Bring back live music but don't bring back sexual harassment at gigs - Revisited

When I began researching the topic of sexual harassment at gigs back in 2018, I couldn't have known that there was going to be a pandemic in 2020, or that it would turn the once thriving and lucrative world of live music into a smoking ruin. 

For a long time in 2020, when I was ready to actually write the piece, I held off because I knew it wasn't the right time. There was a moment in late summer/early autumn when it looked like it might be a good moment, but that moment suddenly passed and I was forced to put it back on the shelf again.

The piece was eventually finished in March 2021, and it was published at the beginning of April in the wake of the Sarah Everard murder and revelations about rampant sexual harassment and abuse in UK schools. Ideally I'd rather these events hadn't happened and that my piece had felt less timely as a result of that, but, given the sense of rage and injustice both events inspired, it really did feel like the best moment to publish it. 

I'm still really proud of this piece, and it has been reasonably well read, generating a small amount of positive feedback. But it was hard work, and it was emotionally draining, so I was pleased when I could eventually hit publish and Let It Go. 

Photo by Hanny Naibaho on Unsplash

Save Our Ladies - Revisited

I had a bit of a break from writing for Medium during 2020, what with the pandemic and everything, so I basically had a year off from the platform before I wrote this little, imperfect, ode to one of the many, many films lost to Covid cinema closures. 

Our Ladies is the film adaptation of Alan Warner's much loved novel The Sopranos, and it will be a tragedy if it never sees the light of day. Why? You'll have to read the piece to find out. 

Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash

Florence + The Punk Women - Revisited

The catalyst for this most unusual of pieces (for me, anyway) was British Summer Time festival 2019, when I travelled to London to see Florence + The Machine headline a festival with a 70% female lineup, and at which Florence's book club - Between Two Books - met and discussed Lavinia Greenlaw's memoir The Importance of Music To Girls. 

I don't really go in for personal essays but I had returned home with a sense that my two once very separate musical worlds (UK punk of the 1970s and early 1980s and Florence + The Machine) had collided well and truly at this event.

It was my inability to describe this feeling when I tried to speak about it to Between Two Books co-founder Leah Moloney at the event that inspired me to write this piece which, as I recall, was more of a hit with the Flows than it was with the punks, though I did receive some really nice feedback from both sides. 

Photo by Urel Landetne on Unsplash

You do have the power - Revisited

The interview I did with activist and musician Shawna Potter in 2019 was always going to be used for two different articles. Most importantly, she was an interviewee for a piece I was working on about sexual harassment at gigs, but I also wanted to write a profile piece to coincide with the publication of her book, Making Spaces Safer. 

Originally, I was going to pitch it to The F-Word but, because Shawna was at pains to explain that the strategies in her book were designed to be used to tackle all forms of harassment, not purely harassment against women, I ended up pitching it to FourGoods instead. Who were interested but who then went quiet on me, leading me to retrieve my submission from them and publish it on Medium instead.

The article has never performed well on the platform, which is a shame, so I hope that by drawing your attention to it here it will get a bit more love. 

Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

Black Marble - Somewhere (Official Music Video)

Such a sweet, cute video

Why achieving gender equality at music festivals means looking beyond the main stage - Revisited

Todays piece from the Medium archive was a follow up to a piece I wrote for The F-Word in 2017 about the lack of female headliners at festivals. I hadn't planned on re-visiting the issue but, as regular readers will know, the rage I felt at the really weak, patronising arguments being put forward by the live music industry as to why they weren't booking women to play festivals went deep.

In this piece, I turned my attention away from festival headliners and focused instead on the ratio of male:female artists across a number of festival bills in the summer of 2019. 

It's a long piece, with a lot of data in it, but I think it was worth it. It didn't perform well on Medium at the time but it has, since, been regularly viewed and read - both pre pandemic and during the pandemic - which suggests the issue is very much a live one. 

Photo by Aranxa Esteve on Unsplash