatre, the Pil and Galia Kollectiv – artists/curators now in London – brought the Chicks On Speed.

Anat: Oh, I didn’t. I thought they were awful! [deadpans]. I felt really at home, I liked the energy, the open-endedness of it, and nonchalance. I found it really fresh and exciting and really beautiful. Later when I moved to London I saw them again in – what’s this big thing that somebody curates? Robert Wyatt’s Meltdown.

Alex: Did we do that?

Anat: You did it.

Alex: Oh. I remember now. With Kim Gordon. A jam session with her.

Anat: In 2001. I was so excited, I went right to the front and everyone followed. I invited them to speak at Goldsmiths for my course. It was great, pretty wild, we had an afterparty in the hotel … I don’t think you were there. Pretty rock and roll.

Alex: Really? Anat, you’re so wild.

Anat: Melissa asked me to help with videos in Berlin. Popaganda was my Goldsmith’s project [and first album]. My idea was to quickly become a pop star in order to study the connection between the pop star and the fascist leader.

Alex: You have to tell her about the Hugo Boss party. I got in trouble over this.

Anat: There’s too much to tell.

Alex: The truth will out.

Anat: Alex is very wicked. I wanted Hugo Boss to give me some outfits for the Popaganda project because they created the style for the Nazis, the SS uniform. I thought it was funny also to ask them to sponsor me. I wrote them emails, I said that the show, Wonder Years in Berlin, curated by Avi Pitchon [at the Neuen Galerie fur Bildende Kunst in 2003], was being made by a second-generation Israeli artist and they said, 'We don’t want anything to do with you or any of this, we don’t want to talk about our past.' Don’t mention the war! Don’t you dare to get in touch! I thought, what a shame. This was in 2003. The Wonder Years show was quite controversial. People broke the taboos about what you are supposed to do in relation to the holocaust. I did videos which took Dietrich songs and created modern pop songs out of them, did a mash-up with 80s tunes. Anyway, meanwhile, nothing to do with this, Alex got a request for CoS to be involved in a Hugo Boss party. It was a huge party, it cost millions of euros, Alex was DJing. One room was huge, like an ice cube, with sushi; the other one was, guess what? Fire. I brought my friend Tamy Ben-Tor, she is a very famous artist in New York. She did electro-Yiddish, traditional songs; I did Popaganda, which used a lot of stuff, music and images relating to the Second World War. I had a video with me doubled up in a swastika shape. I was wearing I think loads of gaffer tape or maybe latex. Everyone was drunk, they didn’t realise what was going on. At the end, I announced, 'It’s really great to be here. Thank you very much, Hugo Boss, for bringing us here. It’s amazing to be part of this wealth, but it is all based on your participation in the Second World War. This is based on the past. It all started when Hugo Boss designed the really beautiful outfit for the SS. It is all about power and art.' There was silence. And then the next day…

Alex: I had calls from high up people in Hugo Boss asking if I knew anything about this…

Anat: So that was it. Since then I have been collaborating with the Chicks. I am an artist and I do performance and music. I did a show in the Substation Project Space in Margate, created a performance with imaginary performers, Die Muschel von Margate, inspired by Weill and Eliot, and drawings. I'm also doing a practical PhD at Kingston University, and going to do an opera – and also working against opera. Just got a scholarship, yeah, it’s good.

Alex: A definite concept. Each object-instrument will have a chapter, information, texts, performance details and tech references and specs so it acts as an open source document, also as a manual.

Merche Blasco: Nice! [She is under the table soldering a contact to one of the shoes.]

Alex: What will happen here at DCA until August is the weaving, a film programme we have put together, with films that have inspired us like that Peter Whitehead one, Tonight Let’s All Make Love In London [1967], a fantastic one with a Pink Floyd concert and Yoko Ono, and Bauhaus films. Plus AL Steiner, really mixing up inspirations. The weaving is going to grow and grow and take over the space. The Bauhaus women were so sad. They were only allowed to be in the weaving workshop.

Anat: Did you read [Sadie Plant’s] Zeroes And Ones? The way a computer is built is a bit like a loom. You programme a loom like a computer.
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With Judith Knight, curator of exhibition, head of arts at DCA.

Judith Knight: At Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA). I was very much interested at looking at the crossover between different disciplines but I was interested in them as a band at that time and their history in regards to the visual arts and performance practice. They appeared at MIMA’s pre-opening programme along with other artist bands like Martin Creed, Bob & Roberta Smith, Juno Projects. I was always very much more interested in looking at their practice and their relationship to history. I thought that refers to Tristan Tzara.

LG: Yes, the gestural vocabulary is very Cabaret Voltaire and earlier, the turn of the century Viennese movements.

Judith: Also agit prop. The title is a double negative, plus the Fluxus-inspired imperative – everything is forbidden, no thinking, no living. There is something in that energetic play, particularly today with all these rules, categorisations, definitions. It is interesting that they are playing with these.

LG: Do they fit into a feminist critique? Rosler, Valie Export.

Judith: I think they do. The contradictions in their work make it interesting. So they are very into the handmade but have also worked with the most amazing designers to create the shoe guitar which has a really high production value. Then they also have work which has a very low production value. They do play in a very serious way with some of these art-historical critiques. Think of the video they made where they play deliberately with the Yves Klein performances. There is a serious aspect to it, although if they went down that route it would negate what the whole is.

LG: They can be seen too much as a band and that occludes what else they do. The stage craft is rough and ready at points, but to focus on this as the sole mode of presentation is wrong.

