Spiderbait celebrate Janet English

In the near-decade since Spiderbait last released an album, their bass player and singer, Janet English, has completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She’s not sure if she wants to practise. “I was just really interested in how the brain works,” she says.

English is the owner of one of the most interesting brains in Australian music. At school, she excelled as a gymnast as well as at hockey, mime, theatre and art, before forming Spiderbait in 1991 with singing drummer Mark Maher (better known as Kram) and guitarist Damian Whitty (Whitt) in the Riverina town of Finley, New South Wales.

Kram was an accomplished musician but, back then, English could barely make it from one end of a song to the other. “She’s kind of an accidental hero in a way,” Kram says. “She was a painter and artist who sort of stumbled into music through her friends and then discovered that she had these incredible talents.”

Kram talks like he plays drums, at an overdriven mile a minute. English is more reticent. With Spiderbait marking their 30th anniversary last year, Kram had an idea: to celebrate English’s work in a single 33-track compilation, Sounds In The Key Of J.… Read more..

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