Terry Poison

Louise: Everybody’s here. We’re standing in the parking lot. We just had a sound check. We have this big gig tonight. So I will put you on speaker and everybody will gather up. We’re standing under a palm tree. Very exotic.
Frank151: Where are you?
L: We are in Tel Aviv.

F151: Tell me who Terry Poison is.
L: Terry Poison was founded in 2004. It was founded at the Art Academy in Jerusalem by me and another girl, and slowly, slowly it became the band it is now, which consists of me, the lead singer; another lead singer, Petite, she sings in French; Anna, she plays the guitar; Gili, she plays the synth guitar, keyboard, and vocoder; Issar, he plays drums; and Bruno, he plays on the synth bass and he’s also in charge of the musical production. All the people in the band are more or less a part of the song writing.
F151: How did you guys get together?
L: I was playing in this club with another girl and Bruno came along and saw the show, and he saw that, “This is very interesting, but it needs an upgrade in sound”—because it sounded like shit. But it had a lot of good energy and very good intentions. Let’s say it like that. Bruno was already, back then, working with Petite. They were already producing like, one song. And then we all got together: me, Petite, Bruno, and this other girl who unfortunately left a year later, but that opened the door for Gili, the synth player, to enter. And from there we said, “We need more girls in this band,” because girls have much more fun together. So Anna came as a guitar player. We also wanted to upgrade our sound and make it more live, because before that the drums came from a computer. We said that we need to take out the computer and get another man in the band. So then we found Issar who is basically like a drum machine, so it’s not such a big difference from a computer. And at least you can climb on him in the middle of the show.


F151: I want to ask what role Israel and Israeli culture play in your music.
L: There’s a very strong party scene, especially in Tel Aviv. People just want to get wasted and rave away the night so they can forget the fuck that they have to go to the army the next day or things like that. The life here is not so easy, so it’s a very strong party scene. We get all the biggest-name DJs coming in, every week. I think that was my idea behind the band, because when there’s a DJ, there’s nothing to look at. You just look at the DJ. So I said, “Let’s make a band that you also can dance to, and dance with.” So this kind of feeling of, “Let’s just rave the night away—there’s no tomorrow”—you call it “escapism.” It’s very strong and I think it has a lot of influence on the band.
Anna: Our music wouldn’t sound the way it sounds if we weren’t all living in this crazy city. It’s a platform for good art. You can fly really high—until you hit the wall and you have to go to America! I want to be in A-mer-i-ca!
Gili: Because in Tel Aviv and Israel we have a very long beach, so there’s a strong beach culture. So that’s an influence—the heat and the bathing suits and the sexual tension in...the band.
L: There is no sexual tension anymore in the band! I have to correct you!

Musically, we all come from many different places in Israel.
A: Yeah, the mix of people from different countries around the world, because it’s the land of immigrants.
L: There are Arabs here, Jews, Germans...a big variety of cultures mixed together, and it’s a very
young country.
F151: That leads me to my next question. Have you guys been influenced by traditional Israeli or
Arabic music?
Bruno: Since a lot of people that came to Israel came from the diaspora, like from Eastern Europe, Morocco, and some Arab countries, there is a mash up of Oriental music, which is more like influenced by the Middle East and Arab culture and also Western European type of music, which is very “Jewish” music, like klezmer and stuff like that. You have prayers that people sing in the synagogue. It’s all somehow getting mashed up into this Middle East party thing.
L: One of our songs actually comes from this Jewish prayer that we sing on the Passover. Obviously our music is influenced by international pop—whatever comes to mind—but I think we have a lot of this “A-minor”-style music in our influences.


F151: Where have you traveled to play?
L: We’ve been everywhere. Last trip before the States we were in St. Petersburg. It was amazing. We’ve been all over Europe: Germany, England, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, and Paris. We’ve been almost living in Paris for some time. And we were in a very cool party in Istanbul, which is actually our neighbor. We thought that this was so extraordinary because it’s still not a part of the European Union, so they’re still a bit left out, like Israel. We played there in this massive party, and they have such a cool scene there, and I really felt that there’s a connection, because there are so many things going on there and still they’re not a big part of the international music scene, a bit like Tel Aviv. It’s very cool to hook up with neighbors because we don’t have many places around where we can go perform. Nobody has ever invited us to Egypt or Syria or Lebanon. We can’t get in. Once we were invited to Bali, but Israeli citizens are not allowed to come play in Bali. That was a bummer.

F151: What are you trying to achieve with your music?
L: We want to make people move, because if you sit around, nothing’s going to happen to you.

We sing a lot about things that happen to us in life, which is the usual shit: heart-broken. Not heart-broken. Waking up on a bench in the morning. Falling down from a tree. Stuff like that, you know?
[Inaudible comment from band member.]
L: Masturbation?! There’s no song about masturbation!
F151: [Laughs] What about a good tour story?
L: Well we have a quite cool story. When we arrived to New York two weeks ago, we actually came for only one show, and we ended up playing six shows. We even had two shows one day, and this was quite extraordinary for a little band like us from the Middle East. It was just crazy. I don’t understand how you people in New York manage to do it.

We were also in LA. It was really mad. The people we met there…so many inspiring people. We like it. You’re great people. You’re all very positive and you just also want to have fun, like us.


F151: What does the future hold for Terry Poison?
L: The future for Terry Poison is that there will be peace in the Middle East, first of all, and second of all, that Terry Poison will get to dance their way around the world and make the music get to the most people possible, because people must dance in order to be happy and forget their troubles. We’re just like many other musicians; we just want to get out there and be able to get to as much audience as possible. In Israel we’ve already managed to get as far as we could. We have two hits already running on the radio, and now we’re ready to hit new territories.
G: We would like to collaborate with great artists that we love, like Daft Punk, Prodigy—
L: Yes, we have big ambitions in this band. Let’s keep it to that.

www.terrypoison.com