The Indonesian female metal band Voice of Baceprot are worried about their upcoming performance at Glastonbury in the west of England, but not because they’ll be playing in front of thousands in one of the world’s biggest music festivals.
Instead, they’re thinking about the weather and what they might eat.
The trio, made up of 24-year-old vocalist and guitarist Firda “Marsya” Kurnia, 24-year-old drummer Euis “Siti” Aisyah and 23-year-old bassist Widi Rahmawati, have never been to the United Kingdom before, and have been watching YouTube videos of the festival to prepare themselves.
“We have heard that it rains a lot in England and, even when it is not raining, it is always drizzling,” Siti says, looking pained.
They are also, she says with a grimace, “concerned about the food”.
Voice of Baceprot (VOB), which means “noisy” in Sundanese – a language spoken by about 15 percent of Indonesia’s 270 million people – will be the first Indonesian band to perform at Glastonbury, which gets under way this week.
For Siti it was the band’s “biggest dream” and a shock when the offer first appeared via email back in March.
“We thought that we would have to play other, smaller venues first, but we got the gig straight away,” Marsya said. “We are so excited.”
VOB was founded in 2014 in Garut Regency, a conservative region of West Java province, when the trio joined an extracurricular theatre group at school. According to Marsya, their acting was “terrible” and, in an effort to bolster the girls’ spirits, their teacher suggested they try music instead.
At the age of 14, the girls picked up their instruments for the first time and began to learn how to play. They had never heard metal or rock songs before, but their teacher gave them his laptop and they discovered playlists filled with songs by bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Armenian-US heavy metal group System of a Down.
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