Rock heroine Kelsy Karter comes roaring back after bizarre, ‘traumatic’ legal ordeal: ‘I don’t have it in me to give up’

Published On January 22, 2025 » By »

 (Editor’s note: This interview was conducted before the devastating January 2025 fires in Los Angeles, the city Karter currently calls home.)

On Jan. 31, rock ‘n’ roll heroine Kelsy Karter and her band, the all-male Heroines, will unleash Karter’s second full-length album, an  “electric, emotional, theatrical, autobiographical” rock opera titled Love Made Me Do It. The day after its release, Feb. 1, they’ll play a special all-ages 6 p.m. show at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records (followed by a Hollywood gig at the Roxy on March 6, rescheduled from Jan. 30). They’ll no doubt be in a more optimistic mood than they were almost exactly a year ago, when a bizarre set of circumstances derailed what was supposed to be their first headlining U.S. tour.

It was a saga so much stranger than fiction that they actually started recording the ordeal for an upcoming warts-and-all documentary. “We filmed everything. I was like, in my trauma, ‘Get the camera out! We need to monetize this somehow!’” jokes Karter, sitting with her guitarist Matthew Peach at Licorice Pizza Records, whose in-house pressing plant is also manufacturing the Love Made Me Do It vinyl.

“Basically, a few days before the [2024] tour started, we discovered that the person that we had paid and trusted and was working with for the band’s immigration stuff was a criminal and everything was fake, didn’t exist. It was pretty traumatic,” Karter shockingly reveals.

As the singer explained to her fans in a tearful social media post last year, just days before the scheduled Heroines tour, she had been duped into thinking an immigration attorney was sorting out U.S. work visas for her band, and that had this lawyer been working on their case for months. (Karter, a self-described “mutt” who grew up in New Zealand, Australia, England, and America, has dual U.S. citizenship and an American passport, but Peach, drummer Sebastian Boyse, and bassist Tommy Gent are all British citizens.) When her bandmates’ visa approvals still hadn’t come in less than a week before tour launch, she panicked and phoned the law office — only to be told by the lawyer that he had never worked on her case and had in fact declined her case via email. Much to her horror, she did some sleuthing and eventually discovered that somebody had been impersonating her and her then-manager — and that, despite her paying thousands of dollars in good faith to secure the Heroines’ visas, no such visas existed.

@kelsykarterPlease watch.♬ original sound – Kelsy Karter & The Heroines

“We paid them. We trusted them. There’s a long list of crimes that this person did in the process of using our names and just taking advantage of us,” says Karter. “Hey, we were naive to it. You hire someone like this for something like that, which not the everyday person knows about, and you’re trusting them. You’re taking their word. You are like, ‘Oh cool. This is why I’m paying you. I don’t know about it.’ It’s so bizarre. All the ins and outs, looking back, it’s pretty crazy.”

And so, Karter was forced to go it alone, admitting in her February 2024 social media post that she “wanted to cancel” the tour entirely, that her “heart has been ripped out of [her] chest,” and that her “faith in people [had] been broken,” but she didn’t want to let her fans down. “I ended up having to do the whole tour without the boys on my own. … It was traumatic for me, obviously on tour by myself, and it was traumatic for the boys sitting at home, watching back in England. It was chaos. And I think the biggest thing for us was it was just violating, wasn’t it? It just felt like someone had, I don’t even know how to describe it… it was just the most violating experience ever,” Karter reflects. “But we’re doing really good right now. The mental health has risen. It’s repaired. It was definitely a very traumatic year, but we’re out of the thick of it now.”

Throughout what turned out to be Kelsy Karter’s stripped-back 2024 solo tour, during which she was only accompanied by her multi-instrumentalist tour manager, Karter’s team was still working with the U.S. Embassy, hoping to explain the unusual circumstances and secure last-minute work visas so that the boys could at least join her for a few of the dates. It almost looked like they’d make it for the tour’s final hometown show at the Troubadour in L.A., but as Peach laments, it “wasn’t the theatrical ending we were hoping for” that would have been the perfect final scene of that in-the-works documentary.

“Were trying to get to the Troubadour and it was like the end of the U.S. tour and we went to the embassy. Everything got sorted out with a lot of help from very clever actual lawyers, actual professionals,” Peach recalls. “And we got to the embassy and we had all other suitcases with us, and the lady was like,’ We’re just waiting on one piece of paperwork to come in, but it’s not here yet, so I’ll have to take your passports off here and post them back to you.’ And we’re like, ‘No, we’ve got to go tomorrow!’ And we left the embassy and then an hour later, the paperwork turned up. If our appointment had been an hour later, we would’ve had a theatrical Troubadour show ending to the whole story.”

