Live peeks part 2: Hatchie

I had the pleasure of seeing Hatchie, aka Harriette Pilbeam, Australia's new indie rock queen in waiting, sell out Manchester's new, lovely venue Yes in mid June.

If anything, I think I underestimated her: The songs feel so easy, so effortless that you can be lulled into thinking that they aren't anything special, when really, they are.

The song 'Stay with me' is a case in point: It builds and builds, becoming much more than a charming slice of indie pop. It is anthemic, it is a tour de force... it is a total earworm.

Live peeks part 1: LP

I saw LP live at the 02 Ritz in Manchester back in late May and was struck by her charisma and the operatic scale of her performance.

My place in the crowd wasn't great, and I had my face groped by a drunk woman (I will be returning to this story at some point I think...) but I had a great time nonetheless.

The video to 'Shaken' has just come out, and while it's not a live video, it is worth a watch.

Better Buses for Greater Manchester: FourGoods and forays into 'proper' journalism

There's definitely a story in this...

Recently, I have been dabbling in what I like to think of as 'proper' journalism.

To explain, there is a certain snobbery within the world of journalism vis a vis music journalists; a sense that we aren't 'proper' writers and we aren't deploying journalistic skills and training. Which, given the high standards of research and quality of writing that you see in a lot of long form music and cultural commentary, feels very unfair.

It goes without saying that there's an equal amount of snobbery and scorn directed at bloggers by journalists in general (including music journalists): We write for free! Without editors! We have no training or discipline! Which, admittedly, is hard to argue with at times. That said, just because you write for free, without an editor, with no training doesn't mean you can't write. Sometimes it does, but not always. I'd also say, on the financial renumeration point, that platforms like Medium as well as crowdfunding platforms like KoFi and Patreon are muddying the waters so far as the 'unpaid' aspect of it goes.

Personally, I'd say that I occupy a weird hinterland that I'd like to call 'Semi professional journalist/blogger', meaning that I do write for free, but I also get paid for my work sometimes. I've also written for free in an academic context, but because it's in an academic context it's fine and not shameful. Which is a bit of a headfuck it has to be said. Ultimately, I would like to be a fully professional writer, but (for various reasons) it just isn't happening at the moment.

I started writing pieces for the website FourGoods earlier this year. They commissioned me to write about veg box schemes and Brexit (this was before the deadline for Brexit was extended to the 31st October) and, more recently, the campaign to re-regulate the buses in Greater Manchester.

There was no byzantine recruitment process, no weird unwritten rules to somehow know by osmosis and comply with... I simply pitched the veg boxes and Brexit idea to them, they liked my pitch, read my stuff on Medium and concluded that I had the right tone of voice for their publication, and that was it: I was commissioned, I was in. I'd like to say that this happens a lot, but it doesn't: My pitches have a success rate only marginally above the proverbial snowball in hell.

Anyway, back to those buses...

As with most of the UK (London is the exception) the buses in Greater Manchester were de-regulated in 1986 and it's been chaos ever since. It's long been a source of disappointment to me that there seem to be so few people in the UK who care about bus travel, who want to change it for the better, who are willing to stand up and make a fuss about it and agitate for a better deal. After all, commuter groups have been doing just that with trains pretty much ever since the trains were privatised in 1994.

Then, I heard about Better Buses For Greater Manchester. I met Pascale Robinson, saw the campaigners in action, and the rest they say is history.

I have learnt a lot about journalism while writing for FourGoods, and it's also taught me a lot about pitching I think as well. Particularly about not pitching too soon, before you've worked the idea out properly, which I know I've done in the past.

I am looking forward to writing for them again at some point.

Photo by Andraz Lazic on Unsplash

Beats: The rave film you didn't know you needed

After I'd pitched the She-Punks film to Louder Than War, film editor Lee Ashworth asked me if I wanted to go to the press screening of Beats.

