Dolly Rockers, the girl band everyone is talking about and championed by Scott Mills on Radio 1, are the all girl group everyone has been waiting for. It is the return of music that’s bright, brash and irresistibly catchy. The Dolly Rockers, consisting of Sophie King, Lucie Kay, and Brooke Challinor, competed in UK talent show The X Factor in 2006, although they did not get past the boot camp stage, in 2009 the group received an unexpected amount of airplay and became instant celebrities. We caught up with Sophie (pictured far right) to find out more about this promising pop act.

Hey Sophie, so how did the band get together?
Hi, yeah we auditioned about three and a half years ago for a girl band called Innocence, but we were working for this manager who was young and we weren’t really going anywhere.
So we left him and formed the Dolly Rockers. We went on X Factor and did that whole shebang. Then we found this amazing songwriter (Ray Hedges), so we knocked on his door and asked him to work with us, and he said yes so we wrote some songs with him, it was quite fun.

What’s the inspiration behind your lyrics?
We write about how we feel and what we do. Our musical influences are like the Arctic Monkeys, Kate Nash, people like that with personality who translate that into their music. So we write about us girls really. We don’t write love songs, we just write about going out and having a good time really.

Where did the name of the band come from?
One of the girls in the group was wearing a top by a vintage company called Dolly Rockers and we thought it would be the perfect name for us. We wear massive tutus and have huge hair and look like dolls. You really do have a unique look! Yeah that’s what we are going for, we don’t want to look like everyone else cuz that’s just boring. All our clothes are designed and made for us, so no one else will be wearing what we wear.

Have you got a favourite song off your album?
Errrrm… probably ‘Gold Digger’. And why’s that? It’s funny… we wrote it about glamour models and things like that, girls who hang around footballers and think they’re amazing. We’ve been on the London scene and been clubbing and we’ve seen the type of girls that hang around footballers and we find it really amusing, so we thought we’d write a song about it.

How does it feel to perform in front of people?
Erm, it’s really exciting, I like it! It’s scary when you do it in a place you’ve never performed before because you don’t know what the reaction is gonna be like. We were together for two years before we did our first gig, and we did our launch gig before we were even signed and we invited every single person we met and we had like 500 people there, and we invited lots of press so there was a lot of pressure because nobody had ever seen or heard of us before. We performed about ten songs and that was fun.

Can you tell me a bit about your single ‘Je Suis Une Dolly’?
Yeah, Bill Wyman did a song a few years ago called ‘Je Suis Un Rock Star’ and it’s sort of based on that. We were thinking about things that relate to Paris like the Can Can and the Eifel tower, so we have the lyrics ‘flash your pants when you Can Can’ and ‘you’re gonna get an Eifel’, things like that. We really like the original song and wanted to make it our own.

It looks like you had fun making the video. What was that like?
It was really fun. We had headphones on so only we could hear the music and we were running around central London getting kicked out of places. We had a dance routine and went in one of the isles in Tesco and started doing it, we looked crazy (laughs). So you got a few funny looks? Yeah, we did a routine on the tube, to jump up and down and jump on people, then the music would stop so we would just sit back down, then the music would start again and we’d jump back up which was quite funny. At one point the director told us to walk in the train station and draw as much attention to ourselves as we could so we just screamed and people were just staring at us (laughs). It looks brave anyway. Yeah we were, very brave.

Your video is similar to the T-Mobile advert with people dancing in the train station, so which video came first?
That was our video, we did it first. We saw the T-Mobile video and we were like “Oh my god, they have totally ripped us off”. Our video was put on Youtube way before their video was.
I don’t know if they copied us but we did it first.

How does it feel to hear your song played on the radio?
I actually hadn’t heard it until today. We went into Radio One for an interview this morning and they played our song and it felt amazing!

Can I ask where you girls are from, because you sing with quite strong accents don’t you?
Yeah, we’re from Leeds, London and Manchester. All the best places (laughs), apart from Birmingham of course.

Do you see yourself as being a role model for younger fans?
Erm yeah, I don’t really look at it as being a role model cuz I’m just a normal girl, but yeah I think I’m a good role model. I don’t want to be one of these girls that has a baby and relies on their boyfriend to support them. I tell my friends that you need to support yourself and you can’t rely on anyone else. But that’s probably because I’m from a single parent that has taught me that.

Good luck with the single… Thank you! And I hope to see more of you guys in the future. Aww, thank you very much. Thanks for your time Sophie. Thank you. Byeeeeeeeeee!!

Check out more of the Dolly Rockers at www.thedollyrockers.com