The neon vamp fronting Glasgow’s rising darkwave thrillmasters, Mercy Girl, has a wee laugh re: her perch in rock’s death zone. “It’s something I’ve thought about since turning 27,” says Daisy Miles, being as she is the age at which Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and other glorious flame-outs entered music’s Valhalla. “I’m trying to make sure I don’t get ahead of myself and go too crazy.”
But when you’re in a band of mates that’s taking hold and taking off, enthralling crowds and booking nights ever further afield (strap in, Warsaw and Berlin), the ride is the ride. “It’s wild,” says Daisy. “I can’t actually explain how surreal it is.”
To take point for Mercy Girl’s erotically charged thrum and voom, Ms. Miles dons armor. “Chain mail’s awesome,” says Daisy, who finds great satisfaction in the pre-show transformation ritual of stepping out of the daylight world and into an iron-ring brassiere, black sky-high boots, and a painted mask. “I love it. You kinda wait til the last minute and then it’s time for war paint,” she says. Pre-Mercy Girl she had a barefoot solo show doing slow psychedelic music, but now her world is different, and “there are different aspects of yourself to get into… I like to do some red tears down here,” Daisy says, scoring her skin with the finger of an inked hand.
Opening wide, as the live-instrument electroclash fourpiece does, a morbidly sensual portal for dancing and spacing in and out and swooning and spinning is perhaps easier for Daisy than is closing it at gig’s end. “The adrenaline is wild afterwards. You just wanna keep going,” she says. Of Mercy Girl’s four — Kylie MacNaughton on guitar, Davey Purdie on synthesizers, Craig Harkness on drums, and herself on slow fire — “I’m the one that needs to get reined in the most,” says Daisy. “I need to chill so I can pack up the gear and help.” But she’s not alone in feeling destabilized by what they do. “The full band talk about it. It takes about a week to come down. You’re going back into a normal job the next day and you’re thinking, ‘God, last night I was on stage’ — and with that mixture of emotions and adrenaline it’s really hard to settle afterwards. It’s really hard.”
The shows see them going out raiding from Scotland, crammed gear and all into Harkness’ Honda Jazz — “keyboard stand sticking into my thigh” — to turn it on at such venues as Manchester’s White Hotel, a rough and ready industrial performance space back of Strangeways prison. “The wiring was so bad we thought we were gonna get an electric shock on stage or go up in flames. That was literally my last thought before we played. And it was so smoky in there that two steps away from the stage a kid came up to me and said, ‘Do you know where the stage is?’ You couldn’t see a thing from the smoke machines, well, plus the bar manager was smoking a joint behind the counter. And I split my lip on the mic and tasted blood the entire show,” says Daisy. “It was sick. I loved it.”
Then back in the Jazz for the weird readaption to the day-job world in Glasgow. Except for mid week, when they four religiously meet at Purdie’s flat. “We’ve recorded every Wednesday for the past three years in Davey’s bedroom,” says Daisy. With no studios yet or few other such accoutrements of ‘making it’ as they’ve worked up the 2025 Closer EP and built a distinctive songbook, theirs is very much still a DIY enterprise. But professional traction is evident, whether in the looming European tour or more purely via the devotion and blend of punters fronting up to lose themselves in Mercy Girl. The crowd ranges, Daisy says, from people around her age and younger up through to veterans of the great ecstasy age of yore. “We have people who like to party a wee bit.”
Helping keep Daisy grounded in her downtime are her cats, and losing herself in the concentration demanded by her day job: tattooing. So away from the stage, gun in hand, flesh bared before her for inking, what does this darkwave diva click play on? “At one point I did listen to a wee bit of Syd Barret era [Pink Floyd],” says Daisy. “But now it’s “Have a Cigar” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.”
