Interview: Marie and the Meltdownz
I think punk has stayed relevant remarkably well, although sadly part of the reason for that is that so many of the things punk was shouting about haven't gone away. In some respects, we've actually watched attitudes going backwards. With the rise of Reform UK and increasingly divisive rhetoric around immigration, gender and identity, you could argue that we need punk's willingness to challenge things more than ever.
‘Driven by a desire to create a more diverse female-led presence in the scene, the band centres around Marie’s distinctive punk baritone ukulele style and sharp, unapologetic songwriting. Their music pulls from real-life experiences and tackles social and political issues head-on, blending grit with honesty. Refusing to be boxed in or told how to look, sound, or behave, Marie and the Meltdownz stand firmly against convention. This is a band doing things their way – loud, fearless and without compromise’.
Marie and the Meltdownz were formed in 2025 and consists of Marie Repulsive on vocals and baritone ukulele, Jessica on drums and Paul on bass. Marie was a member of early The Pukes, who she is working with again, and was vocalist for 12 years with Lost Cherrees. Paul plays bass in Rites of Hadda and was in the Hawkwind covers band Spirit of the Age while Jessica has a history in social justice activism.
Marie is also the host of Punk Rock Creatives podcast that interviews ‘musicians, artists, designers, poets, and writers from the punk and DIY scenes’ trying to get beyond the normal soundbites to allow listeners the opportunity to hear ‘voices and perspectives they may not have encountered before’.
Noticing that the band was playing their first gig at a benefit for The Menopause Charity and intrigued by their bold mission statement I contacted Marie to see if she would consider an interview, something she kindly agreed to.
E&D: Could you tell us a bit about your musical history?
Marie: I started a band 27 or years ago called Public Execution with members of Bug Central and Active Slaughter, we did about 2 gigs and an EP and nothing else after that. I did a couple of bands here and there, one was called The Repulsive Love Fairies, where I got my stage name. Thinking back to this band I think Marie & the Meltdownz are probably a more older sophisticated version of this line-up. Rich Grealish who played drums went onto play in bands such as The Love Me Tenders, Borehead, Queen Corvus Band and a couple of others.
I played in a couple of local bands in Southend-on-Sea, before joining The Pukes in the early days, and then joining Lost Cherrees who I was with for 12 years.
E&D: You were with Lost Cherrees as vocalist weren’t you? Have you been involved with other bands as well?
Marie: I was with Lost Cherrees as the vocalist and I played a bit of uke in the beginning, I am surprisingly back doing stuff with The Pukes. We have just done some recording at Inferno Class Recording Studios, which is Trystan O’Connell’s (former guitarist of Lost Cherrees) studio. The Meltdownz have just recorded there and I recorded an episode of Punk Rock Creative Podcast with Trystan talking about his studio and our time in Lost Cherrees and we did some really good stuff with the band. Notably Vi Day at AWOD where I sang the lead on ‘Cry No More’ a cover of The Poison Girls track which we played with Vi Subversa’s (Frances Sokolov) son Pete Fender.
E&D: I think you have also worked in SEND previously. Is that something you are still involved with?
Marie: Yes I am, both my sons have SEND needs and both have EHCP, they are both high functioning, I do some hours at a college and I teach Graphic Design as a working Graphic Designer/Digital Creative and just recently I have supported a family to get their EHCP for their son who got diagnosed with ADHD and Autism when he was 4 years old and was basically failed by the school system and he ended up on my course with no support and struggling. I used my knowledge to help get families the support they need, and attend SEND coffee mornings, events, engage in forums and work with families in my son’s school when I can to offer advice and support from my time as a SEND school teacher and as a parent with SEND children who has navigated the system.
E&D: Could you tell us a bit about your new band, Marie and the Meldownz? There is a full band and acoustic version, isn’t there? Who else is involved?
