Mermaid Chunky

Words by Willow Shields Photographs by Lizzie Clark-Norgaard Hair Styling by Josephine Shears Clothes by Mermaid Chunky

Mermaid Chunky, a chunky woven wool hailing from the same place as the band of the same namesake: Stroud, Gloucestershire. The duo, made of Moina Moin and Freya Tate are incredibly, beautifully weird and wacky. Their stage costumes set them apart from the rest, made by Moina can only be likened to sea creatures made of cloth and silks. And originally that’s what drew me to the band. I saw them in Folklore’s basement on a very dark, dreary winter evening a few years ago and have been enthralled ever since. They use different instruments and everyday objects to make buildable sound-scapes, and to create songs like Newbury Bypass and King of the Herbs. I invited the pair, along with photographer Lizzie Clark-Norgaard and hair stylist Josephine Shears round to my South Hampstead homebase to get their hair done, put on some outfits to take some photos, get caked in the face and chat about their music and who they are as people. 

After all but one of the aforementioned tasks had been completed, including wrapping bark around the pair and a very stressful taxi ride to The Heath with a cake in-lap. We were back at the house and the duo were sitting opposite me, sipping ginger tea and giggling. The first question I posed to them was if they were a deep sea creature, what they would be. Moina began, “a water bear, I guess.” Freya answered, “an octopus with a beak inside of its tentacles,” I asked if there was a specific one and Freya said, “I think they all have beaks,” Moina giggled in reply. Freya then asked Moina what a water bear is, “it’s a tiny tiny thing that looks like a fabric bear, a grey bear that looks like this…” Moina then curled up and sat in a little huddled position on the sofa, and then continued, “and its face looks like a scrunched up piece of fabric, and it can survive anything. It could survive the world exploding, it could survive in space. It can dehydrate itself and if a bit of water comes in it blows up again. Like a biscuit.” I found out on the day of the shoot that the pair are both gluten-intolerant after trying to get them to eat the cake baked for the shoot and them very politely declining. On the subject of biscuits, I asked them what biscuit they’d eat if they weren’t gluten-intolerant. Moina began “I love custard creams. That’s the kind of thing that you crave, like butter on toast. The bite of a custard cream has the whole universe.” Freya then said, “I’d really love a buttery shortbread biscuit, the really buttery ones.” 

I then took a swerve away from biscuits and sea creatures to ask them about their music, and in particular why they write about things that some would categorise as ‘silly’, “childhood trauma i guess.” Freya said straight faced before breaking out into a fit of giggles, and then continued, “I think it's a combination of things...Like childhood stories a lot of the time” Moina then picked up, “They’re very instinctual, they're very emotional songs. We don't have writing sessions, they just sort of emerge. I feel like a lot of the songs have emerged during times of quiet little lonely times, but not in a negative way. When you're on your own and looking at the tiles, you know, or in a place with lots of rubbish - but you feel happy. And you’re like, there's some words for this loneliness and then there are these characters that form that you realise need to be in that space. I feel like we're just vessels of the universe.” Then asking what their favourite childhood stories are, feeling like that may be a point of inspiration for them. Moina began, “I had a great time because my dad read to me every night, and he really kinda took it on. There was this old book, with all these weird watercolours in it and all the watercolours seeped into each other. There was one about these golden heads at the bottom of the sea, and this girl had to keep swimming to these golden heads to keep finding answers. And these golden heads were really ugly so everyone else ignored them apart from this wise girl.” Freya then said, “My dad didn't really read to me much, well he did, but mostly just cassette tapes. And bits of these cassette tapes just stick in my head. And there was one about a hoover that ate everything that was really scary and it would just go ‘I’m hungry, I’m hungry’, and that really scared me. And there was one about a princess that came out of a lemon and she would die if you didn't give her water straight away so she'd be like ‘water, please! Give me water, please!’ and then she just melts away.”

After talking for a while about the original version of Rapunzel, which I was told at a highly formative age and which I think about far too often, I spring a totally different question on the pair. “What’s your chosen method of transport?” After some oohs and ums, Moina said, “We’ve had some good times on the train. We’ve had some bad times on the train but they've also been funny. And the train has also been a good last resort many times.” Freya then expanded on Moina’s love/hate relationship with the train in, “Moina’s very good at not buying a ticket on the train and trying to talk her way through.” Moina then continued, “I just get angry when you put so much effort into not buying a ticket and then you get to the end and they make you buy a ticket, like I feel like I’ve already put my payment in.” Then suddenly, Freya raised her voice ever so slightly with excitement, “But now! We’ve got a car! It's a red Vauxhall Agila and it just about fits all the kit, me a Moina in the front seats and nobody else. Which is actually quite economic fuel wise. We call it the copper clam,” Moina interjected, “We’ve actually been trying to make a podcast about driving lessons,” On the subject of kit, I saw this as a door I was yet to open and strode through confidently, asking to chat about their live sound. Freya began, “When we started out it was all fresh loops on stage, now we sometimes start off with something pre-looped and then loop into it. It’s a lot. The whole thing came out of live, because we didn't record until we’d been working together for like six or seven years. So it’s all very live oriented.” Moina then explained a different element of their live life, “It’s very much tied into performance art and the visual aspect of that. The costumes, and the energy of not knowing what’s going to happen. There’s a very interesting growing scene with all of this kind of stuff.” Freya began again, “We just want to open spaces for people, within the fabric of reality. Where they can exist if they don't fit in with usual spaces.” Moina again, “We often ask friends or strangers to come and dance on stage with us. We give them lots of costumes to wear, they come and dance with us which is amazing! We give them very little instruction, which is on purpose but it's the natural way we roll. It’s so nice because people will do the most amazing things on stage, and they'll wear the costumes in very different ways and we’ll give them a general direction for makeup but the things that have come out of it are just amazing! Because people meet each other, and start their own collaborations, it feels really like a family.” I then asked if they feel as if they put on a persona getting on stage or if it’s simply an extension of who they are day to day. Moina said, “people say, ‘you really don’t put anything on do you?’” Freya backed her up with, “Definitely all you on stage, Moina doesn't put anything on. I don't know if I do, I think it’s mostly me and maybe a bit of something else.” Moina then turned to Freya and said, “I wouldn’t say you do, but I don't know what’s going on inside, I don't know what you're channelling. Freya is the busy scientist on stage, she's got all her pots boiling. Whereas I’m more of a frivolous lady of leisure so I mess things up more. Freya’s busy doing hard work and I’m experiencing the euphoria from that.” 

