Matrimony's overlooked Aussie punk curio Kitty Finger gets vinyl reissue

Sydney's Matrimony – featuring Dani, Sybilla, Michael, Zeb and Polly – knocked out Kitty Finger in '89 when no one was looking.

Here's the scoop...

Sydney, Australia, 1988. It all began as something of an escapade. Polly Williams and Zeb Olsen decided to start a band, were soon joined by Sybilla Visalli and Michael O’Neill, and finally Dani Marich. Friends and keen music fans, they’d been seeing bands play In Sydney’s inner-city pubs regularly, and had seen enough bands to get a sense of how much fun making music could be. Musical influences were many and varied: Beat Happening, the Stooges, Sonic Youth, the Runaways, Lydia Lunch, Pussy Galore, Blondie, Jesus and Mary Chain, T. Rex, and the Velvet Underground. These were artists that broke boundaries, who were provocative, that challenged their audiences, and weren’t afraid to play by their own rules. Artists that you couldn’t ignore. 

 

Author/journalist David Nichols, then working for the Australian edition of Smash Hits, persuaded the staff that the office’s petty cash allotment (a fund raised by selling review copies of records) should be donated to Matrimony so they could make a record. Which is how the band unexpectedly found themselves in Sydney’s Fatboy Studios in 1989, making the opus that is Kitty Finger.

 

Fifteen songs tumbled out. All the songs were original, save for a reworking of the Scientists’ “Frantic Romantic,” which Matrimony transformed into something dreamier and more languid. Sybilla came up with the album’s title, finding the phrase “kitty finger”, taken from a book about exercising. The bold cover shot was equally inspired, with Sybilla doing the honors in a $2 photo booth. 

 

But Matrimony came apart as quickly as they’d come together, and by the time Kitty Finger was released, the band was no more. Copies of Kitty Finger made it to Calvin Johnson, the Olympia, Washington-based co-founder of Beat Happening and K Records. Zeb went to Olympia, and, to her surprise, found that people knew all about Kitty Finger. She ended up playing in local bands (the Go Team, Some Velvet Sidewalk, Viva Knievel) with the same musicians — Kathleen Hanna, Tobi Vail, Billy Karren — who would later form Bikini Kill. Thus Matrimony helped lay the groundwork for what was to come.

 

Bikini Kill always championed their predecessors in Matrimony, and at Kathleen’s urging, Bikini Kill’s record label Kill Rock Stars would reissue Kitty Finger in 1997. “Every time I listen to the Matrimony record I get super inspired,” Kathleen wrote the group in a letter, “and maybe some other girls will feel the same and start a good band for a fucking change.” Matrimony’s legacy lives on in their message to aspiring musicians everywhere; that, in Zeb’s words, “you didn’t have to be able to play really well or record expensively to be totally awesome, you just needed to really mean it. And Matrimony really meant it.”

Matrimony's Kitty Finger album is out on vinyl today (Friday, December 17) which you can get directly from Kill Rock Stars right here. Check out a couple of tracks following the hype below. 

"From the howling wind guitar over the swamp bass of "Refrigerator" through the off-kilter sour-voiced interpretation of the Scientists' "Frantic Romantic," which they recast from near power-pop to almost a dirge, Matrimony prove just how bad the good old days were." – Alternative Press

"This is the great lost riot grrrl album, released by a young mostly female (they had a boy drummer) band from Sydney in 1989. Something of a late-80's bridge between the Slits, Lydia Lunch & Bikini Kill" – Joe S. Harrington

"One of those mostly unheard instant classics that surface from time to time out of the mire of obscurity. Matrimony was a fantastic punk band in Sydney, Australia in the late 80's. The music is primitive, swampy, fun and catchy; like a sister to early Bikini Kill or a cousin of Lung Leg." – Heartstroke Records