Last August, Denmark-based Wall of Sound punk outfit The Courettes – who blend loves of ‘60s girl groups and garage rock — put on one of the purest rock n’ roll experiences we saw all year in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection when they headlined Kung Fu Necktie. The duo – comprised of husband/wife Martin Couri (drums, backing vocals) and Flavia Couri (vocals, guitar) – were gearing up for the September release of their fifth full-length, The Soul Of… The Fabulous Courettes (whose “California” features La La Brooks of The Crystals), courtesy of longtime home Damaged Goods Records. Flavia and Martin have been on the road basically ever since, continuing to connect with rock n’ roll fans all over the world, earning critical praise from a plethora of major publications, and enjoying everything they’ve built for themselves over the past decade. The Courettes are preparing to head back to North America and return to Kung Fu Necktie on September 18th. I recently got a chance to catch up with both Flavia and Martin to discuss their roots, the past year on the road, and what it takes to be a sustainable rock n’ roll band in the age of Spotify.
*Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Izzy Cihak: The last time we spoke was last August, about six weeks before the new album came out. What have been some of the highlights of touring and promoting it over the course of the past year? You’ve played a ton of shows and gotten a lot of critical acclaim.
Flavia Couri: I think since last October we played around 140 shows, or 125 last year, something like that, and there’s been many highlights. We got very good reviews, some big ones, like The Guardian from the UK. We also did the BBC Session with Marc Riley when the record came out. That was a great moment for us, playing live for millions of people on the radio, also because since I was a kid I had Beatles Live at the BBC, so I had this big dream of what it is to play the BBC.
We toured the US, we played SXSW in March, we did the West Coast; it was a very nice tour. It was maybe the best tour in the USA so far. We got a new booking agent in the US. We played UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Austria… many, many places [laughs]. The problem right now is that we’ve played so many gigs, sometimes it’s like, “Where were we last week?” It’s really becoming hard to look back, so I hope that when we’re older and we want to write a book about it we can remember stuff, because the recent stuff gets a little blurry [laughs].
Izzy: Yeah, it’s been like a year, and it continues for the rest of the year. The whole touring cycle is like a year and a half at least. It’s like an old school touring cycle.
Flavia: Exactly! Since 2021 we’ve been touring nonstop! And there are great things about to happen next year that are already booked. We’re gonna play Little Steven’s Underground Garage Cruise. Little Steven chose like the coolest song in the world, “California,” months ago, so we got on the radio. And he was doing the first cruise, and we were like, “Why are we not on the cruise?!?! It must be the coolest thing in the world!!” And then we get to play next year! We get to play with artists like The Sonics, so we’re really, really looking forward to that. And then we’re gonna support The Damned and Wembley.
Izzy: Yeah, I saw that! It’s them and Marc Almond and Peter Hook! It’s an enormous bill!
Flavia: Yeah! We were totally, absolutely thrilled, over-the-top, when it was confirmed. And then we got the news that it would be three support bands, and we would be the first, and we’re like, “Ohhh, no! Why are we the first? That sucks!” And then we saw the lineup and we’re like, “Oh my god!” Us, then Peter Hook is next, then Marc Almond… It’s a crazy lineup, so we’re absolutely looking forward to that. This is gonna be awesome, probably a highlight!
Izzy: On a related note, what are some of your favorite things about touring, in addition to just playing the shows themselves?
Flavia: Well, playing the shows themselves is the best time, but seeing the world and meeting people is amazing, getting to know that people are the same everywhere. When we toured Japan, a lot of people came to tell us, “Oh my god, Japan must be so different!” And we were like, “Yeah, it’s different, but it’s also the same.” It’s a big rock n’ roll community all over the world, people in Japan listen to the same records that we do. Then you tour a lot, you get to know a lot of people, and everybody’s passionate about the same thing. Actually, playing is such a small part, and then it’s meeting people, getting in touch with a community, other bands, music lovers, fans, DJs. When you actually go around the world, you just see people are people everywhere. Different colors, different languages, but, in the end, we all want the same thing. I think this is probably the coolest thing.
Izzy: You’re going to be returning to Kung Fu Necktie. What can be expected of the live experience this time around, both for those who saw you there last August and those who may be yet to see you? It was definitely one of the best shows of the summer last year.
Flavia: Thank you! We’re definitely putting some new songs in from The Soul Of… The Fabulous Courettes. I think we already played “Shake!” but we play around six of the new ones in the set, but we change a little bit every day.
