[advertising]

By AMY KENNY
Staff Writer

It's really the Sex Pistols' fault we're locked out of the apartment.

Well ... sort of.

Well ... ok, not really.

But if London musician Rose Perry didn't think her two new kittens, Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, would have escaped, she wouldn't have locked the door.

I wouldn't be meeting the grinning guitarist on the stairs to the now-inaccessible second floor of her renovated Adelaide St. North house, shaking hands over a banister.

As it is, she did and I am.

"I'm so sorry," Perry laughs, covering her face with her hands, "I didn't want them to get out!" She peeks through her fingers at her fiancee Jesse and bursts out laughing again. "Good thing you lock everything," he moans, his head lolling back, hiding his own smile.

One unanswered call for extra keys (made from neighbour's phone), two roof climbings (Perry and Jesse), a screen busting, a falling through the window onto the bathroom floor later, and we're in.

"Ok let's try this again," Perry says brightly as she opens her back door. "Hi, I'm Rose!," she extends her hand and laughs before leading me into her red and black living room where the Pistols peer up from beneath furniture.

Perry slips her slight self through back-to-back doors off the living room, sits down in a straight-backed chair in the office and crosses her legs. Everything about her is sharp, dark and tiny. Her spiky black hair is streaked with red, and heavy black makeup lines the green eyes of her dead-white face. A silver cross hangs below a black and silver choker on her slim neck. She pushes a chunk of bangs behind her ear and a silver nose ring glints in the light. She clasps her hands in her lap, where her chipped pink nailpolish matches the Tank Girl ringer T she's wearing.

It's hard to imagine much of a voice coming out of someone this small, but it does. Loud, clear, eloquent and non-stop in a way that makes you think it's had some practice.

And it has. Perry, a lifelong Londoner at nineteen, started taking vocal lessons at age four, moving quickly through celtic, jazz, broadway, classical, opera, and choral to a grade seven certificate in vocal music from the Royal Ontario Conservatory of Music. She finally dropped the formal training in favour of rock, the genre she's always held nearest and dearest, last year.

"My Dad raised me on stuff like Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and my Mom was all about the Beatles and the Monkees you know? Rock had been engrained in my backbone and even though I did all this opera training and everything I still always knew -this doesn't fly with me."

What did fly with her were the grunge and chick-rock movements of the nineties, so when Perry started her first cover band, Her, in 1999, it was with more Veruca Salt than Vivaldi in mind.

After four years, Her made the swift transition from cover to the real McCoy, and released their first album, a 23-minute, 8-song body of work titled Straight From the Loft, in 2003. Right away things started gelling for the all-girl foursome. Their CD was released on Perry's own label (Her Records), the ladies were at a point where they could pack London's Call the Office, and bands like liveonrelease and Lillix were getting major label attention in the light of one Miss Lavigne. Her was no exception; EMI, Sony, Castle Records and Teenage USA were all interested. It was a good time to be an angry girl rocking out.

Unfortunately for Her, it was also a good time to air grievances. Perry was fed up with the lack of total commitment from her three bandmates, two of whom planned to start college during the scheduled Loft support tour without telling anyone. She wanted a band that wanted to make a living as a professional band.

"Everybody's gotta be on the same page as me and if they're not then I don't want them in my band," she says matter-of-factly. "And yeah I know that sounds harsh but you know what I mean? Everyone has to have the same goals and see things the same way and not be more into partying than doing this on a professional basis, otherwise you're going to be nothing more than a garage band."

A testament to this conviction is Perry's guitar skill. Up until a year ago she had only ever experimented with cello, bass, piano, and squeaked out Ode to Joy on a violin ... once. After six months of practice, back in the days of vocal-training. Still, when Her made the switch from a cover band to a band that wrote its own material, Perry quickly realized the problem in having a lead guitarist, who only knew guitar, write the music. She decided the band needed the perspective of someone who could write with both vocals and instrumentation in mind. "I'm a singer first off, but being a guitarist too, I know my vocal range and can write well to my voice. Because she [Her lead guitarist who can't be named due to legal issues] was only a guitarist, she only understood how to write for guitar. She didn't understand how vocals have to be written along with guitar."

So Perry practiced six hours a day. Her fingers bled her frets red but at the end of three months, she was confident that she could add the label of guitarist to a list of titles that already included singer, songwriter, manager and band nazi.

