Trainor, a rock drummer in real life, gets to fully release her wild rock chick side in Terror Byte. “They didn’t give us characters as such,” she explains. “I’m a hardcore rock chick, a drummer – I exaggerate the rock chick side of me; that’s how I came to be really rocky, it’s my thing. My character on stage is an exaggerated version of myself. I’m in a band called Honeybone; we moved here from NZ. I’m from central Otago, near Queenstown. I moved to Dunedin to study music and played a lot down there.” Dunedin has a proud history of producing indie music, (to the point where the city’s identified with its own sound), particularly during the ’80s and ’90s when bands such as The Chills, Toy Love, The Clean and The Verlaines emerged from NZ’s south. It’s still the case according to Trainor. “There heaps of really great bands there. But we had done all we could and it was time to move on. At first we thought we’d move to Auckland but then we thought: ‘Let’s move to Melbourne!’ I quit my day job and it worked out really well. This job with Dracula’s came up. I saw the audition for Terror Byte on Facebook and thought ‘that’d be cool.’ It’s great – everyone’s friendly; it’s a pretty cool job to have.”
For the moment, Trainor’s had to put her independent music career to one side, not that she’s complaining. “I’m pretty lucky,” she says. “Dracula’s is super fun. I don’t have a lot of time for my band’s music, I’ve been doing Honeybone on and off, but we are going to release an EP next year. We’ve released on CD and one EP already.” Trainor hasn’t had time to miss performing live. “I am going to get back into live music but we’ve been busy with rehearsals; it’s quite intense. A lot of Terror Byte is tracked music. We perform all covers in Terror Byte, modern songs like Will You Love Me Again by John Newman and Make Me Wanna Die by The Pretty Reckless. I’ve been listening to live music outside rehearsals. It’s just different.”
Trainor says she hasn’t had to learn anything especially new in order to perform in Terror Byte. “I’ve got a rock gig background; others are musical theatre people. I’m just flexing different performance muscles. I did a lot of theatre and acting in high school. In Terror Byte I’m performing a character so I can’t just play the drums. It’s very different from performing with my band; that’s just a gig. You bang drums and toss your hair around a few times while you’re on stage. In Terror Byte we’re reacting to people, I have to be bigger in all my movements. The trickiest thing is to keep everything exaggerated, getting into that performance mindset. You’re conscious, even when the focus isn’t on you, that there is that one person watching you. I give 110% every time.” Because the producers and directors of Draculas, the Newmans, are open to new ideas, Trainor’s been able to include one of her own original songs in the show. “I play guitar for a couple of songs in an intro where we can play our own songs. I’m actually playing a Christmas song I wrote, Fuck Your White Christmas, about singing Jingle Bells the southern hemisphere. I’m glad I could do that. Everyone loves it every time.
“Everyone is very talented and really diverse,” she continues. “We each have our area of expertise and we’re all doing other stuff as well. We’re all so different, no-one is the same; it makes it more of a great show. Stu is the host (long-time Dracula’s host Stewart Reeves), Mason (Somerville) is the all-rounder and guitarist, Jess (Barlow) is the cabaret chick and does musical numbers, Amanda is the aerialist and then there’s me. I only joined in October and it’s been a really fun challenge. I can’t pick a favourite part,” she says, when we ask which bit she’s enjoying most. “I love everything about it. The acts are all very weird. There’s one really out there part which involves a vacuum cleaner fetish; it’s a crazy random thing.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