Marie: It’s myself, Paul Maybin who also plays bass for Rites of Hadda, Jessica Day who plays drums and has been an activist for social, racial and LGBTQ+ rights, Jessica describes themselves as a queer anarcha feminist. Myself singing and playing ukulele, on our recent recording I play bass as well, one of our songs is going to be on Dammit Records’ October Dammnations, and we are releasing our EP in November.
E&D: I love the manifesto for Marie and the Meldownz! Could we unpack it a bit?!
‘Driven by a desire to create a more diverse female-led presence in the scene…’ Do you feel that the space to be female in punk is constrained, that there are still mainstream gendered expectations and attitudes that need dismantling in punk? Initially punk gave women more room to explore what that meant, do you think that space has shrunk over time? The patriarchy still knocking around?
‘(The) music pulls from real-life experiences and tackles social and political issues head-on…’ What sort of issues is the band engaging with?
The band ‘stand firmly against convention’ – is that in terms of form, sound or content. I was reading some comments the other day about early punk that in terms of form/song structure it was very conventional, is that something you are hoping to play with? I guess a ‘punk baritone ukulele style’ is a good start!
Marie: I think punk did open up a space for women to be something other than what mainstream culture expected them to be, and that’s one of the things I’ve always loved about it. But I don’t think punk somehow escaped patriarchy just because it rejected the mainstream. Those attitudes can still exist within alternative scenes too.
For me, it’s not simply about wanting more women onstage. It’s about wanting more space for different kinds of women — different ages, bodies, backgrounds, identities and ways of expressing themselves. There can still be an idea of what a woman in a punk band is supposed to look like, sound like or even behave like. I’m not particularly interested in fitting that template.
A lot of my songwriting comes directly from things I’ve experienced or things that make me angry. I write about sexism, misogyny, inequality, social attitudes, relationships, motherhood and the expectations placed on women. Sometimes the political and the personal are basically the same thing. You start writing about something that happened to you and realise there’s a much bigger social structure sitting behind it.
And when I say Marie and the Meltdownz stand against convention, I mean all of it really — sound, form and content, but also the idea of what a band is supposed to be.
I play a baritone ukulele through distortion. We have bass and drums and no traditional electric guitar, and I love the fact that people sometimes don’t quite know where to put us. I’m not trying to make the ukulele behave like a novelty instrument, and I’m not interested in adding a guitar simply because that’s what a punk band is expected to have. I enjoy playing ukulele and I love how versatile the instrument can be.
In terms of songwriting, I don’t think being unconventional necessarily means deliberately making every song structurally strange. Sometimes a simple, direct three-minute song is exactly what something needs. Punk has always had plenty of conventional song structures. For me, the punk part is having the freedom to decide what serves the song rather than following a rule about what punk is supposed to sound like.
So I suppose the common thread running through Marie and the Meltdownz is: I don’t want somebody else deciding what space I’m allowed to occupy — as a woman, as a human, as a songwriter or as a musician. If it sounds right on a distorted baritone ukulele, that’s what I’m going to play. I’m going to say what I need to say.
E&D: You helped organise and were part of a gig on 30 August to raise money for The Menopause Charity, how did that go?
Marie: It went really well. We had a lot of competition that weekend, including Notting Hill Carnival and the annual South London Punx gathering at The Windmill in Brixton, so we knew we were competing for an audience on an already very busy weekend.
But for me, the event was about more than simply how many people came through the door. We wanted to raise money for The Menopause Charity, but also to create a space where we could actually talk about menopause and perimenopause openly, particularly within the punk community. It’s something that affects so many people, yet there can still be this strange silence around it and if we’re going to talk about community and supporting each other, then issues like menopause need to be part of that conversation too.
It was also important to us that the event celebrated women continuing to make music, perform and take up space as they get older. There’s still this ridiculous idea within wider society that women somehow become less visible or less relevant with age, and putting a load of brilliant women onstage is quite a good way of saying, ‘No, actually, we’re still fucking here’.
So yes, we raised money for a really worthwhile cause, but hopefully we also helped make menopause a little less taboo — and had a bloody good punk gig while we were doing it.
