Bright Sparks

Undertakers, band managers and museum workers by day, pop-charged rockers by night, The Hot Damn! are a gang you’d want to join.

- Polly Glass

Gill Montgomery has come straight from the mortuary. Her mortuary, to be precise. Some rockers wait tables, others teach music or pick up temp work. The Hot Damn! frontwoman looks after dead people.

“It’s interesting,” she muses, of her day job running a funeral home in South East London. “It’s very hands-on. I think you’re either for it or you’re not.”

Stiffs notwithstanding, The Hot Damn! seem like a band you’d go to the pub with. So that’s what we’re doing right now. Sitting outside at a London boozer on a balmy Monday evening, we’re meeting half the pop-rock quartet responsible for about 90 per cent of the colour in today’s British rock scene. Drummer Josie O’Toole promptly orders the pinkest drink on the menu. Montgomery is ready for a pint.

“You want to be memorable,” she says as talk turns to music. “I look at people like Iggy Pop or Alex Harvey, and they’re not amazing singers, they just have something. They make it interesting and fun. I never wanted to be an Adele. I just wanted to be different, be… not boring. If you’re boring, you’re fucked.”

Six-foot tall and slightly wired in her flip-flops, beachy skirt and hoop earrings, Montgomery has ‘something’. On stage she mixes childlike energy with a Billy Idol snarl. At Hot Damn! rehearsals – typically at 10pm, after everyone’s finished work and made it round the M25 to their base in Maidenhead – she and guitarist Laurie Buchanan, an undertaker, compare notes on the various leaking bodies they’ve handled.

Now, over her third beer and a plate of calamari, Montgomery relives the Iggy Pop concert in Glasgow that tuned her into the power of performance. “He was this seventy-five-year-old man, with a spray tan, running around with his top off and his nipples out, shouting at people. I was like: ‘That’s your job?! That’s amazing!’”