Manda Rin from Bis

Drifting on the Dial’s Joey Soares interviews Manda Rin from Bis, the Scottish indiepop band that composed and performed the Powerpuff Girls end theme song.

This interview was originally intended to promote The Heroes of Townsville, a Powerpuff Girls themed charity fundraiser for Starlight Children’s Foundation. Unfortunately, it was announced prior to the interview that the event was postponed due to the passing of Eric Bauza, the co-founder of event organizer Saturday Morning Cartoons United.

We opted to continue the interview, which became a long, heartfelt conversation about Bis’s career, D.I.Y. musicianship, and the Powerpuff Girls’s legacy.

How are you doing?

I’m doing okay, thank you. So, I’m in Glasgow, Scotland and it’s dinnertime here. So it’s quite a difference to you.

Yeah, I just woke up. I’m still in bed, if you can’t tell. My sleepy little cat here.

Aw, I’m a cat person too.

How many do you have?

I’ve got one, a 19 year-old tuxedo cat. I’m a big cat lover and she is adorable.

Aw, what’s her name?

Her name’s Akiko.

Nice, is she named after anyone?

It’s because she was born in the autumn and that’s a very popular Japanese name for anyone born in the autumn there. And since we called her that, we noticed some sushi restaurants called Akiko, so it’s like ‘ahh!’

Nice, nice. I love this musician, Akiko Yano, if you’re familiar with her at all. She worked with Yellow Magic Orchestra a bit.

Of course! It’s a very popular name. I’m a big YMO fan.

How did your guys’ style come about? It’s a mix of some disco, sort of twee, sort of punk, mix of everything.

Oh my gosh, you’re now talking over 30 years ago. So we were just teenagers and we just loved music, so we basically just did what every kid learning an instrument or trying a band out does and you just do the kind of thing that you like. John has always been into ska music, disco, techno stuff. Steven’s into everything. I’m a big riot grrl fan but also punk and new wave stuff. So, when you combine all that together, you just get a massive bunch of stuff that doesn’t quite go together but it worked with us and people just couldn’t label us. We’re like the [polarizing savory spread] marmite of music. People either love you or hate you! But that’s good. I would rather be that than be easily-categorized or something. So I like being loved or hated, it’s fine.

I feel like I notice so many people who are into categorizing music, and I love it too, I have to say. But there’s just something great about bands like you guys who are a little hard to categorize.

Whenever anyone says, “what does your band sound like?” and it’s like “oh my God, where do I even start?” It’s really hard! It depends who you’re talking to, what the answer is.

And different people have different frames of references that you can talk about.

Exactly.

You guys also kind of fit into the Britpop scene too. How do you compare that Britpop world with some of the more indie scenes, like starting out with Heavenly and bands like that?

It’s weird because I think the guys and I wouldn’t really think of us in the Britpop scene at all. 1.) It’s very kinda guy-based, but 2.) It’s kinda stale, it’s quite chart-based, and quite typical guitar music. But it was a thing of the time, so I think the only thing we have in comparison with Britpop is that we were our most popular in the late ‘90s. So there’s that, and we love that music, to be honest. Bands like Blur, we adore. That’s one of the bands the three of us can say we collectively love, and there’s not many of them that we can say that we all love. But we love them so much. There’s a lot of bands in the Britpop scene that we do not like, but we’ve met most of them by now and they’ve all gone through the same crap that we have, and we relate in that sense. So, it was an era and a time that I’ll love forever and will go to every disco Britpop dance that I can.

How would you say that the scene has changed in Glasgow since then and now?

