Dolly Parton was once asked how she could play the guitar with her long acrylic fingernails. ‘Pretty well,’ she replied, parrying the ingrained sexism of the question with her usual disarming wit. Litty Hughes, self-taught guitar shero in Glasgow-based electro-punk trio Brenda, has followed Dolly’s lead, partly as a riposte to a Noel Gallagher comment that women don’t make good guitarists because they’re too busy thinking about their nails. ‘It’s cos I can’t use a plectrum properly,’ she explains. ‘I’ve been using one finger the whole time.’
Hughes has been playing the same guitar since her teens but was thoroughly discouraged in her music aspirations by rejection from a succession of lad bands. Her route into jubilant DIY rock’n’roll was to play socially with other women. Her future bandmate Flore de Hoog, meanwhile, was also meeting with a degree of resistance closer to home. ‘I’m very lucky to have a supportive family,’ she says, ‘but they always taught me to absolutely never sing cos I don’t have a conventional voice. Then I was listening to The Velvet Underground songs sung by Moe the drummer and I thought, “it’s allowed to sound out of tune”.’

Along with drummer Apsi Witana, de Hoog played in the short-lived but most entertaining indie quartet Wet Look. When lockdown and, quips Witana, ‘internal politics’ put paid to that pop wheeze, they hooked up with Hughes to form Brenda, named in honour of their favourite non-friendly neighbourhood hardware-store assistant. ‘Very badass, very butch,’ says Hughes. ‘She doesn’t care about customer service.’
De Hoog characterises the Brenda approach (the band, not the scary retail worker) as ‘loosey-goosey’. By accident more than design, there is no bassist nor rhythm guitarist in the line-up, but de Hoog compensates to some degree by playing two synthesizers, one with each hand, like a femme punk Rick Wakeman. ‘You need those low-end bass tones,’ she says. ‘When we first started, it was quite nerve-wracking because we didn’t even have endings to our tunes. It took ages to create structure and finally now we’ve got something that’s presentable. I’m quite chuffed with the album.’

And rightly so; their self-titled debut is a short but perfectly formed calling card for their idiosyncratic blend of post-punk attitude, new-wave synth pop and haunting harmonics, fuelled by anger but delivered with joy. Recent single, and album highlight, ‘Microscopic Babe’ is accompanied by a blast of a video, an homage to B-movie schlock shot on the hoof during a trip to Los Angeles. ‘We got to choose our own props from a huge medical warehouse in LA,’ says de Hoog.
‘Maybe we could have just used a Super 8 filter and did it ourselves,’ concedes Hughes, ‘but it was fun to go to LA; when you get that opportunity, you do it. My 15-year-old self would be so proud. You can’t shelf women in their thirties . . . you can’t shelf women full stop.’

Brenda’s album launch party is at The Glad Café, Glasgow, Friday 28 July; their eponymous album is released the same day by Last Night From Glasgow.