If Brody Dalle were a man, she would have bowling balls in her underpants: she had her first guitar at 13, her first high at 14 and a punk rocker for a husband shortly afterwards. She has her second baby in August. And anyone who says “Yay” now will get a smack on the head.
Skin like snow, lips as red as blood, hair like cedar wood – and dark circles under her eyes, as if she had played sparring partner to Evander Holyfield. Brody Dalle’s path to becoming a rock’n’roll Snow White is a fable that the Brothers Grimm would have written after two bottles of Jack Daniels and an anaconda-thick trail of coke. It’s already off to a good start: Melbourne’s New Year’s hangover is still firmly in the neck when Joanna Robinson arrives on 1. January 1979 for the first time. Screaming remains her favorite pastime, but for now she is doing laps in the pool, her coach sees Olympic potential. Until marijuana and Kurt Cobain get in the way. Since then, the bundle of energy no longer keeps her body, which is now covered in needles, moist with chlorinated water, but with the sweat that drips from the pores of a stage sow. Violence is the new virtuosity, she planes down raw woodchopper chords and roars and rattles as if she were scraping every syllable out of her throat with a rusty fork.
She is sweet sixteen when she stumbles across Tim Armstrong’s Doc Martens backstage at a festival – guitarist of Rancid, tattooed below the belt and almost twice her age. The punk brat leaves reason at home and runs off to California with Armstrong. Bonnie and Clyde 2.0 get married on Brody’s 18th birthday. The bride has barely recovered from her hangover and has formed a band: The Distillers. But gradually the punk rock road movie begins to slide, the Distillers crumble like marble cake without butter, and in 2003 Brody is also rid of the Armstrong surname. She replaces it with the seventh since birth, that of actress Béatrice “Betty Blue” Dalle. She kept it when she said her hoarse yes to Josh Homme, the front man of Queens Of The Stone Age, in 2006. Brody Dalle plunges straight from her first maternity leave back into musty rehearsal rooms and smoky concert halls. At Spinnerette’s shows, the audience sweats like they’re having sex in Bangkok – without air conditioning.
In interviews, Brody Dalle says she lives more consciously as a mother. In her case, this means that she hangs the vegan existence on the butcher’s hook, hammers guitars with empty beer bottles and carves lifelong souvenirs under the skin of fans after the show. Brody Dalle is expecting her second child in August. If only one of them takes after mom – oh oh, Josh Homme….