Yeah, so when we started out, we were very young. We weren’t even above 18 to be able to legally be in a bar playing music. So it was very strange for us. We’ve always been slightly behind our peers. The ones before us, say the Pastels and the Shop Assistants, and whoever seem so much older than us, and we weren’t really kinda around at the same time. But then when we got around the scene there was the Yummy Fur and Lung Leg and Urusei Yatsura. And again, just a tiny bit older, some of them. But we were taken on board. They kind of took us under their wing, a lot of them. They just saw us as the “oh, they’re the new kids on the scene, aw, that’s so cute.” Like, John’s the youngest in the band, and he was only 14 when he and Steven started. Steven was 15. When I joined the band, I was 16, Steven was 17. It’s absolutely crazy how young we were! So for these not-that-much-older people in Glasgow, who were maybe only 18, taking us under their wing, were just lovely and offering us gigs and Chemikal Underground offering to put singles out. I think they just saw us as really passionate, loved music, they just wanted to help us. And that was so, so nice and we’ll always owe it to them for that. But that was a wee scene in itself, and since then, so much has always happened in Glasgow. We’re so lucky that there’s tons of venues. Sadly, not all of them exist anymore and we get sad about how that’s changed a lot in Glasgow. More has popped up. Again, I feel a lot more alien to a lot that’s going on in the city center like anyone does, where it changes. The students take over and you don’t really know where you are anymore. But it’s still there and it’s still evolving and it still exists. And the good thing, the thing I absolutely love, is that the youth are getting really into Bis. Like, we’re appealing to the young people, and when we play, people are getting so passionate about us, and they’re really young. I can identify with that, and they love looking into our history and asking us questions like that, too. So it’s all good.

I know the show was just cancelled. Are you guys still planning on coming to the U.S.?

I am absolutely gutted. I truly am. I can’t stop thinking about it. This has been talked about for six months now non-stop. I’ve been in shock and absolute bewilderment at the whole idea of getting to America for the first time with our band in decades. And the circumstances are hideous and I feel bad about saying I’m sad, because there’s people that merit it way more than me and I don’t deserve it. We’ve all been teary over it. I just feel it’s something I was so, so excited about that was just totally taken away from me. I’ve made so many plans. I’ve made plans to see people I haven’t seen in decades, amazing people, people that were from Grand Royale, people that were from Capitol, people who were fans that turned into friends that I’ve kept in touch with. And I’d even booked my vegetarian meal on the flight, I was so, so excited! And I’m absolutely gutted, I really am. But these people are adorable and I can’t help thinking of them and the loss, and that’s all I can think about. So I hope it gets rescheduled. I live and hope.

Same.

I’m not a very lucky person, I don’t think. But I just want to get back. I love L.A. I love it so much.

We’d love to see you. I think your guys’ last show here was before I was born.

That’s disturbing to hear, actually.

Sorry!

The week that we were going out, for five nights. I had pictures of our hotel room that was booked, and I was so excited. And Heavens to Betsy were going to play the day after we played. And the timing — ‘wow, we’re going to see Heavens to Betsy! I can see Corin [Tucker] again.’ I’m gutted, I’m absolutely gutted. And I was going to ask you if you had heard the news,because I wasn’t sure whether to bring it up or not.

I had, yeah. Did you know Eric [Bauza] at all? I didn’t personally, but just so huge. I loved The Day The Earth Blew Up and Coyote v. Acme. He’s so amazing in both of those. Just one of the hugest voice talents out there, and someone who gave back to the community so much.

I can’t believe what it must be like, and it’s his fiancee Caro [Buermann] who got in touch six months ago and approached us, saying “hey, we’re having this reunion of the Powerpuff Girls for charity. It would be wrong to have it without having Bis there!” And when I got that email, it’s like — What!? We don’t get emails like that every day. And ever since that email, I’ve honestly felt like I’ve known Caro. We were in touch all the time. She even sent me her WhatsApp, she gave me all her social handles. We’re in touch all the time. I’ve just never met her, and I was so looking forward to meeting her, and to think that this could happen to such a beautiful, lovely person. The hurt she must be going through, I can’t imagine. I lost a good friend of ours, he was a Bis tour manager, his name was Stuart Mason. And he did stuff for us for about twenty years, and he did all the American tours, Japan, Australia. And he passed away when he was just 51 years old. And that has hurt me really badly and we wrote a song called Big Sunshine on our album Slight Disconnects about him. And that’s what it kinda reminds me of, because someone taken too young, it’s disgusting, it’s horrible, they don’t deserve it.

Yeah, and then you think about lost potential. And then you think about how much they gave in the time they were here, too.

I know. I didn’t know Eric, but when I see all the pictures of him and when I’ve been telling all my family, “I’m not going to LA anymore, this guy just passed away” and I send them links and they’re like “oh my gosh.” And they’ve researched him and they now know everything about him. And like my friend Stuart, he just seems full of smiles, full of positivity. And guys like that are so rare! My friend Stuart just left a legacy amongst everyone; nobody had a bad thing to say about him. Nobody. He just brought positivity to everything. I don’t think I could have kept doing the band in the ‘90s if it wasn’t for him. I needed him. It was so hard as a teenager. It was really rough. I get the impression that Eric seems like that kind of guy as well, everybody just wanted in the room. He just gave off a good vibe. And it’s an inspiration to all of us, and I hope that continues, and I just hope that the whole team get through this. It’s just horrible.