Judith: It’s quite interesting because they fall between a lot of those issues: neither art, nor music – but in fact they are all those things. There is some seriously interesting thing about not playing a guitar, about trying to create a shoe guitar out of a feminine [object]. It’s quite an aggressive thing, a stiletto heel. When you unpick the work, there is a serious and interesting critique in there. Also the spontaneity and the way they deal with these issues is effective. At DCA, one live performance, which is being filmed and then being shown in the gallery. Again, this was a challenge for us: how do you create a show of performative practice? An ongoing performance. The Fashion Archive (2007) is in the introductory space, a clothes rail. I watch my child, at nine, do this – ripping off clothes, putting new ones on, a consumerist introduction. That statement from the banners, Create under all circumstances. It links with keeping a tension and antagonism there. A whole series of object instruments are here: the Theremin tapestry, the hats made with Christophe Coppens, amazing shoe guitars made with Max Kibardin, some prints they have made especially – they used a motif from a sound speaker and created a design which is being woven on another object instrument, the loom; and so they have created within the space a weaving studio with Scottish weavers led by Morwenna who will weave throughout. The design has a reference to Bauhaus, African textiles.

LG: The tunics, and hangings, Alex was telling me about fabrics printed in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Judith: Melissa was meant to be here working, but she got stuck in Abidjan because of the volcano. She called and said, but I am making these incredible banners with statements on, being made by sign writers in Abidjan. She was there on a project with Nadine on the Girl Monsters event. They are quite utopian statements, linking to early modernist statements. It has been fantastic working with them, it is so live and spontaneous.
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With Anat Ben-David

LG: I am interested in what you are saying that the CoS are like an organism.

Anat: At the beginning there is a general idea and you don’t know what to expect of the process; at least for me this is the experience, I realise what it is I need to do and you just grab the job you need and make sure it’s finished on time. By the end, it’s really intense. Last night, you saw it - it was crazy, Mel was sewing, Alex was fixing the shoes, I was editing the projection, then there is the climax, performance, which is like the ultimate release. I think this pressure contributes to the show. You’re multi-tasking, you are from the cleaner to the superstar, documenting, performing.

LG: Other than the fact that your solo projects do tend to be spent working alone, what is the difference between your own work and your CoS work?

Anat: I think fundamentally the Chicks are more like this organism that has no head to it. Of course, it is Melissa and Alex who lead the whole swarm, but sometimes it’s really interesting because you don’t feel yourself so much. You become part of this thing – which is good. With my practice, it’s me, me, me, which is sometimes too much. It can be demanding and reflective and extremely intensive - with the Chicks, it’s more freeing.

LG: The times I have seen you on stage it has been about the power of performer; all that charismatic power necessary is condensed and focused on this one figure. Then moving into the Chicks, it is a swarm, something to lose yourself in. It is an interesting way to talk about them.

Anat: Yes. My research started with the fascist leader and the pop star and using the power of the stage to propagate, to create this political statement. I was interested in alienation; you are yourself and you are the puppet, the performer, that you operate. In this context, when you’re in CoS, you are another thing which is not yourself. It is easier to become that because you are in a group and you are completely alienated from yourself. With my own practice, I create characters, alter egos, which help me alienate myself from it.

LG: Do you find it easy to move back and forth between these personae, the diffuse Chickness and the puppet soloist?

Anat: Yes. I am really lucky because I enjoy this process, whereas other people – famous people, ones working with their personae – get tormented. What is the real one? What is real? With me, it’s this lifelong study. I am interested in exactly that, in becoming this other: and being easy to change – this is what I do, this is art, this is the stage, this is me. After I graduated from Goldsmiths in 2003 I was drawn to the Chicks and doing shows with them. I was part of them, but also doing my own thing. It was so hard to make a statement. Then I released my solo album Popaganda, then people realised I had my own thing. Little by little, I began to feel much better. Now it’s very clear that I do my own thing and I am also part of them. But if I were to merge completely with Chicks I wouldn’t be happy. I think Melissa and Alex are in a way, thought they are CoS, are trying to create an individuality of their own. So Alex is more like the fashion, gadget end; Melissa is more like the arty, theatre, wild thing. They are very clear about it: that Alex’s interests are not so interesting for Melissa and vice versa – but it all comes together in the Chicks, everything comes together, that’s why it’s all diverse. The cigar boxes and the shoes are the perfect example. The shoes are shiny and neon and perfect, that’s what Alex is like, she loves that, shoes, fashion, jewellery, because she’s a jeweller; then Melissa is handmade.

Anat: She is a newcomer. I don’t know her that well. She works with those guys in art space in Barcelona. She knows the box and shoes guy. She has her own solo practice. She is so sweet and so talented. Krõõt came via Nadine. She’s a dancer. Kathi Glas, who makes the costume wasn’t here, but she’s a big influence and a big member. She started around the same time as I did, 2003. There was a moment when I couldn’t go on tour and so she did, first time on stage. She became a Chick. She’s really important. AL Steiner, too, this big dykey New Yorker I dragged in. There are a lot of people drawn in, but the people who stick it’s like I always knew them. It’s like my family. As soon as we meet, it’s like, we have the same blood. With AL, it was in Miami, we did a project for Jeffrey Deitch and AL was there and she loved the show of course. And then we met at the party and through me she met the Chicks and they were off.

LG: Do you see yourselves getting old together?

Anat: I’m sure. We’ve been through everything together. Ups and downs. By this point, I can say that we will be old ladies together.