The Veronicas: ‘People ask where we met ... we say “the womb”’

Hello the Veronicas! Would you kindly introduce each other, giving me three surprising facts about your twin, please ...

Jessica: Lisa is a comedian.

Lisa: Jess is an incredible chef and domestic goddess.

Jessica: Lisa is always late.

Lisa: Oh! That’s not a nice fact to be putting out there. I feel like it’s my birthright given that we were both born five weeks early. So I’m allowed to be a little late now.

Jessica: This is a little insight into the woman I live with.

If you weren’t stuck in a record company office doing interviews, where would you like to go in London?

Jessica: We’d be in east London doing some vintage clothes shopping or we’d be in a pub in Camden. We saw loads of hipsters last night, and I took loads of photos because I was so amazed to be seeing the world-famous hipster community.

It sounds like you were on safari!

Jessica: To be completely fair, they do look fabulous.

Lisa: They’re just people who dress really well and wear a lot of flannel and have a lot of facial hair.

Former MTV VJ Donna Air once asked sibling MOR pioneers the Corrs how they met (1). Has anyone asked you something similarly stupid?

Jessica: Yes, they have. We’ve been asked a lot about where we met and I say “the womb”. They look at us funny like we’re just trying to give them shit and I’m like, ‘No, we really did meet in the womb, we’re twins.”

How would they not know you’re twins?

Jessica: I guess they don’t read the bio, I don’t know.

Lisa: Maybe they’re blind.

Do you remember the first time you realised your sister looked the same as you?

Jessica: It hit me when I saw a photo of the both of us and I couldn’t tell which one I was.

Lisa: But to be honest that usually happens in hindsight because at the time I never think we look that similar. What messes with us more is the fact that we grew up with people treating us as one entity rather than as individuals. Even teachers wouldn’t bother learning our different names; they’d just point at who they wanted.

This is always important to twins: who’s older?

Jessica: I’m one minute older. But we were five weeks premature. We were meant to be born on Valentine’s Day but instead we were born on Christmas Day. I think our mum’s only just forgiven us, to be honest. We wanted to share our birthday with Jesus. We thought that was a little bit cooler than a Hallmark day (2).

Isn’t it a bit annoying to have your birthday on Christmas Day?

Jessica: No, we love it!

Lisa: Our whole lives people ask us if it’s annoying but we’ve always liked it. I think it’s because there’s a really nice energy knowing everyone’s celebrating with their families or people that they love on that day.

Just as an FYI, we’re not celebrating your birthdays on that day.

Jessica: (Laughs) What?!

Lisa: No, but we just like that everyone’s with their loved ones and it’s the day we get to celebrate with ours.

If your new album goes to No 1 in the UK, I will celebrate your birthday as well as Jesus’s this year.

Both: Deal!

Your 2009 single 4Ever is one of the greatest pieces of music of the last 10 years. What do you remember about making that song?

Jessica: It was a very exciting time. We’d just signed with Warner Brothers, we’d got the chance to fly to Sweden to work with Max Martin and he’d especially written that song for us. There was a lot of excitement around it. We were very young and we were living our dreams, and I think you can hear that enthusiasm in the song. To collaborate with someone like Max was an experience not many artists get to have.

Lisa: It shaped us. It shaped everything about our band and our sound and it shaped us as songwriters.

Your new album is the first one you’ve released in seven years! What on earth have you been doing?

Jessica: Well, we’ve been in the studio a lot over those seven years, believe it or not ,and we’ve been travelling and writing a lot. We were also going through a difficult time with our old record company (3) and there were a number of legal proceedings that had to happen within that situation. That took a big chunk of time. We were staying inspired during that time, though, and not letting it keep us jaded, even though we were contractually not able to release music. We just focused on what we could control and that’s the creative part.

Did you walk around with “Slave” scrawled on your cheek like Prince did?

Jessica: We never pulled any dramatic stunts; we just brought the lawyers in.

Do you have a message for your old label now?

Jessica: I think the music doing well is enough of a message (4).

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Did you feel vindicated when the first single You Ruin Me went top 10 in the UK?

Lisa: Blown away.

Jessica: So overwhelmed. We feel so blessed and humbled and also validated at the same time. I tweeted “ha ha” at our old record company, which really did make me feel quite good in that moment.

Did they reply?

Jessica: No.

