Hive minds: Honeyblood's Stina Tweeddale and Cat Myers talk tattoos, punk attitude, new album Babes Never Die

Right now, however, the only thing at their feet is Blanket, the feline flatmate of Cat Myers, the rhythmic half of the band. As Blanket slinks around the room, Myers watches from a window seat, Doctor Marten boots planted firmly on the floor. It's a typical drummer's stance.

Sitting opposite her on the sofa is Stina Tweeddale, Honeyblood's founder, singer and guitarist. Two mugs of tea are perched on the table between them.

We're in Myers's flat in the Gorgie district of Edinburgh. Originally from County Durham, she moved there a decade ago, around the same time Edinburgh-born Tweeddale quit the capital for Glasgow and a university history course. The singer briefly lived in London but currently lives in Shawlands, “on the posh side of Queen's Park”. “My partner is from Edinburgh as well and we always say we'll move back,” she says. “But it's too expensive”.

And so Honeyblood is a sort of inter-city affair, with its drummer and its rehearsal space in the capital, but its mouthpiece and mainstay in the west. Besides, Glasgow is where the music is, and where the music is is where Stina Tweeddale wants to be. “That was the reason I moved,” she admits. “There weren't enough touring bands coming to Edinburgh so I needed to move to see all that.”

Honeyblood may have released only one album but Myers is the third drummer to have partnered Tweeddale so far, a personnel turnover of near Spinal Tap-esque proportions.

First to take her place on the drum stool was Shona McVicar, who plays on the debut but later gave up music to pursue a career in dentistry. Next up, Rah Morriss. But when she returned to her native New Zealand, Tweeddale asked Myers, who had long been on her radar anyway.

I ask Tweeddale if it's important for Honeyblood to be an entirely distaff concern. It hardly needs pointing out that all three drummers to date have been women.

“They've all been blonde as well,” she laughs. “It's like I have a type, like I'm one of those creepy people …”

Myers interrupts. “Where do you even find them?”

“I know, I know. One of them wasn't even a drummer. I just really, really liked her. She really wanted to do it and that's cool with me. My favourite musicians have loads of heart. That's what I'm really into.”

Myers is very definitely a drummer. A graduate of the music department at Edinburgh Napier University, she has worked as a session drummer for jazz and funk bands and previously toured with American blues guitarist Gregg Wright, who played on The Jacksons' 1984 album Victory. She also works regularly with the National Theatre of Scotland, most recently on its Edinburgh International Festival show Anything That Gives Off Light. “I do as much as I can to keep entertained,” she says simply. “I get bored easily”.

Tweeddale, meanwhile, is from the Oxgangs area of Edinburgh. She attended the local Firrhill High School and her teenage years were spent hanging around city centre record shops. Though she didn't start singing until later in life she says she always wrote lyrics, so perhaps her choice of music as a career was a foregone conclusion. Having a professional musician for a father probably helped too. He is guitarist Sandy Tweeddale, of venerable Edinburgh band Blues'N'Trouble.

“I've always been pushed into music,” she says. “Not pushed in a bad way, though. It was just always around me. So when I was younger I was into all the standard bands everyone my age was into. Nirvana was a big one, then when I was about 14 I found out about The Breeders and PJ Harvey and that changed everything. I discovered The Smiths as well, so that's the combination for Honeyblood's style of music and the lyrics – those three all kind of combined.”

Around the same age she also discovered the politically-inspired Riot Grrrl movement and bands like Babes In Toyland and Bikini Kill, led by punk-feminist poster girl Kathleen Hanna. Tweeddale is still a fan, and still mindful of the movement's influence on her and many women of her generation.

“I don't think it ever stopped speaking to people. I did the Girls Rock Glasgow school recently [a rock summer school for girls aged eight to 16] and one of the things that I saw there was that everybody was obsessed with these bands and has been for 15 years, the same as me. So it was nice to know you weren't that creep who liked these random bands at school.”

The Kathleen Hanna love-in continues for a few minutes more and Tweeddale tells me she has tickets to see The Julie Ruin, Hanna's new band, when they play Glasgow in December. It's two days before Honeyblood close their American and British tour with what promises to be a pulsating gig at Glasgow's St Lukes. Mind you, Tweeddale also reveals that she's going to see the reformed All Saints too.

“That's another band I love,” she says, unabashed, as Myers raises a quizzical eyebrow. “I'm not even ashamed of this. Why should I be ashamed about my favourite childhood band? I am so excited to see them. They used to wear combat trousers and bandanas and I thought that was cool.”