I went on to ask them if they had a colour palette for their lives currently, what they would be, Freya said that she “really likes” browns, beiges, oranges and reds. To which Moina said, “I like brown, I'm into blue at the minute, baby blue. I think it's funny and I think it’s nice. And I really like red, I had to write a whole essay about it. It was the first colour that humans used.” I asked where they got it from, Moina simply answered “The Earth”. To which I grandly stated that the Earth gave us red, then Moina said, “the Earth gave us red, exactly. And it really is the colour of life. You bleed red, it represents love, death, all the passions really, anger. It was used firstly, they think, probably painted on the body to protect from the sun or fertility/maternity thing or it could have also been more artistic. I'm into red because I feel like it’s human.” They both added cream and oatmeal to their colour palettes. I began slightly losing my grip on reality at this point of the interview, as I asked Mermaid Chunky if they were placed in a field anywhere in the world where they would want that field to be. Freya immediately quipped, “I don't really want to be in a field…” to which we negotiated the parameters of the question, to then eventually land back on ‘you have to be in a field’. Freya said that she would like to be in a studio ghibli-esq field, “with the wind and the grass, a soft blowing meadow.” Moina replied with, “I like the little lakes in the fields. I went on the train from Monpelier to Barcelona and it looked exactly like that. With these spreading meadows and the little puddles, really nice.” We then talked about different types of fields, the fields of their hometown - Stroud, me going through field withdrawals since being in the city and Moina’s mum discovering new fields during lockdown. We come to the conclusion that the best field is on a hill, in the middle of summer, when the last rays of sunlight are hitting the top. The breeze waving the soft grass, and the air is warm and sweet, that's the best field. 

After that, I asked them if they are a particular fan of castles, Freya immediately answered “ooh! I like castles!” Moina interrupted with, “Freya! Freya, just glows with medieval intelligence, she would thrive in a castle.” I asked if either of them had a particular favourite castle, Freya began again, “no, they all sort of merge into one. I like turrets, I like when people dress up in costume, especially chainmail and then fight each other. I like the nerdy men that do that.” I then asked them if they’d ever been to Medieval Times in America and then gushed about my need to experience it at least once in my life. This led me to ask if either of them have a favourite tourist attraction, Moina answered, “I like The Merry Maidens stone circle in Cornwall.” Freya declared, “that's a good one, I like Stonehenge.” and after Moina prompted her to continue she said, “all I’ve done with Stonehenge for the past five years is drive past it in a traffic jam. On that road, there's always traffic there, it’s like they said ‘let's demolish this beautiful ancient site by putting a road here, but let's not make it too big so then the traffic will always get stuck’. Which is kind of a reward for being stuck in traffic, you get to see Stonehenge. I was reading this Seven Wonders of The World book, and there’s some thought that it might have been a tall building and that it was just level one. And that they built with wood on top of it to create a huge cone-like structure. But that's just an idea.” Moina then shouted as if she were at a football game, “CONE!” with an extension on every letter after C. Freya responded “all praise the cone” and then continued talking about how Stonehenge was probably a building because it would be so much effort just for some random rocks. “It’s got to be a building, the light shines through it. And there would’ve been a town around it, a market and you know… They found some bones and there was some talk of incest as well. And that's usually kings and queens,” 

To break away from the conversation of medieval royals, pure blood and possible market towns, I asked Freya and Moina incredibly seriously; “how many olives, on average, do you eat in one sitting?” Freya stated, “however many olives are in the packet, that's how many olives I eat in one sitting.” Moina, slightly detached from the line of questioning said, “I like olives, they're really nice.” After that I discovered that Moina used to steal multiple olives from an unknown source and after further questioning she started shouting “Truth, Truth.” again and again. It was then I decided to stop the interview. 

Mermaid Chunky, not just a type of wool they don't make anymore from Stroud, but a pair of incredible, smart and absolutely outlandish women. You now know about their gluten-intolerances, Freya’s fear of the hungry hoover and Moina’s dark past with olive theft. Maybe next time you spot an octopus or water bear on the telly, or if you're driving down the motorway and you see a red Vauxhall Agila, I hope you'll think of Mermaid Chunky.