Martin Couri: It’s a much bigger sound this time.
Flavia: A huge sound! We’ve been working on the production of the shows, we have our own sound engineer, and we have some tricks, so people can expect a much bigger sound. It’s a Wall of Sound with two people [laughs].
Izzy: You’ve been signed to Damaged Goods for a while now, which is such a cool label and has put out a lot of cool records over the past like 30ish years. How has it been working with them and just being a part of that label?
Martin: Signing with them was definitely a change in our career.
Flavia: It was a game changer.
Martin: It was a big milestone for us, and it was something we’re really proud of, because we’ve been fans of Damaged Goods and their releases for many years. That was actually our number one choice in the world of labels we wanted to use.
Flavia: It’s funny, because Martin would send them records and say, “Hey! We’re The Courettes and we would love to be on your label!” And they actually replied and signed us. It’s totally one thing that we thought was never gonna happen, but it did happen, and it shows a lot about their work ethics. They actually listened to the band without having anyone who knew them. And being in the same group as some of our heroes, like Billy Childish and The Delmonas and Thee Headcoatees, it’s out-of-this-world cool! And we’re part of the Christmas album, so when we saw the picture, together with all of them, it was like, “Oh my god, this is so cool!”
Martin: Yeah, that was a big one!
Flavia: We have it in our studio, the Christmas album! We’re big fans of Phil Spector’s Christmas album, so we’re so proud! We have it in our studio and look at it every time we do new music! It’s a good vibe.
Izzy: This year is actually the 10th anniversary of your debut LP, Here Are The Courettes, so I’m curious how you feel about the first full-length a decade later?
Martin: We’re still proud of it. It’s a really spontaneous, really raw, high-energy, no compromise album. And it’s like the perfect debut album.
Flavia: We still play “The Boy I Love,” off the first record. I think it’s one of the best songs we ever wrote. It has this girl group formula, but we didn’t know how to record it back then in a Phil Spector way, that we discovered with our third album. But with the name of the band, The Courettes, everything was there. It was just so raw.
We were also very concerned with how we’re gonna sound with two people, so we limited a lot of the overdubs in the studio. We didn’t wanna be this band with thousands of instruments and then, live, it’s only us. And then we found out that good songs are good songs, it doesn’t matter if it’s an orchestra or two of us. So, we allowed ourselves to evolve a lot in the studio and in the production of our albums. But everything was already there: the influences, the songwriting, the energy. We’re very proud of that album.
And it’s so funny because, as Martin said, it was so spontaneous and uncompromised. We played our very first gig in a little bar in our hometown and Kim “Kix” from POWERSOLO, a great Danish band, saw us. He was playing with his one-man band and said, “I wanna record you guys!” We said, “Well, we only have eight songs,” and he said, “Great, then we’ll record the eight songs!” That’s why it only has eight songs [laughs]. Everything was so new! I remember writing the lyrics on the way to the studio for one of the songs. Everything was very unplanned, organic, and we recorded everything in two days. We’re so proud of it and everything happened very fast after that album.
Izzy: Do you have any particularly vivid memories of those earliest days of touring after that album dropped?
Martin: We started touring in Germany, we just packed the car and then drove. We never had any thoughts about where we should start, and then shows just popped up in Germany and that’s where we went.
Flavia: We’d had bands before, so we had some kind of network in Europe, but we didn’t plan much.
Martin: No, we didn’t plan anything.
Flavia: Things were just happening, and it was very DIY: “Let’s go! We have a gig in Berlin! Let’s pack the car, let’s drive ourselves!” That was how we used to tour back then [laughs]. Then we had a son a year after, 2016, and that was crazy, because we wanted to be home with him all the time. So, we just drove, played the gig, and drove back home. We did this a lot, and it was insane. It was crazy, but we had so much energy. I don’t know how we did that, it was out-of-this-world crazy what we did. We used to play way less than what we play now, like a third, which is still a lot of gigs for many bands, like 40 or 50 concerts a year.
Martin: But in terms of how we did it, we had to. It was a big passion, a big love, and it was our mutual project, of course, but it was also a necessity, because we had to make money for living. We’re not just so privileged that we could stay at home, we didn’t have family money or anything.
Flavia: No [laughs]. And we still don’t have family money [laughs].
Martin: We had to make money, because we had a little kid to provide for. That’s why you do your best, because you really, really wanna be booked again to play this place or another place.
