Raised in a cult, Chris Owens from Californian duo Girls weaned himself off his bizarre upbringing using drugs and punk, before being rescued by a multi-millionaire and setting off on a sonic adventure. And the music is as good as the back story. He talks to JIM CARROLL
IT’S ONE HELL of a back story. While most bands have to embellish the narrative to make themselves sound interesting, Christopher Owens from Girls has no such problems. All he has to do is mention the religious cult he grew up in, his prodigious drug intake over the years and how a multi-millionaire philanthropist saved his life. All of these are subjects he’s more than willing to share with any interviewer who calls.
In some ways, Owens’ tales could easily overshadow the music, were it not for the fact that the cracked ballads, fuck-you anthems and freaky Californian pop moments created by Girls are quite a trip in themselves.
The songs on their debut album, Album, are a blur of emotions, from hurt, fragile fragments about heartbreak, lost friendships and childhood to powerful affirmations of life and the lure of second chances. Throughout the album, the other half of Girls, Chet "Jr" White, works up a storm of fuzzy, ethereal, sun-soaked sounds, evoking a magical, hazy sonic world of wonder. You'll listen to a tune such as Lust for Lifeagain and again trying to work out how something so simple could be so compelling.
But before those songs saw the light of day, Owens was living a very different life. His parents were members of the Children of God cult, a religious group formed by David Berg in California in 1968. The Children Of God were the kind of cult that gives other cults a bad name, with a chequered history involving child sex-abuse charges, prostitution and murder.
“You don’t really know what it’s like growing up in a cult until you actually leave, because you don’t how to live any other way,” says Owens. “It’s only when I think of my life now and think of it then that I realise what really happened. To me at the time, it was totally normal. But when I became a teenager, I just started to see that I was growing up in a very weird, different way.”
The cult was where Owens first got involved with music. He and the other kids were encouraged to learn and play songs by Elvis and The Beatles. Those who showed any talent, like Owens, were sent out to busk to make money for the cult. On the streets, he’d play songs by The Everly Brothers and Fleetwood Mac. While busking, he’d meet “regular” people, and soon began to realise that life in the cult was not all it was cracked up to be.
His teenage curiosity then led him to other music. “Some of the older kids would tape stuff from the radio, and we learned to play those songs on our crappy guitars. It was stuff like Guns N’ Roses, Michael Jackson, Bon Jovi, that kind of stuff. It sounded just amazing, foreign and weird to us because we weren’t used to it. There was sort of an underground scene with kids passing around tapes. If you got caught, it was a big deal.”
When Owens was 16, he escaped to Armarillo, Texas, where he embraced punk, drugs and anything else the Children of God frowned upon. “Punk and taking drugs was a release for me and my way of dealing with my fucked-up life and a reaction to those years. I mean, it’s not like I could forget about it.”
It was in Amarillo that the out-of-control youngster met Stanley Marsh 3, an eccentric multi-millionaire philanthropist, artist and businessman. Marsh took Owens under his wing and gave him a job and somewhere to stay.
After a couple of years working for Marsh (“I used to mow the lawns on his ranch, and then I became his personal assistant after a year, and I also did a lot of music and art”), Owens headed for San Francisco. He played in a band called Curls with his then girlfriend before hooking up with White to form Girls.
In between getting stoned and working together on slacker songs, the duo clicked and Owens’ songs gave Girls the focus they needed. “It was really the first time I ever wrote music for myself,” he says. “It started out as fun rather than as some grand plan to record an album. We could only afford to use really shitty rehearsal spaces late at night and all our equipment was broken so that’s how it turned out. But the songs got a good reaction from people and that encouraged us to keep going.”
Owens stresses, though, that they would have happily used better studios and bigger budgets if they had been available. “We didn’t set out to sound messy and lo-fi. If we could, we probably would have hired session musicians, gone into a smart studio, and made a huge record, but we just couldn’t. This is our DIY pop record.”
Maybe next time out, it will be a different story. Owens talks about having “six albums of material” written and ready to go. “I really want to make those albums and I don’t really care if we have to stay as poor as we’re now to do that. I’ve never done anything like this which makes me feel so alive.”
Albumis out now. Girls play Whelan's, Dublin, on March 1
