Dunedin duo Haunted Love tell Lydia Jenkin why they've combined horror, sci-fi, and teen romance into their sound.
Geva Downey and Rainy McMaster have had uncannily parallel lives, even before forming Haunted Love. They both listened to the Nolan Sisters, Talking Heads and David Bowie growing up, had slightly hippy mums who encouraged them to play guitar, went to art school, and they both worked in a Dunedin art gallery (where they met). "Marriage counsellors say that the best couples who stay together are the ones who have similar childhoods," Downey laughs, "so maybe that's helped."
When Downey met McMaster, it was as if she'd figured out what had been missing in her music at university, and she quickly asked McMaster to be in a band.
Finding the name Haunted Love was almost as effortless for the pair - it came from a 1970s comic series of spooky and romantic gothic horror. Though the stories themselves weren't inspiring, the overall aesthetic was. "Maybe it was the treatment of the horror genre in particular, because Rainy and I are both super-sensitive to any kind of horror post-1970s - it's just too gory and a bit too freaky. But before that, when horror was perhaps a bit more of a metaphor for the outsider in society playing on human darker sides, then that's much more interesting than shock value," Downey explains.
The first song the pair wrote was inspired by the Otago Settlers' Museum's crammed portrait gallery.