Maybe they’ll reply in seven years?

Jessica: (Laughs) Maybe when they actually update themselves on what’s going on.

On the cover of the album one of you is sniffing the other one’s shoulder. What did it smell of?

Jessica: Lisa’s pheromones.

Lisa: I don’t wear deodorant.

Jessica: It’s a similar smell to like patula and sandalwood. It just smells like our chakra sprays.

You worked with the notoriously easy-going Billy Corgan on the album. Did any of his songs make the cut?

Jessica: No, they didn’t.

Lisa: They did!

Jessica: Oh yeah, a song called Did You Miss Me did. It’s a really heavy, Pumpkins-esque song.

Is he a nice guy?

Jessica: He’s an incredible force to be reckoned with. Beautiful soul, beautiful guy. Just the most enigmatic soul.

Didn’t one of you date him?

Jessica: Date’s a shallow word for what it was – we were very much in love. Relationships are hard to keep strong, especially when you’re both artists with intense personalities. He’s wonderful.

The aforementioned Did You Miss Me features the line, “Down under we don’t take no prisoners” and yet between 1788 and 1868 approximately, 165,000 convicts were transported to Australian penal colonies by the British government, so …

Jessica: Oh, we’re all just a bunch of convicts.

That line is factually incorrect, though.

Lisa: Except we don’t take any refugees now either, so there’s that. No, but listen, that was to do with the metaphor of not taking any prisoners and the down-under part was because we’re from down under.

You obviously don’t fact-check your lyrics on Wikipedia like I did.

Jessica: We’ve really done a disservice to the public by not giving them a history lesson of Australia. We need to make a public service announcement apologising for it. I’m glad you brought it up. To be 100% honest I was waiting for someone to ask us that because I said to Lisa: “When we say we don’t take no prisoners and we’re a convict nation we’re going to be asked about that at some point.”

And I bet you were like, “it will be some annoying journalist from the UK who thinks he knows it all”.

Jessica: (Laughs) I was hoping it would be an annoying journalist from the UK.

And here I am.

Jessica: The Americans wouldn’t bother to pick that sort of thing up.

Emeli Sandé’s got a song on the album, too. Did you get to meet her?

Lisa: We didn’t. We’d love to, though, and that song when we heard it we knew we had to record it.

On one of your songs you say you wished you’d been born Bob Dylan. If that were true you’d both be 73 and far too old for Radio 1. Then what?

Jessica: Yeah, but we’d be able to express our feelings in a very poetic way like Bob does and that’s worth being 73 and all those things that come with him.

Have you been keeping abreast of the Madonna and Radio 1 business? (5)

Jessica: Listen, the industry is all politics as far as that’s concerned. It sounds dramatic and boring to me.

Lisa: Luckily, we live in a world of the internet so if people want to hear the songs they can. But I feel like it’s a little bit unnecessary for them to say they’re not going to play Madonna, because if people are wanting to hear Madonna then fucking play Madonna. If people are requesting a song then play the song!

Did you see her being dragged down some stairs at the Brits the other week?

Jessica: Yeah, so unfortunate. She handled it brilliantly.

Lisa: She’s a true professional to keep going. It would hurt a lot but she obviously knows how to fall properly – she fell very gracefully.

There’s quite a bit of rapping on your album, which I was surprised about.

Lisa: We call it spoken-word monologue.

Jessica: You can call it rapping, if you like.

Lisa: If you think it’s rapping then I’m flattered.

Any plans for a hip-hop side project?

Jessica: Pretty much any side-project vibes we channel into the Veronicas anyway. We’re not scared to bring in all different styles or genres. That being said we wanted to get Eminem on our song Cold. That would have been so killer.

Lisa: Set that one up for us, babe.

Footnotes

1) Sharon Corr said of the question: “It was clear that she knew absolutely nothing about us.”

2) Obviously Valentine’s Day’s history is linked to a martyred Christian saint named Valentine, but card companies also do rather well out of it, this is true.

3) They started working on their third album in 2009 but a legal wrangle with Warner Brothers meant they couldn’t release it. They left the label in 2013 and signed to Sony.

4) Their self-titled new album went to No 2 in their native Australia.

5) It was initially reported that Radio 1 had deemed Madonna “too old” to be playlisted. Radio 1 responded saying her new single, Living for Love, wasn’t relevant to their young audience.