Yeah. So, I hope it does get rescheduled. And hopefully someday we see you guys here someday. We’d love to have you guys here. L.A. loves Bis!

I was so excited when this was all getting finalized. I just said, “I cannot wait to tell our fans,” ‘cause I just knew how many of them always say “when are you coming back to America? When are you coming to LA? When are you coming to New York?” and it’s like, I cannot wait to say! I know we have such a passionate fanbase that, no matter where we play in America, a bunch would travel. They’re mental, they’re absolutely mad, they would. And I know a lot of people have bought flights and hotels. There’s a fan who has been around since the start, she’s from Ohio, and she booked tickets to come. And people coming from Canada. It’s hurtful, but I know nobody can… yeah. So I’m sad about it, I just hope it gets rescheduled. I still just can’t believe we’re talking like this. It’s such a shame.

Still, it’s such an honor to interview you by the way, I forgot to say that.

It’s a pleasure!

Just while we’re on the Powerpuff Girls note, how did you get involved? I figure Craig [McCracken] reached out, probably?

So, once again, I’ve got to go back to thirty years ago! We had a manager who is one of these kinds of managers who is not a real manager, he’s just a friend who then became a manager and probably regretted it later on because it kinda took over his life and his relationship and everything because of how intense it was. Anyway, he got a call from America, from Cartoon Network, saying “Hey, Craig McCracken, the creator of the Powerpuff Girls, would really like Bis to write a theme tune to their new cartoon. We’re going to send you some VHS video tapes to see what the cartoon’s all about and would like the band to write a theme tune for it. And they gave a kind of briefing of what the three characters were like, what their personalities were like. And there was one tiny, wee jingle at the beginning that does “doo doo, da doo doo doo doo,” and that was all that we had to include, but apart from that, it was free to Bis to do whatever we wanted. And I remember coming up with the lyrics with Steven, and it’s just so funny to think how simple it was at the time. And we were just teenagers, it was crazy! It was like, “commander and the leader!” and it’s still getting sung and thought about to this day. So that’s what happened: we got the video tapes, we watched them on video, and we wrote the lyrics, and we did it, and they were like “we LOVE this! We absolutely love this!”

It fits perfectly!

And ever since, it’s been amazing. Even when we were still touring America, the Powerpuff Girls would come on in the airplane when you’ve got a little TV screen in front of you. We’re like, “oh my God, people know this thing that we did stuff for?” And 30 years later, you’re seeing the Powerpuff Girls branding, even in shops and Chinese websites.

You still see the ice cream trucks have Bubbles with the little gumball eyes.

It’s crazy! Even my daughter, she’s 8 years old, so she was a nothing when that was around. And now everyone’s talking about it. She’s probably watched more episodes that I have, though, and knows more about it. So the fact this isn’t happening — I’m absolutely gutted, I really am.  So tell me about this, is it a podcast that you do?

No, it’s a music radio show on KUCI. It’s a college radio station at UC Irvine. Just keeping in that indie college radio tradition. It’s called Drifting on the Dial.

It’s always been very good for Bis, actually, college radio. We didn’t really understand the importance of it when we first toured America, but yeah. Very important for all the D.I.Y. bands for sure.

Promoters reach out to us, like Mike [Cubillos of Earshot Media], and so we get to promote events. I love doing that, and I just love playing music. We have all of these CDs and records submitted over the years; we have your guys’s first couple albums, all the U.S. releases. And yeah, it’s just so fun to do that. I graduated a year and a half ago now, but I still just keep up with it and I’m glad they let me stay.

That’s great! Yeah, so we’re still doing stuff, and when we’ve been playing recently, we’ve added a new song. And it seems like it’s just been in the set forever and it gives us confidence to think we can still do this. It’s so reassuring that we’re placing a new song in amongst a selection of songs in the past 30 years and it works and people are loving it, so we need to get a new album out, and that’s what we’re going to do. And we’re absolutely sick to death of record labels and getting mistreated and albums disappearing and getting contractual stuff worked out in the new digital age. I feel we’ve lost so much and we’ve got hardly any college and that’s SO not Bis. We need our control back, we need a new album, and that’s our plans for 2027. New album, we’ve got a bunch of dates set up in the UK, but yeah. We need to get new music and we need to get absolutely sorted in America, because we can see that that’s where a lot of our fans still are and that we still love. I wanna get back there.

