North and South Magazine, September 2007
Page Five
The Beat Goes On
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The BeatGirls: not a business you expect to find up against Oscar-winning special effects company Weta Workshop & Digital at the 2006 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards. None were more surprised than Sanders and Watkins. Under company name Total Entertainment NZ, they were nominated for Services (including Financial Services, Property and Arts) - the most keenly contested of five categories - as was Weta's Richard Taylor.
Taylor was awarded both category and supreme honours at the November ceremony in Wellington; his company also pipped the BeatGirls for the 2006 Wellington Gold Awards (regional business awards). But being alongside the mighty Weta was kudos enough, says Sanders. And as nominees, they had to submit mission statements about achievements and aspirations, which she says was a useful business exercise in itself. (Weta Workshop and Sanders had met before: Taylor worked on Peter Jackson's 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, in which Sanders played fantasy creature Diello, acting a love scene with Kate Winslet while "glued" inside a latex suit. Jackson has also hired the BeatGirls to entertain at his private parties.)
The BeatGirls are unashamedly "entertainers". Sanders: "As a covers group you always feel like original musicians and other people look down their noses a bit, but the symphony orchestra does covers, everyone does covers. People think you're only successful in the music industry if you've got a single on the radio or a record deal, but especially in New Zealand it's the opposite: a lot of those [original music] artists aren't making much money after the record company's taken its cut. Now there's the problem of free downloading."
The BeatGirls make more money than most original artists in New Zealand, she adds.
There's also the slightly sniggery suggestion their chief selling point is sex appeal. Sanders is unfazed: "That's what people in those eras looked like," she says. "Women performing in the 60s had miniskirts, 70s performers wore tight pants."
Watkins, who occasionally plays bodyguard, says friends call him Hugh Hefner. "But it's more like Charlie's Angels. I'm Charlie and the angels go out and do the business."
 Olympics 2004, Athens: the BeatGirls perform on The Today Show, with host Katie Couric and Billy Watkins |