Flavia: We came with 100% every night. Of course this is a passion, what we love to do, so it comes very naturally, but also because we don’t have a plan B. So, we give everything we have. We’ve been doing that for 10 years, and where we are now and where we were 10 years ago is totally another thing. Things become much more comfortable in a way. We have a crew when we’re on the road. We’d always be driving, performing, selling the merch, promoting, doing business, but we’ve found the right partners — Damaged Goods Records, our booking agencies in Europe and the US and the UK — who we’re very happy to have working on our side.
It’s not just Do It Yourself, it’s Do It with Others, do it together. We started Do It Yourself, and now we’re doing it together with the audience and the people who supported us in the early days. We’ve got partners, so it’s not DIY, it’s Do It Together. It’s so beautiful, this concept, it’s amazing! We would never be here without our partners, and without people who buy tickets to see us and buy our records. We’re so, so, so, so grateful, because there’s no music business if there’s not music lovers who are there, open-minded enough to go to a show, who want this thrill of being at a live show on a Saturday night or buying a record. They’re our biggest partners, actually.
Izzy: It’s great that you actually can make a living doing it over there, because in America I know a lot of pretty big artists that need to have day jobs, which is really depressing [laughs], and they can’t tour as much as you do, and maybe they’d like to. But it is really inspiring to hear about places where you can live as a touring musician.
Flavia: To be honest, it’s not very common in Europe either. One of the many things that makes it possible is that we’re a duo. If we were a band on tour with six people, that’s three hotel rooms, six plane tickets… For a lot of things, we’re lucky, or maybe we’re just clever. We don’t live downtown, we have a house a little bit outside town; it’s cheaper and more space, with a studio. It’s the kind of thing that we chose.
If you have a day job and you don’t have the freedom to book shows, you end up playing less, so you don’t have the income. We’ve been balancing this lifestyle for ten years. It’s a very thin balance, how much you gain and how much you spend. It’s not easy, and I don’t think it’s because we live in Europe that we can do that, because very few bands we know can actually do that for a living. I think I can count on one hand [laughs].
Martin: A maximum of five bands we know of.
Flavia: For most bands, they have day jobs, or the third category is that they have family money, so they do it for fun… there’s a lot of that, where you have Mom and Dad [laughs]. Of course, you get things much easier, but I don’t know that you have the same drive; you’re not that hard worker when you have Daddy’s money or whatever [laughs]. I’m from Brazil, and in Brazil, if you don’t work hard, you don’t get anything. It’s a little bit like America [laughs]. So, I think our work ethic also comes from our family background.
We manage to make a living making clever career choices, so it’s a constant challenge. In the last ten years we survived a pandemic putting life costs very low and playing gigs in the countries that are open. “Oh, Germany’s open! Let’s do a gig there!” It was crazy, crazy times, but we managed to get by. We built our own studio back then. It’s this balance of circulating in the business. There are enough costs nowadays, with Spotify the record sales went down, the streaming money’s ridiculous. That’s why you see big names like Paul McCartney and everybody doing tours. That’s actually where the money is, when AI bands are getting all the money on Spotify [laughs], bands that don’t even exist. So, that’s hopeless to try to get money from that [laughs]. It’s better to sell records at the merch table.
Izzy: We were talking about this, but you have shows booked through the end of the year, and next year you have the huge show with The Damned and Marc Almond and Peter Hook, and I didn’t even know about Little Steven’s Underground Garage Cruise, which is amazing. I love a lot of those people, like The Dollyrots are friends of mine and one of my favorite bands of the past 20 years now…
Flavia: They’re gonna play, too! We’ve never met them, so it’s gonna be great!
Izzy: Yeah! What else does the future hold for you? How are you hoping and planning to spend 2026, in addition to those two huge shows?
Flavia: I think we’re going to Japan in January, but it’s not confirmed yet. We’ve been to Japan in 2022 and it was an amazing experience, so we really wanna go back. We have some 7”s coming up soon, too.
Martin: Now we’re beginning to get in the mood to make new music.
Flavia: Exactly! We’re missing being in the studio! And that’s a great point, because sometimes it’s like, “We have to write a song.” It’s been this cycle for many years; we have five albums out. When we’re touring, we just want people to hear those songs. Now we’ve been touring for almost a year now, and we miss being in the studio. We have some small breaks from touring this year, so we’re tidying up the studio, making it comfortable again. We wanna start hanging out there, and that’s how the ideas and concepts start coming. We’re in that phase that we’re feeling the urge to be creative and make new music.
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