Though Perry shared songwriting duty on Straight From the Loft, some inconsistency between the vocals and guitar is still noticeable when listening to the album, especially on American Perfekt -the one song whose guitar work Perry had no hand in. At times her Joydrop-esque voice dips, soars and curves around the music, buried beneath overdone guitar, or on a completely different tempo than the sketched-out instrumentals.

As well as giving Perry a little more creative control, the musical self-instruction came in handy when Her split in 2003, two months after Loft's release. Determined to maintain the band she had worked on for four years, Perry and Her drummer-cum-bassist (again; name + legal issues + etc. = no can do) kept their name, traded in bandmates, and started touring with a new drummer and guitarist in late 2003. This second incarnation of the band only lasted until December of that year before the same old issues resurfaced -Perry wanted to practice; the rest of the band wanted to party.

"It's difficult for sure, finding people that are serious about it and aren't huge druggies or boozers, because with tonnes of musicians that's just how they are. They think it goes with the profile right? Sex, drugs, rock and roll? No. Not me. I'm a straight-edge rock and roller. Probably one of the very few and far between ones but I'm here." Since the split of Her, Perry has focussed on promoting a seven-song demo entitled Feisty, which she recorded while Her was still together. She's also started looking for new musicians to work with because she misses the energy of a live four-piece, as well as the freedom it affords her as rhythm guitarist to "run around and jump into the crowd if I feel like it."

She just has a very specific idea of what that band should be. Perry wants a four-piece fronted by two females who have the whole light/dark contrast thing down when it comes to sound and style. She wants a variety of influences. She wants to trade off singing and song-writing with another female lead. She wants battling vocals. She wants a bassist and a drummer (but is gender non-specific on this point, owing to the fact that she's done the all-girl thing before and it didn't work out so hot). "Basically I want my own version of Veruca Salt," she laughs. "They're untouchable ... Veruca Salt is my favorite band of all-time!"

So far a classified ad on the Internet has turned up one potential collaborator in a Niagara Falls native who will be in Japan until this summer, but whom Perry feels is on the same page as her when it comes to musical aspirations. She's also recently hooked up with bassist/singer Kat Cameron after Cameron dropped a resume off at Green Earth, the Masonville Mall store where Perry works full-time, drummer Matt Cole, who was introduced by a mutual friend, and lead guitarist Jesse Tomes.

Her goal for the next few months is to get this band started, writing, and possibly recording and touring, but in the meantime Perry will continue working at Green Earth, modeling (something she's done on the side since she was seven) and playing shows in and around London -but only at bars that are worth her time.

"I don't want to have to drive a huge distance and be practicing for hours on end if nobody's going to show up to the gig because how does that benefit you? It doesn't matter if the drunk people in the bar like you, they're drunk. Where's that going to get you? I'm not trying to sound elitist but you shouldn't play gigs unless it's going to accomplish something."

This, she says, is part of her problem with bars like London's shady east side Embassy nightclub. "There are bands that have been playing [the Embassy] for six years and what have they done? They're still playing at the Embassy. It doesn't progress to anything." She thinks too many musicians focus all their energy on playing every show that comes along, hoping it'll miraculously lead to a life in the industry. Perry prefers to be selective in her club bookings, and focus on getting as much media attention as possible. As far as she's concerned, the more you get out there and sell your story, the more people will be interested, the bigger your crowds will be, and where popular opinion walks, record contracts follow.

As hell bent as she is on earning a living through rock though, Perry has one sticking point -no one pulls a Britney on her and tries to create Rose Cora Perry. To her, a musician writes the music, sings the music, plays the music, establishes the image, style, tune and sound. It comes from the musician, not the marketing team. She'd love to sign with a major label, and plans to eventually move to Vancouver because of its proximity to Seattle and LA ("where things happen"), but if signing a record deal also signs away her reality, she'll stay indie forever. She doesn't care if she has to tour the country on a shoestring indie-rocker's budget. She's a musician. To Perry, it's as simple as that. This is what she does. Label interest may or may not follow right away but that's sort of ... irrelevant to Perry. "If it's what you love doing, do it. Seems pretty simple to me. And I know it won't be easy and blah blah blah, I know it took fifteen years for No Doubt to get signed and ten years for Blink, but that doesn't matter to me," she shakes her head defiantly. "What it comes down to is whether or not I can be myself and get signed. I just want to be writing my own songs at the end of the day."