ZOWIE w/ TOMMY ILL AND LITTLE BARK

Zowie

with TOMMY ILL and LITTLE BARK

Thursday March 1st Bodega

$15 on the door only

WHO IS ZOWIE?

A tightrope trailblazer taking pop into new territories, a pint-sized performer with a killer live show (playing for the likes of Katy Perry, Mark Ronson, Peaches and The Kills), and a songwriting power house, Zowie is a dynamic force to be reckoned with. In 12 short months Zowie has set the online community alight with her videos for “Broken Machine,” “Bite Back,” and “Smash It”, all the while working feverishly towards her debut long player schedule for release in early 2012. She’s been picked out as one to watch from the New York Times, Nylon, Rolling Stone Australia, and The Daily Telegraph (Australia’s highest selling newspaper to online pop mavericks such as PerezHilton.com, ArjanWrites.com, and Filter.com.

Music has run through Zowie’s veins since childhood. From Auckland, New Zealand, Zowie (aka Zoe Fleury), a music obsessive, started playing drums on stage at eleven alongside her musician father (on a kit given to her by a one-time drummer of The Jesus and Mary Chain). Zowie spent her teens adding guitar, keyboards, and vocals to her musical artillery. In between her years at music college she versed herself in all that goes on behind the scenes by interning with two major record labels.

The Auckland live scene saw her session drum for several New Zealand acts and form The Bengal Lights, a two-piece punk girl band. An extended visit to Sydney inspired her to front Bionic Pixie, where Zowie graduated to the front of the stage (with drums still close by) as vocalist and key songwriter. A cracking mid-morning slot at the 2009 Big Day Out set tongues wagging, but Zowie wanted to go further – and evolve her character musically and creatively – and Bionic Pixie became Zowie.

Work began in earnest on her debut album last year. Zowie reached out to a dream team wish list of producers and writers and began a six month stint writing and recording with many of the world’s best, making musical pit-stops in LA, Atlanta, Toronto, London, Stockholm, Gothenberg, and Sydney.

Zowie’s idea was to blend her multifaceted inspirations (Grace Jones, NIN, Gwen Stefani, Gary Numan) into something totally new – music with heart, cheek, balls, and no cheese. “I love to mix the dark with the pretty. I mish and mash pop with all sorts of musical flavors – I don’t think I’m JUST pop music, but pop is part a big part of the sound. When I met Perez Hilton he told me, “I like you because you make pop music, but you embrace it in a really different and cool way,” and I think that’s when it finally clicked with me. I realized how I am many things, and that pop culture is a universal language”.

“Pop is not a dirty word! I have travelled the world and worked so hard for these songs – the way I’d always written before was mainly about the beats. As I went on I was suddenly the one doing the melodic hooks AND beats – it was flipped around, and I learned to write in a million different ways. To write a good pop song is one of the hardest things in the world. I’m always looking to do something different from my peers.”

The first (New Zealand only) single, “Broken Machine,” (a cheeky lift of a Nine Inch Nails song title paired up against a J-Pop inspired school-chant) was picked up by blogs and radio all around the world, going Gold in New Zealand and smashing across many radio formats. “Bite Back,” the slinky follow up, enjoyed over 8 months of airplay on Australia’s much lauded Youth Alternative network station, Triple J, who picked it out as their Song of the Week. The new ear-worm, “Smash It,” first aired in an episode of the esteemed tween show “Pretty Little Liars” and has again broken boundaries on New Zealand radio formats.

Along the way her live show has gained serious momentum, with Zowie being invited to open for Katy Perry across the Australian and New Zealand legs of her California Dreams Tour (playing to over 150,000 ). She also opened on the Australian tour with Mark Ronson and The Business International, as well as shows with Architecture In Helsinki and Strange Talk, Peaches and The Kills, and festival appearances at Future Music Festival (Australia), La De Da (New Zealand), and Rhythm & Vines (New Zealand). Zowie also killed it at CMJ 2010 where she played the Fader Fort, NZ CMJ Mixer, Nicky Digital Party, and The Music Slut showcase and was featured in the New York Times four times in the space of two weeks. Perez Hilton personally invited her to play his One Night in Austin party at SXSW 2011, where she also performed for Nylon Magazine and NZ Outward Sound.

International accolades continue to build, with Zowie performing for APRA at their Song Summit Showcase, winning best NZ Video for “Broken Machine” at the Juice TV Awards, and shortlisted out of 700 bands by MTV for their MTV Iggy Best New Band of 2011. MTV says, “With just a handful of singles under her belt and a Bettie-Page-as-a-sexy-robot look, she’s poised to challenge the Ke$has and Gagas of this world for total pop music dominance.”