Baby Animals

Band members

• Line up
  • Suze Demarchi (vocals, guitar)
  • Dave Leslie (guitar)
  • Frank Celenza (drums)
  • Eddie Parise (bass)

Formed

Perth, WA, 1989

Band information

Baby Animals play strongly melodic and strikingly heavy hard rock. The band was formed by Suze Demarchi after her return to Australia following a stint in the UK where she recorded a number of singles. Eddie Parise and Frank Celenza were drawn from Perth pop-metal act The Boys and Dave Leslie was a long-time member of Sydney band Swingshift, that had originally been a Cold Chisel tribute act before eventually switching to original material.

Baby Animals gained notice almost immediately with a commercial-sounding heavy rock laced with a sublime pop sensibility. After winning a national audience enjoyed a meteoric rise which saw them gain worldwide attention and success until the musical climate shifted and the collapse of their record label finally broke them apart.

After a brief formative period the band won the support of The Angels who put a Baby Animals demo track on the B-side of their "Dogs are Talking" single and took them on part of a national tour. Following this the band played several shows with Jimmy Barnes and released the single "Early Warning". Heavy touring followed the release of the album, which began as a sleeper but eventually got to #1 on the national albums charts almost a year after it was released.

Picking up support in the US, the Baby Animals worked there extensively, touring with the likes of Van Halen, Robert Plant and Extreme, won several ARIA awards and returned victorious to Australia to record the second album.

Shaved and Dangerous displayed little variation from the successful formula of the first album and gained considerable local success, however the rise of the grunge movement in the US effectively killed them as a touring act there and when the Imago label collapsed, the Baby Animals were doomed.

DeMarchi married Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt and disappeared for most of the rest of the decade, though she released a solo album in 1999. Baby Animals reformed in late 2007 and is playing a series of shows Australia-wide during 2008.

Discography

Albums:

	1991	Baby Animals	imago
	1993	Shaved and Dangerous	BMG

Singles:

	1991	Early Warning	imago
	1991	Rush You	imago
	1991	Painless	imago
	1992	One Word	imago
	1992	Impossible to Fly	BMG
	1993	Don't Tell Me What to Do	BMG
	1993	Lights Out at Eleven	BMG

EPs:

	1992	Ain't Gonna Get	imago
	1992	At The End of the Day	BMG