Voodoo Queens

The Voodoo Queens were born in late 1992, when Anjali Bhatia walked away from the drum stool in Mambo Taxi to make her own racket out front. She took up guitar and vocals and roped in family, her sister Rajni on keyboards and her cousin Anjula Bhaskar on bass, plus Ella Guru, another Mambo Taxi refugee, on guitar and backing vocals. A drummer called Sunny was there at the start, and the lineup also counted Stefania "Steffi" Lucchesini on drums.

One gig was all it took for John Peel to offer them a session, recorded in January 1993 while Anjali was still clocking in at the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street. Two more Peel sessions followed, along with a busking face-off against Boyzone on Channel 4's Naked City. The North London band hit number one on the UK Indie Chart in 1993, and the press filed them under riot grrrl and alongside Asian-fronted bands like Cornershop.

They recorded for Too Pure, and "Supermodel Superficial" is them at full tilt: fuzzed-up, sneering indie punk with a title that says exactly what it thinks of the catwalk. The bass spot kept turning over, with Rebecca Lunn filling in and Mary Deigan arriving in 1994, and the band was done by 1999.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.