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BiTS: I've said a number of times in reviews that I've done that you remind me constantly of
Grace Slick, which you do. Do you know her music?
DS: That’s a compliment. Well, to be honest, I hadn’t heard her music until you mentioned it. And
then when you mentioned her, because I had not heard right, I looked her up straight away and
I was quite flattered. So that's very nice [laughs].
BiTS: Well, that's good, okay. Tell me, how did you meet Ritchie?
DS: Okay, well this is a slightly strange one [chuckles], so Ritchie and I had been friends on the
dreaded Facebook. So basically, Ritchie and I have been friends on Facebook for about five and
a half years, but we'd never met each other. I’d sort of followed Ritchie on Facebook and he
likewise followed me, but we didn't know each other, and we'd sort of never met each other. And
when lockdown occurred, basically as I had lots of time on my hands, I think a lot of people did.
I wasn't working, so I decided to do some covers. So I set up this little page doing Debra Susan
covers of all sorts of music right across the board, so say from Motown to Doris Day, through
Amy Winehouse tracks, to any sort of cover that you can possibly imagine, including opera, right
across the board.
I noticed that Ritchie sort of started following me and started commenting on some of the videos.
So I then started to look a bit more at what he was doing and then it sort of went from there. Just
as we were coming out of lockdown, Ritchie sort of messaged me [chuckles] and sort of said to
me, would you like to meet up for coffee? And I thought, oh, that sounds a very nice idea. So it
sort of went from there. So we sort of met up for coffee. He invited me to his flat and at first I was
a little bit, you know, that seems a bit forward, and I thought I hope he's okay [laughs]. So I went
round to his flat. He made me a coffee and
basically, he’d developed a guitar riff which then
became our debut single ‘One Hell Of A Ride’.
He was very nonchalant about it. Very nice, and
he said, oh, I've come up with this guitar riff. Do
you think there's anything you'd be able to put
to this? And I listened, and if I honestly say,
within about 15, that's all it took about 15
minutes, I’d sort of listened to it and straight
away came up with some kind of melody and
then in front of him, I wrote down the first verse
and chorus. We tried it out and I thought, oh, this
has gone well, this sort of really works. You were
pleased, weren't you, Ritchie, with it as well?
Then we uploaded it to Facebook [laughs] and
our producer Michael Tingle who’s a marvellous guy. He really is a lovely, lovely man, he sort of
said I really like that. We ought to get that into the studio. Well, I had no experience of doing
studio recordings at all. I’d never done anything like that. So I looked at Ritchie. I was a bit
surprised, and I said, really? He said, yes, we'll get that into the studio. So within about two weeks,
we were in the studio recording it, at which point obviously, I'd written the second and third
verse and the chorus. It was as quick as that.
BiTS: I bet you were nervous of that, weren’t you?
DS: I was very nervous yes, and also because firstly that was my very first experience. I'd never
recorded anything previously. I'd gone from being in a band in 2016 to, I think it was about
October 2020, when I met Ritchie to actually being in a recording studio and sort of recording a