The Ditty Bops: while so many of rock's reigning women vie for attention as femme fatales, these vaudevillian vamps are putting the show back in showmanship

Interview, Sept, 2004 by Milena Selkirk

The Ditty Bops may live in the throes of the club-trotting star system of young Hollywood, but the singing Los Angeles duo of Amanda Barrett and Abby Dewald prefers old-time show business to nouveau schmaltz. Their self-titled debut (Warner Bros.) is a veritable homage to the jazz-, swing-, and ragtime-era acts of yesteryear, with the girls harmonizing on fragile odes to love, danger, and the good old days with the thrown-together intimacy of a carnival sideshow.

"My parents were both in a traveling circus before I was born," says Barrett, a sometime model who, in addition to singing and writing songs, learned from her folks how to juggle, mime, and eat fire. The Ditty Bops' vaudevillian aesthetic carries into their live shows, each with its own theme, costumes, and set design. "One of the most important things for us is to make the performance theatrical," says Barrett, who met Dewald six years ago at a late-night showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) in New York City's East Village. "We use my dad and some of his circus friends and incorporate mime in the show." The women even design many of their own set dressings. "We definitely take advantage of using props that we make out of card-board and paint," explains Dewald. "I've always done art since I was a little kid, and I wanted to bring my art into our project."

With angsty hand-wringing and raging cynicism still the dominant milieus of so much music these days, the Ditty Bops are a sprightly anti-dote. "It makes you think, Is this possible now? Can people be this free and do their art and have this much fun?" wonders Dewald.

If the Ditty Bops are any indication, the answer, it seems, is yes.

Milena Selkirk is a New York- and London-based writer.