Butcher Babies singer Heidi Shepherd was recently interviewed on Talk Toomey podcast. She explained how the band’s nipple tape image was a homage to late Plasmatics singer Wendy O. Williams. She said (via Blabbermouth):
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“I think it [the nipple tape] was a good idea. It was something that people were like, ‘What?’… We did in our band previous to Butcher Babies too, so it wasn’t something new to us.
“In a lot of ways, it definitely hurt how we’ve grown, but I also think that it was a message that we stood for. The people who didn’t get it and it got lost in translation, well, now they know.
“But in Europe, it seems like more people understood, which kind of makes sense. But it seems like in the US, I’m like, did people forget about [Wendy]? [Laughs] Does the metal community not understand this? But I don’t think that it was a bad idea. I think it was something that I did and I’m proud of.
“I don’t really hold any regrets. I think that in life in general, these situations build to the bigger picture, and I think that having had that past and where we are now, it’s kind of a cool evolution of the band too. It’s unique.
“We went from being these young girls, bouncing around in nipple tape, screaming hateful things into microphones, to women, almost a decade later, grown up in the industry, helped with this women’s movement, if you will. And I think that that sort of thing helped me become the woman I am today.”
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When Podcast host asked her whether this was a marketing ploy. She said:
“That was not ever anything that ever went through my mind: ‘Oh, this will help us get attention.’ Because I was in a band for a year prior to that, that I did that. I didn’t think that it would ever end up here.
“I didn’t think that it would ever amount to anything. I just thought we were gonna have some fun playing some original music with our friends along the Sunset Strip, ’cause that’s what we did before. The only difference was, before, it was five girls and [we were playing] covers. And that’s the reason we created Butcher Babies – to do original stuff.”