E&D: You did an interview with punktuationmag.com around older women in punk – how have you experienced that? Freeing, empowering, disorientating?
Marie: I think I’ve experienced all three at different times — freeing, empowering and definitely a bit disorientating.
It’s freeing because I don’t feel as though I constantly have to be on alert for unwanted attention, mainly from men, in the way I often did when I was younger. There’s something incredibly liberating about reaching an age where you start caring much less about whether you’re pleasing people or conforming to somebody else’s idea of what a woman should be.
I feel empowered by knowledge and experience too. I know myself better. I’ve lived through enough to have a much stronger sense of what I believe, what I’ll accept and what I won’t. And I think I have more peers now whose experiences I can relate to. There’s a sense of solidarity in that which I didn’t necessarily have when I was younger.
But it is disorientating because I’m middle-aged and, firstly, I genuinely never imagined myself getting here! And if I did think about middle age when I was younger, I certainly didn’t imagine it would feel this liberating.
I grew up without older female role models in my family, so I developed a really distorted idea of what being a middle-aged woman meant. I associated it with becoming passive — writing off your own life, doing what men told you, standing back rather than speaking up, even when you should be protecting yourself or other people. I didn’t have women around me showing me that getting older could actually mean becoming louder, stronger, more independent and more certain of yourself.
It was when I became a young adult and found punk that I started coming across women who challenged that idea. Women in bands like Lost Cherrees, Hagar the Womb, Rabies Babies and Rubella Ballet showed me different ways of being female, creative and outspoken.
And probably the most important influence for me was Vi Subversa from Poison Girls. Here was a woman who completely challenged the idea that women had to become quieter or less radical as they got older. She hadn’t aged out of punk or rebellion — she was proof that age didn’t have to make a woman invisible. Now I’ve reached this age and discovered almost the complete opposite of what I’d once imagined middle age would be.
I’m making music again. I’ve started a new band. I’ve created Punk Rock Creatives. I’m interviewing people I admire, putting on events, writing songs about things I actually care about and taking up more space creatively than I probably ever have before.
So there’s something quite funny about it. I spent years thinking getting older meant gradually disappearing, and actually I’ve become far more visible.
Maybe that’s the most empowering part of it: I haven’t aged out of punk. I’ve aged further into myself.
E&D: Picking up on the inevitability of older punks, Punk Scholars Network have a conference this year around Punk at 50. How has punk done so far? Has it managed to stay up to speed and relevant in a very rapidly changing political and technological world?
Marie: I think punk has stayed relevant remarkably well, although sadly part of the reason for that is that so many of the things punk was shouting about haven’t gone away. In some respects, we’ve actually watched attitudes going backwards. With the rise of Reform UK and increasingly divisive rhetoric around immigration, gender and identity, you could argue that we need punk’s willingness to challenge things more than ever.
Punk has also become something much bigger than I imagine many of its pioneers ever thought it would. It’s survived for fifty years, crossed generations and spread all over the world. Technology has obviously transformed how people discover music, communicate and create communities, but that basic DIY principle adapts surprisingly well. You don’t necessarily need to photocopy a fanzine and hand it out at gigs anymore — you can make a podcast, release your own music digitally, create online communities or reach somebody on the other side of the world. The technology has changed, but the impulse to create something yourself and get your ideas out there hasn’t.
And there are always going to be young people who feel alienated or that they don’t fit into mainstream society. Punk can still provide somewhere for those people to go and find others who feel the same way. I think that’s one of the reasons it keeps regenerating itself.
Musically, some punk has deliberately stayed close to what came before, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But I’m particularly interested in bands taking the politics and confrontational nature of punk and applying it to contemporary experiences.
Rites of Hadda, for example, tackle gender in an incredibly upfront way. They’re talking about gender and identity using language and perspectives that simply weren’t part of mainstream punk conversations decades ago.
Another band I’ve encountered recently, Grail Guard, are writing about modern racism and, importantly, the way racism isn’t just something that happens at one moment in somebody’s life. It can have consequences that ripple through families and generations. That’s an interesting development from simply writing a song saying “racism is bad”; it’s exploring how deeply those structures can affect people’s lives.
