Coming on as a stroppy hybrid of Huggy Bear and Mambo Taxi, Voodoo Queens were quite a fancy of Peel’s around this time. They recorded three sessions for him between January 1993 and February 1994. Peel may well have been taken both by their music and the fact that one of their guitarists shared a name with a track from one of Peel’s favourite albums.
The resemblance to Mambo Taxi isn’t a huge shock as both Ella Guru and Anjali Bhatia left that group in order to form Voodoo Queens. I have to compare Supermodel-Superficial to Mambo Taxi’s song, Prom Queen, which both Bhatia and Guru played on, and which I changed my mind on including on the metaphorical mixtape when making selections from Peel’s show from 30/1/93. Supermodel-Superficial is an improvement on Prom Queen, because its ire is better directed. While not being a direct attack on supermodels themselves, it instead tears to shreds the lifestyle orthodoxy that was forming around the cult of the supermodel and which was being pushed on to young girls as a desirable way of looking and living.
This all slightly predates the size zero controversies - indeed my principal memory of 1990s supermodels is that they were slim rather than thin, though Kate Moss veered dangerously close - but Voodoo Queens can see the direction of travel that things are moving in and they call bullshit on it here.
It all makes me wish that Voodoo Queens had lived long enough to take on some of the things which that journey brought into our lives in subsequent years such as It girls, reality TV stars, influencers and OnlyFans.
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