Again, we hope to see you!  How is the fight against the D.I.Y. Corps going?

I suppose it’s quite similar to what we’ve just been talking about. Thirty years and we’re still all about it. We’ve not lost our roots, we never will. We love it and whether it’s to do with our merchandise, or our music, or choosing our single, or anything. We totally believe in doing things D.I.Y. I’ve got such a passion for it, I really do. I just know in my heart it’s something I will love until the day I die. I never stop thinking about Bis. Maybe a different answer you’ll get from John or Steven, I don’t know, but I absolutely love it. It’s hard, don’t get me wrong, to manage it with jobs and kids and just life. But it’s my biggest hobby, as most people would call it. I don’t really make money from it, so it’s hard to fit in, hard to make it possible. But I just love it. Again, just speaking to people like yourself, and to fans, and still getting emails from people saying “oh, you guys got me through such tough times in my life, you mean so much to me.” That means the world to me. Like, that’s my band that did that! And people who know the Powerpuff Girls and sing that song. That’s like — that’s us that did that! We actually made that! It’s not the people that covered it and probably earned more money than us on Spotify. It was us! We actually made that song! And that’s why I was proud to show off the recording of it on our socials the other day, because I just wanted to prove that we were teenagers and we made that for people. I just love it, I absolutely love it. And the D.I.Y. part of it is the non-commercial side of music. And that’s what everybody truly loves. We toured quite recently with the band EMF, who were a big favorite of mine as a teenager and a whole lot of people. Their main songwriter, Ian, did a lot of work with people like Beyonce and a lot of really big commercial acts and he probably did well financially off it, but he just said, “too commercial for me.” So even people like that, EMF were a massive success in the charts and stuff. But even him, he just didn’t feel comfortable being in that world and just being in the D.I.Y. scene, I feel at home. It feels like me and I just want to keep making music and I love it.

I’m very much the same way. I was in a band for a few years and then I finally got a job and now it’s been so hard to schedule. And everyone else is more focused on the goal-oriented side of things and very focused on music promotion and streaming numbers and all of that, and it’s just too much for me.

Yep. And that’s a new side of it for a band like us, it’s very, very strange. We’ve gone from a very physical world, where it’s sales that get you into the UK charts, actual physical charts. And then we’ve never properly experienced the digital world. Our record contracts don’t even have it mentioned, so we don’t even have ownership of our first few albums. Like we can’t do anything with them digitally so we only make money on the things we release now. So that’s the future. We’ll do a Taylor Swift and we’ll just hopefully rerecord everything. Because we’re so proud of what we’ve done! We just feel like we don’t own it anymore and it’s horrible, it really is. It’s a different world. It’s hard to even explain what it must have been for bands like us. We didn’t even know. The Internet wasn’t even around! I’m telling you that, like you’re my child or something! Oh my God! It’s so strange, like, I remember the first time we went to New York and we went to the Knitting Factory. We were playing an event called the Scottish Invasion with Teenage Fanclub, and we were very young as well. And they had a computer as you walked in the door! And you could type stuff in, you could look up your own band. There was a guy who knew all about web stuff, and he’d made us a wee, tiny website that was the very first one we had. It’s the first time I got to see it, going on this computer in the Knitting Factory, because we didn’t have computers back then. So it’s so strange, really strange.

Also, how’s your badge company going? I read a couple interviews where you’re talking about it. That’s your main job right?

Yeah! So I started doing that in… was it 2001 or something? Just as a side thing. I was paying a company to make me badges for Bis, and then my partner at the time said, “yeah, let’s just get a badge machine and try to do it ourselves.” And we started our company called weebadgers.com and then other people were like, “Oh, I love these badges, can you do some for my band?” and then “Oh, can you do them for my band?” It just kept going and going and going. It got quite crazy, and this is the days before I had children or commitments and things like that. So it was actually really good. It’s worked out really well where — I don’t make a lot of money by any means, minimum wage if I’m lucky — but it’s meant that I’ve been able to have children and not get childcare and because I’ve got MS, I can take time off if I need it. And when I do gigs, I can say “closed!” I’m my own boss and I love being my own boss. I wish I had tons of money. If I did, I’d be in America with my band all the time, because that’s the dream. But, nothing we can do, and yeah. It does the job, it does it.