So I don’t think punk needs to sound radically different every ten years to remain relevant. What needs to evolve is whose experiences we’re hearing about, what we’re challenging and who gets to speak.
E&D: How do you see its future? Do you feel optimistic about its adaptability and resilience?
Marie: I do feel optimistic about punk’s future. Its resilience comes from its ability to adapt and from the fact that no one generation owns it. There will always be people who feel alienated, angry about injustice or who simply don’t fit neatly into what society expects of them, and punk can still give them a place to belong and a way to express that.
I think the important thing is that we allow the next generation to make punk their own rather than expecting them to recreate ours. It might look different, sound different and tackle different issues — but that’s not punk disappearing, that’s punk evolving.
E&D: Alongside Marie and the Meldownz you also host Punk Rock Creatives podcast, can you tell us a bit about that?
Marie: Punk Rock Creatives is an independent podcast I started to explore the creative people and stories around punk and alternative culture. It was originally going to be a graphic design podcast, but talking about punk and creativity felt much more natural to me.
I talk to musicians, artists, writers, photographers, designers and other creatives about what they do, but I’m often more interested in the person and the journey behind the work.
We’ve talked about everything from music and creativity to activism, mental health, domestic abuse, neurodiversity, sexism and simply surviving long enough to keep making things.
It’s very DIY — I produce it myself on a shoestring budget, often recording in my youngest son’s bedroom! It used to be recorded in my oldest son’s bedroom, but he grew out of accepting Lego sets as payment for studio hire.
It’s grown far beyond what I originally expected, with listeners around the world and some incredible guests, but I still want it to feel like two people having a genuine conversation rather than a polished, formal interview.
For me, it’s really about documenting people’s stories, giving different voices a platform and showing just how broad and creative the punk community actually is.
E&D: You describe the podcasts as ‘raw, real, and rooted in the spirit of punk’ – could you define that ‘spirit’ for us?
Marie: For me, the spirit of punk has never just been about a particular sound or how somebody dresses. It’s about DIY, questioning things, speaking up and creating something because you believe it should exist rather than waiting for somebody to give you permission.
That’s what I try to bring to Punk Rock Creatives. It’s independently produced, on a shoestring budget, and the conversations aren’t supposed to feel overly polished or manufactured. I want people to be able to talk honestly about creativity, music, politics, difficult experiences, failure, success and everything in between.
It’s also about giving space to voices and stories that might not always get that space elsewhere. Punk gave people the idea that you didn’t need to be part of an establishment to make something meaningful. You could pick up an instrument, make a zine, put on a gig, start a label – or in my case, start a podcast.
E&D: What’s happening for Marie and the Meldownz in terms of releases and gigs this year? You have a track on a comp out soon don’t you? Possibilities of an EP this year?
Marie: Yes, things are starting to get quite exciting! We have a track appearing on a compilation being released in October, and then we’re planning to release our EP in November, so watch this space.
Gig-wise, I’ve got one acoustic show coming up, as well as two full-band Marie and the Meltdownz gigs currently lined up. We’re still a relatively new band, so at the moment it’s really about getting the music out there, playing more shows and seeing where it takes us.
It’s been a busy year already, but it feels like we’re only just getting started. Keep an eye on our social media for upcoming dates and venues — Instagram is the main place you’ll find us.
Thank you for taking the time to ask us questions Tim and hopefully see you out and about.
Photo by Cil from Dinosaur Skull courtesy of Marie and the Meltdownz.
Bibliography.
Marie and the Meltdownz Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1535119524668746
Punk Rock Creatives Podcast Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1767688167291600
Rae, Ruth. 2026. ‘Hot Flushes/High Voltage: Older women in punk & Menopause awareness gig in a week’s time!’ punktuationmag.com https://www.punktuationmag.com/hot-flushes-high-voltage-older-women-in-punk-menopause-awareness-gig-in-a-weeks-time/