As it turned out, Kelsy, a former theater nerd who grew up loving Annie and Quentin Tarantino and whose first showbiz dream was to be an actress and director, was able to bring the drama all on her own. The situation was obviously far from ideal, and the tour was a struggle for her mentally and emotionally, but even though Karter obviously flourishes in a band environment, she also thrived in this more intimate, VH1 Storytellers-type setting — her vulnerability (and often her tears) on full display for the supportive fans who rallied around her.

“I was anticipating the Troubadour show to be horrible, if I’m honest, because I thought the boys would be there and then when we realized they weren’t, I was sick,” Karter admits. “I was like, ‘All right, last show. Let me just get through this.’ And it ended up being probably my favorite show of the whole tour. I think I mastered being up there on my own. It was the last show, and I just made it about the fans.”

This wasn’t the first time Karter had suffered a professional setback. “I’ve lost record deals over people wanting me to be more pop/rock — which means they should be asked to be ‘more generic,’” Karter quips. “My whole life people have been telling me who to be, how to dress, what to say. As a woman, it’s hard.” And so, as excruciating and demoralizing as this visas-swindle ordeal was, Karter was able to get through it, mostly thanks to her fans at every tour stop.

“I’ve always been an underdog my whole life. I’ve always been underestimated and misunderstood, and I’ve never in my career been handed anything from some suit in his ivory tower. I’ve done it out of pure nerve and wit and the people around me — and those people include the fans,” Karter asserts. “So, when we were naming the band the Heroines, that wasn’t just about us. That was about the community that we had created and want to continue to create with the kids that resonate with the music. It’s just about a partnership. It’s just connection. And that’s what all we’re here for, is to connect with people through music.”

Karter’s fans connect with her because of her transparency and vulnerability, whether she’s onstage belting her confessional, messy lyrics or sobbing in a heartbroken Instagram tour announcement. “The toughest people are usually the ones that are the softest inside,” she explains. “And I think that there’s this stigma: My whole career I was told that I had to pick one thing, and then be that. You can’t be soft and hard, masculine and feminine. You can’t have the duality. And I got sick of hearing that. I was like, ‘Well, I am all these different things, so I’m going to go forth that way and if it works, it works. And if it doesn’t, I’m being myself.’ We’re all a little bit of everything.”

Karter has brought that duality to her literally cheeky fashion statements, like when she wears a tearaway men’s suit with an ‘80s jazzercize thong leotard underneath (the latter reveal was inspired by Karter’s mother, an aerobics teacher, who Karter says “has the best ass of any woman I’ve ever seen in my life”), or when they two sides of her personality — one in leather and studs, the other wearing much less — make out on the Love Made Me Do It album cover. Karter, a former tomboy, actually only started to “embrace her femininity and sensuality publicly” in the past few years. “I’d always kind of been quite androgynous and made a decision to not let anyone sexualize me, because there was a period where I listened to people as a young girl and was like, ‘Oh, I have to be sexier and I have to be more shocking!’ And I hated the feeling of doing that, because it was on someone else’s terms. So, I finally made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to do that anymore, and when the day came, if the day came, I was going to do it [on my own terms].” Karter recently channeled her inner metal sex kitten in her Lita Ford-inspired music video for “Laser to the Heart,” and on the other end of gender spectrum, she pulled off some surprisingly convincing (and surprisingly sexy) male drag, complete with latex pecs, in her hilarious, Tarantino-esque video for “Hotel Flamingo.”

And so, like a true heroine, Karter keeps rocking, against all odds. “The thought of giving up or whatever, that’s not a concept I really understand in my experience as a human being. I’ve just never really had that in me, but I don’t know where it comes from. I’ve always been a stubborn, precocious kid. … I think, honestly, it’s my biggest flaw,” she chuckles, when asked about her tenaciousness. “I don’t have it in me to give up. I am a worker, for sure. It runs in my family. We love solving problems. We love working. It’s just, I’m obsessed with it. And the way I see it is, I wake up every day and I do what I love with my best mates. I’m in love [with boyfriend Adam Slack of the Struts, who she actually met almost seven years ago at the above-mentioned Roxy]. I’m good-looking. What more do I want? I’ve got it all, mate. I’ve got it all.”

Watch Kelsy and Peach’s full video interview above, in which they also discuss how the Heroines met, how Kelsy and Adam met at the Roxy and Rainbow in 2018, the unique visuals behind their new rock opera, Kelsy’s nomadic upbringing, and more.

Kelsy Karter

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