Showing their metal

Andrew Mathieson
FOUR unassuming girls – three of them from Lara – walk up in sight of a burly bouncer without a skerrick of fear.
They just utter the words ‘Kiss or Kill’.
It’s no threat but it instantly commands his respect.
From that point, the heavy metal music promoters – sisters Nicole, 27, and Kelly Makin, 24, Kate Brown, 24, and Melbourne friend, Emily Ispanovic, 23 – take control behind the door and stage of the seedy pub.
But the Kiss or Kill girls, by their own admission, wouldn’t have had the guts less than a year ago to be so brazen.
“Really, I’ve found that the metal community is just so friendly,” Emily stresses.
“Looking from the outside in, you’d never think four girls could go up and approach some big, scary-looking dude like that.”
Real metal fans the girls might be but they’re no ordinary headbangers.
Two of them have studied business management for music. Another, Nicole, runs, of all things, an aged-care and disability services provider.
Emily has moved on to bigger challenges since her uni days.
She’s a personal assistant to Mike Brady – yes, the same man of Up there Cazaly fame.
The perks allow her to listen in to studio voice-overs and the making of his latest country album.
On the flipside, Nicole has found heavy metal has received a bad rap, even from some nightspots.
“They think we’ll wreck the place,” she insists.
“In the time we’ve been doing it we’ve never seen anything like that.
“Nothing stolen, nothing damaged.”
Only traditional band venues like the Geelong and National hotels and the Barwon Club trust them with regular dates.
Kiss or Kill has now promoted more than 30 death metal, metal hardcore and black metal shows since June.
The girls don’t take a cent from their shows – only the bands get a paltry share of the door.
In fact, they girls are always the ones out of pocket.
“We wouldn’t want to add it up,” Kelly says, “it would be too scary.”
But the girls put their heads together to try putting a figure on the cost of their endeavours.
Off to Gippsland on a Friday night, back to Geelong and then a Melbourne show the next day and the costs start to add up.
“If you include petrol for two cars, not to mention the driving and the time, all the other costs, it would probably be $500, maybe even a $1000 a show, between us,” Emily guesses.
They soon discovered there is very little glamour on this side of the curtain.
“If we’re planning a show, we’d often spend two weeks promoting it,” Kelly says.
“Then we advertise, there’s the street press and there’s other costs with that sort of stuff,” Nicole adds.
“What else is there?,” Emma wonders.
“We also run a lot of raffles – that helps,” Kelly replies.
“Yeah, we raise about 100 bucks – we might even make $150,” Nicole says before giggling, “luckily we all have pretty good full-time jobs to support this.”
The name of the promotion, Kiss or Kill, also whimsically sums up the girls – the balance between their feminine presence and the brutality of the metallic sounds. It was initially the name for the group’s clothing label.
They’re still creating designs but haven’t got around to printing them.
Nicole jokes that the plan is for the clothing to eventually subsidise the music.
“It seems to work and it doesn’t seem to pigeon-hole us into any scene,” she says.
“Even if we do clothing, it doesn’t limit us to music.”
Nicole brought Emma on board Kiss or Kill after playing together in a former band.
Now the girls like to feign they have any talent.
“I used to play a musical instrument back in the day,” Emma reminisces.
“I play guitar,” Kelly reveals before Nicole pipes in: “And I play drums, but, yeah, not any more.
“The bands we promote are all musically gifted and they’d laugh us off the stage.”