Myers is 31. Tweeddale is younger though by how much she isn't saying. “I'm not going to tell you,” she replies when I ask. “You'll never find that anywhere.” (In a 2009 interview with Boycotts, the now defunct band she formed in Glasgow with school friend Joe Gillies, it was stated that she was “in her 20th year”. So let's settle on mid-20s. Old enough to feel nostalgic about All Saints anyway.)

Old enough to have a tattoo as well. Hers is inked somewhere on her midriff and, funnily enough, it reads: “Babes Never Die.” Which brings us neatly to the new album and the song of the same name, one of the standout tracks.

Tweeddale had the tattoo done two years ago, just before Honeyblood set off for a tour of America. It was, she adds unprompted, “around Valentine's Day”.

A spur of the moment thing, then? “Not really. I've been saying it for about five years and I've had the phrase for a long time. I didn't think it would become a song, though, or an album title. So I just got it tattooed on me because it's what I say, I guess. And when we came back from America, I wrote the song. I knew I wanted to write one called Babes Never Die. The idea was there, and I fleshed it out. Now I have to tell people I got the tattoo before I wrote the song, in case people think I have my own lyrics tattooed on my body. Because that would be stupid.”

And what does the phrase mean to her? She laughs. “I just used to get drunk and scream it at people. I love talking absolute s***e to people when I'm drunk.”

But it's more than that. It's more just than a late-night, howling-at-the-moon piece of empty sloganeering. It's a mantra with a particular experience at its core. With a little coaxing, Tweeddale eventually zeroes in on it.

“When I first moved to London I was so overwhelmed by it because I'd never been before,” she explains. “I was so, so poor I couldn't even afford to rent any gear there, so I had to take my amp down on the bus. I was so naive. It was my way of dealing with stuff, thinking it would be fine. And it wasn't. Well it was in the end, but it was so difficult at first. And I kept meeting these really inspirational people who had their stuff together. I thought: 'Wow these people are total babes, they've got it nailed. They're creative, they're doing all the things they want to do. They're sound.' Then it was like: 'Well, babes never die. You never give up if you have respect and belief in yourself.' That's the mantra.”

Giving up isn't anywhere on the agenda at the moment. Nor is letting up: as you read this, Myers and Tweeddale will once again be in America readying themselves for a tour which starts tomorrow and takes them to Chicago, Philadelphia, Portland, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco among other cities. Then they return to the UK for a further 14 dates which include a high profile show at London's 1200 capacity Scala.

No pressure, then? Actually no. The way Tweeddale tells it, the pressure is all behind them. With the relentless touring schedule which followed the release of Honeyblood, she and Myers found themselves spending up to six months on the road at a time. It was hardly conducive to writing new material, so when Tweeddale arrived back in Scotland from America and was met with searching questions from the label – How many new songs have you written? How's the second album coming along? – her answers were “Zilch” and “It isn't”.

“I was like 'None'. I've written no songs'. I haven't written anything,” she recalls. “So then I went home and we had a couple of months off before we started doing festivals and I sat down, I was like: 'Oh my God, this is such an unachievable thing. How am I supposed to write an album in three months? How will I do that?'”

The tattoo helped. Inspired by her mantra, title track Babes Never Die came to her and was the first song written. Then a little rural solitude did the rest as the two bandmates took off together to a cottage in Dumfries and Galloway.

“We set up drums and instruments and recorded demos and stayed up late,” says Myers, taking up the story.

“We drank lots of tea,” adds Tweeddale.

“And wine, and good food ...”

“And just played all day ...”

“And then it just came together naturally ...”

“And by the time we came back,” Tweeddale concludes, “we had half the album.”

The other half soon followed; the album itself was recorded in London with producer James Dring, and come November 4, the world gets to hear the complete work. Will there be any nerves as they wait for the public response?

Again, no. “I'm not too bothered by reviews," says Myers. "If the audience is having a good time and people are coming to shows, that's great. It's like worrying about Likes on FaceBook.” Besides, she adds, “being a working musician is all about failing”.

Sitting across the room from her friend, Tweeddale nods her head in agreement. “I don't need to have the validation,” she says simply. “I know I can do it.”

And who's going to argue with that?

Babes Never Die is out on November 4 (Fat Cat Records); Honeyblood play St Luke's, Glasgow, on December 8