Notion 90: Wet Leg

We were joking about the ‘band name generator’ (do you remember that website?) that is the emoji keyboard. We just tried loads of different combinations, blindly thumbing the keypad. [The water and leg emoji] happened and we were like yeah, this feels right. The band was started as a bit of a joke, just for the fun of playing — so having a dumb name like Wet Leg is a good reminder to not take ourselves too seriously.

Rhian: I’ve worked so many weird jobs since leaving school… I’ve always wanted to do something with music and have worked a load of bad jobs so that I could still have the time and flexibility to do music. But actually, if I’m being totally honest, I just didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself and my life, and pretending to myself that I was trying to do music alongside all these crap jobs was the only way to stay sane. It was a very long and hopeless string of shitty jobs — mainly loads and loads of waitressing, but I’ve also been an ice marshal, a large-scale puppet operator at a weird theme park, a crazy golf caddy… Then a couple of years ago I got really lucky and fell into doing wardrobe assistant stuff for commercials and music videos, which I really, really love, but recently I’ve had to stop doing because we’re so busy with band stuff now.

I’d pretty much given up doing music altogether actually, because I was so busy doing the self-employed hustle thing and had finally found a job that I really loved. But then lockdown came along, shoots were cancelled and I moved back to the Isle of Wight. Hester and I made some music videos of our own and wrote some songs just for the fun of it and as something to keep us both busy and sane amidst the seemingly endless pandemic.

Hester: I dropped out of my first year studying music at uni, and got scooped up into the family business of making jewellery. Dropping out was a bit sad as I wasn’t sure if that would be the end of music and me, but I somehow managed to keep making music with my pals whilst also learning a new skill, one that I love so much. I’ve been pretty darn lucky, really.

I think we’re just trying to write fun songs that are a bit stupid and throwaway, but inevitably, yeah — some songs do end up being kinda laced with impressions of real people that we know. It’s hard to make anything without accidentally putting a bit of yourself and your own experience into it, however dumb and silly the subject matter. Whether you even consciously decide to do that or not, it’s just something that happens, I think.

In “Wet Dream” for example, that one probably came about when one of my exes went through a stage of texting me after we’d broken up telling me that he had a dream about me, that we were married and it was amazing… That’s probably where the inspo for “Wet Dream” came from, but I haven’t really thought about it ‘til now. It’s funny that.

Living on the Isle of Wight, it’d be difficult not to take advantage of living somewhere so beaut. All our music videos and press shots so far we’ve shot on the Isle of Wight, it’s just where we live so it’s kind of a no-brainer. It’s been the obvious and most natural thing to us, to choose our favourite locations on the island, take a camera and play around and see what happens. We’re both just a couple of country girls, so it’s fun to play around with these exaggerated small town cottagecore versions of ourselves in our visuals. It feels true to who we are and like a bit of a joke at the same time.