Nice, nice. Also, while talking a bit about your art. I always see you guys have that manga artstyle that you were drawing. What manga were influencing you thirty years ago, and then is there any good manga now that you’ve been reading? I haven’t been into manga for about a decade, I will say.

You know, when people used to ask me this in the ‘90s in Japan, I never really knew many names and many comics. I only knew the kind of main ones like Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon and the Dirty Pair, I think it was. And I was always a fan of Astro Boy, Astro Girl. But I never delved very deep into it, and I felt quite ashamed I was trying this art that I didn’t really know an awful lot about. I didn’t know the background, I didn’t know names, I didn’t know books, I didn’t know artists. And I maybe shouldn’t have been allowed but I just love making these silly drawings. Whenever I’m in a hotel, which I was a lot, and you’ve got a little bit of paper and a pen at the side of your bed, I just used to randomly draw. And they ended up being on Bis records sleeves and stuff. I just loved it! And if it wasn’t for that art on our first record, I don’t think Japan would have sold 100,000 albums. I think that’s what really appealed to them, that we loved their culture and loved it so much. I find it absolutely crazy now that my children are learning about manga, their friends are into manga, there’s some kawaii shops to buy Japanese stuff from. Do you know how hard I found that thirty years ago? It was really hard! And because our first album is coming up to its thirty year anniversary next year, and someone is offering to put out a special release of the vinyl for it but add a few extra songs, and I was thinking of doing new artwork for the front cover of the three of us more like the way we look now. And, you know, on the Beatles’s red album how you turn it around and it shows you the way they look now? I’d quite like to do the New Transistor Heroes as the way I see us now, like me with longer, colored hair, Steven with glasses, John with a hat. I’d love to just draw that again, so it was just today actually, that I started thinking about properly getting that together. And it would look good on merchandise as well. And I can still do it! I don’t do it very often, I don’t have the time but I enjoy it, it’s lovely. And I’ve completely gone off topic here, I don’t even know what the question was.

That’s exciting! I’m excited for the reissue. Also, are you going to update the facts on the front cover of New Transistor Heroes? I was reading that Steve can “cut through any element with his razor sharp vampire teeth.” But we’ve had more elements discovered since then. I looked this up beforehand — apparently copernicum was the most recently-discovered element [at that time]. Have his teeth kept up with the discoveries of new elements? Are there certain elements he can’t cut through now?

I’ll need to ask him that, oh my God! I’ll be seeing him on Friday, we’re going to have a rehearsal before we go to our Nottingham gig. I will ask him this because these are questions we don’t usually get, Joey, so thank you! My first intention was, “oh, I’ll just maybe replace the heads on the characters,” just to make my hair longer. And when I started with myself, I realized this is actually impossible. I can’t do that proportionately, I have to do the whole thing. So now I’m gonna have to do all three of us all over again. And now you have got me thinking that maybe I should just update absolutely everything, I don’t know. You’ve got me thinking, thank you.
You’re welcome. Very, very excited! Thank you so much again for the interview. Hopefully we get to see you guys sometime.

I hope so. I did say to Mike [Cubillos], I didn’t know if anyone wanted to do the interviews after the event’s been cancelled, but so far everyone’s like, “yeah, of course we do.”

So it’s like, wow, we’ve still got it! Yay! So thank you.

It’s an honor.

Let me know if there’s anything I can share, anything like that.

One last question: which Powerpuff Girl (or Powerpuff Girls character) do you identify with the most, and then if you had to assign one for John and Steven?

Ooh, yay! Well, “Blossom, commander and the leader” — well, that’s always Steven. He’s like “I’m Steven!” He’s the guy in the middle, that is Steven for sure. And then Bubbles, I would say that I maybe relate to her the most. Not because I’m cute because I’m not, but because my daughter looks like Bubbles. So I will take Bubbles, and that leaves Buttercup to be John because that’s the wee person on the side that’s the kind of cool one. The one that stays a bit quieter, but they’re one that everyone thinks is amazing. So he’ll be Buttercup.

Nice. Thank you again so much!

Follow Bis at: https://www.instagram.com/bis.the.band/?hl=en

To donate to Eric Bauza’s family, you can visit: https://www.cartoonsunited.com/donate

To donate to Starlight Children’s Foundation, you can visit: https://www.starlight.org/