I was always a confident kid, but I was never confident enough to get up on stage and do something in front of a whole bunch of people. “I always quietly played guitar and wrote songs from eighth grade, but I noticed during Battle Of TheBands it was only ever a token girl singer or something or it was just all guys. “Basically every year the school has a talent quest or a Battle Of The Bands,” Wilkinson says. When she was nearing her final years at Elanora State High School, she decided to put a plan into action.
I would spend hours replaying that record and learning how to play all the riffs on it. It was one of the records that taught me how to play guitar.” The film and the music was “formative” to Wilkinson, dropping in her first year of high school and the proceeding years saw her not only refine her skill as a guitarist and as a singer, but as a songwriter as well. I basically learnt how to play every single guitar part and bass part on that record by ear and that was just from playing it over and over again, listening to the lead guitar parts, listening to the rhythm guitar, listening to the bass, and just learning how to play all of it. This was in the midst of when I was a sponge, I mean, everyone’s still a sponge, you know? This was, like,my formative years. “I was immediately obsessed with it and also immediately obsessed with the soundtrack when it came out,” she says. “I remember going to Sanity and buying the soundtrack. Having moved over from New Zealand to Australia in the nineties with her older sister, Elvira, Indonesian mother and English father, the idea of becoming a teenage rock star was a nonsensical one to Wilkinson growing up on the Gold Coast … right up until she saw a 2001 film called Josie And The Pussycats in cinemas. I didn’t look the part – this is in inverted commas, by the way – I didn’t look the part, I was underage, the whole band was underage. I was brown so people were expecting me to sing RnB and I played guitar and I sung this shouty kind of pop, punky surf music. There were so many rumours going around ‘oh, they’re manufactured’ and it’s just like ‘yeah,right!’ If someone was to manufacture an underage punk band don’t you think they would just make everybody all girls and all skinny, tiny blondes and white?” “Pretty much all the odds were against me. “I had a conversation with somebody about this,” says Amandah Wilkinson, the band’s frontwoman and founder. With a distinctly Lego aesthetic in bright, colourful, co-ordinated outfits and side-swept fringes, they broke through at a time when music charts were dominated by RnB music from Usher, Lil Wayne, Flo Rida, you name it, making their success story all the more unlikely.
The pop-punk indie band comprised entirely of teenagers had burst on to the scene in 2005 after winning a high school Battle Of The Bands competition and experiencing a fairy tale ascent. The group consists of Josie, their guitar-playing leader Valerie, the brilliant tambourine-player Melody, the naive and optimistic drummer Alan, Josie's love-interest Alexander, the group's cowardly manager Alexandra, Alexander's pesky sister who constantly tries to upstage Josie and be Alan's main squeeze and of course, Sebastian, Alexandra's fiesty cat.In the late naughts, if you were any kind of self-respecting pop culture connoisseur with your finger on the pulse you knew who Operator Please were. The show followed the adventures of a rock & roll band that comes across all sorts of adventures along the way. In 1972, it was re-conceptulaized as " Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space". The show premiered on Septemand lasted until Januafter airing for 16 episodes.
Josie and the Pussycats is an animated Saturday morning TV series based on the Archie Comics comic book series of the same name created by Dan DeCarlo.