I wasn't sure at first. Mainly because it's a rave film and, in the 1990s, I was a riot grrrl. That said, I do remember feeling a frisson of excitement when Castlemorton happened. If you weren't alive at the time, it's hard to overestimate the shock waves this one illegal rave caused back in 1992. Some people still think it was singlehandedly responsible for the introduction of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. Four days of hedonism, trespass, drugs and rave music in Wiltshire over the May bank holiday weekend certainly caused as much of a political stir as the Poll Tax Riots had two years previously, and those four days so shook the constabulary and society that it caused questions to be asked in Parliament. I'm not exaggerating here: It is a matter of public record, distilled beautifully into digestible and highly evocative text by Matthew Collin in his book Altered States.

I watched the trailer for Beats. It looked good, I said yes.

Unfortunately, I forgot to put the date for the press night in my planner and, consequently, forgot to attend the Printworks on that particular evening.

I only realised what I'd done a day or two afterwards when I was listening to Lauren Laverne on 6music one morning and she was interviewing the director, Brian Welsh, about the film. "I wonder when that screening is" I mused, searching through my emails. Then "Oh...bugger..."

I watched the trailer again. The film still looked good.

I paid to go and see it at HOME that week instead.

Because I watched it at about three o'clock in the afternoon with about three other people, I wouldn't say it was quite the right dynamic, audience wise, but the film was still brilliant.

I'd seen Human Traffic back in the early 2000's, and while bits of it are funny, it's not what you'd call realistic. Beats, on the other hand, is the natural heir to the kitchen sink drama and, as such, it is very realistic, very compelling, and very, very good.

You can read my review here. 

Punk: Two different generations, two different projects

Back at the beginning of May, The F-Word published an interview I did with Canadian DJ Siobhan Woodrow about her podcast She's A Punk.

She's A Punk launched in February 2019 and making it is a real labour of love for Siobhan: Despite working all day with audio in her day job, she spends her evenings and weekends recording interviews with inspirational punk women and editing those interviews into podcast episodes. She's doing the project entirely independently, DIY punk style.

In a related note, a couple of weeks ago I finally had the pleasure of seeing the finished version of Gina Birch and Helen McCookerybook's documentary film Stories from the She-Punks: Music with a different agenda.

I interviewed Gina and Helen about the project for The F-Word back in October last year, and I wrote about the work in progress version of the film back in 2016, so it was brilliant to see the final version.

Because I really, really love this film and I wanted to write about it for a new audience, I pitched the idea of a preview or review of the She-Punks to Louder Than War, who were very happy to commission me to write it.

Thinking about these two projects, I'm struck by how inspirational they both are. Both were borne of a combination of love and frustration: Frustration that their voices were not being heard. Women have been written out of punk histories for a long time, and it was a need to redress this imbalance that led Gina and Helen to make their film. Similarly, Siobhan began making She's A Punk because she couldn't find a podcast for women like her: Independent, awkward, resourceful women. Punk women.

While Siobhan's podcast could be seen as covering a different generation of punk women to the She-Punks, she has a very wide ranging definition of punk which should see her range of interviewees head off in all sorts of directions in the future. The She-Punks project, on the other hand, is part of a different but related narrative: A patchwork of punk women accounts now being written, published, shared, filmed... Most recently there has been Celeste Bell and Zoe Howe's Poly Styrene book, and Jordan Mooney has also recently published her memoirs. Serendipitously (well, for me anyway...) Between Two Books have just announced that their next book, which will be discussed at British Summer Time fest on July 13th, will be Lavinia Greenlaw's 2007 classic The Importance of Music To Girls. This memoir, while not exclusively about punk by any means, does touch on it. It was published in the same year as Helen Reddington's book The Lost Women of Rock Music, an academic account of punk's lost women musicians. Zillah Minx's She's A Punk Rocker, another DIY punk documentary, was released that year too.

Sometimes I think 'Surely there is enough evidence now? Enough accounts to re-dress this collective amnesia as regards women's creative and cultural input into punk?'. Then I'll read something, or I'll hear something, and I'll know that while we may have won a few battles, we are a long, long way away from winning the war.