Warpaint hit Dublin this weekend for Forbidden Fruit Festival

THERESA Wayman’s voice softens to a whisper. "I don’t want to talk about it," says Warpaint’s guitarist. "It was upsetting."

She is referring to comments she made about Beyoncé and the controversy that ensued.

“Every song on Beyonce’s last album has her, basically, looking like a slut and she does not need to do that,” Wayman told Q magazine. “She’s gorgeous and so fucking talented. And they all take it as women’s liberation.”

The remarks went viral. Warpaint, Wayman especially, were cast as the villains. Some commentators discerned a racial element — a middle-class white woman loftily dismissing a black performer.

Wayman was shocked. She stood by her belief that it’s hypocritical for artists to claim they are feminists, even as they take most of their clothes off in public.

Nonetheless, she appreciated her observations had been insensitive and dangerously off-the-cuff. Who knew how much damage it could do to Warpaint?

“It doesn’t feel real at all,” Wayman says of the experience. “It feels surreal — awful. I was numb — and also flabbergasted at the length people went to [comment]. I had never experienced anything like it. I didn’t know how to react.”

She was appalled that elements of Warpaint’s audience, hard-won through years of touring, threatened to turn their backs.

“What got me was people saying, ‘I’m a fan of you guys and a fan of Beyoncé — and now I don’t want to be a fan of you anymore’. That hurt. I thought, ‘How stupid of me to say something in a crude manner’. To think I was speaking in a context where I could talk off-the-cuff, as if it was with a friend [rather than a journalist]. It was dumb. I don’t want to antagonise any of our fans — don’t want to antagonise people in general.”

The irony, Wayman says, is that if she had given her opinion in a measured manner it was unlikely to have gone viral.

“Because I said something provocative it was on everyone’s radar,” Wayman says. “It’s sad — unless you couch something in an [outrageous ] way, nobody is going to pay attention.”

Warpaint are the last band you would expect to be caught up in a celebrity furore. Since emerging from Los Angeles, in 2009, they have burned low and steady, their minimalist guitar pop in no hurry to draw attention to itself.

“Starting out, we weren’t super-ambitious,” says Wayman. “We were playing, doing our stuff. We were not itching to get out of the gate. I didn’t know about that [record industry] side of music: I simply wanted to write songs”.

The group was formed 10 years ago by Wayman and singer Emily Kokal, school-friends from sleepy Eugene, Oregon.

Relocated to LA, they initially moved in show-business circles — the late Heath Ledger was an early fan; Kokal dated former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist, John Frusciante. They even had a quasi-celeb in their ranks, in the form of original drummer Shannyn Sossamon, a sometime actress whose biggest screen roll was opposite Ledger in A Knight’s Tale.

The Hollywood angle caused consternation. Warpaint were wary of being pigeonholed as a show-business thing. In an interview with me in 2010, Kokal was straight-up annoyed about the media’s eagerness to paint the band as Beverly Hills dilettantes.

“I don’t know why journalists always bring it up,” she said. “Maybe they think they are doing us a favour. It gets repeated and repeated. Hopefully, it will die off once people hear the music and see us play. Then, the stigma will go away. It gets annoying some times. Like [actor] Billy Zane was at our show. I don’t know — it’s so random. I think the interesting story is the relationship between the four of us and our music.”

Signed to storied UK label 4AD, Warpaint worked hard at shedding the TMZ image. In 2010, they released their debut, The Fool. Enigmatic and understated, it was a huge international hit. The band have spent much of the intervening period touring — leaving little time for new music. Perhaps that explains the long delay that preceded second LP, the self-titled Warpaint.

Less immediately catchy than its predecessor, it was recorded with U2 producer, Flood — the first ‘big name’ figure with whom the four had collaborated.

“We’d never worked with him before — or even met him,” says Wayman. “There was one conversation. After that, we knew he was right for the job. We signed up. Then, his other projects took longer and longer and the original start date was put back. We decided to wait. All of us figured it was worth it.”

Did she worry his reputation would get in the way of Warpaint making a good album?

“It is weird — creating music is such an intimate process. It took a while for us girls to become comfortable [with one another]. For that reason, it was strange to be in the studio with someone we didn’t know. That said, it is not an uncommon scenario. A lot of the time it goes wrong. But a lot of the time it goes right, as well,” Wayman says.

* Warpaint headline the second day of Forbidden Fruit festival, Kilmainham, Dublin, this Sunday.