Somewhere I’ve got a bag with 999 paper hearts, printed black on one side and red on the other: An interview with comics legend Suzy Varty

Suzy Varty was born and educated in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. This creator of the first UK wimmins comic (Heroine, 1977) was a participant in the travelling women’s art project Feministo between 1976 and 1978, and was first published in 1976 by the Arts Lab Press. Suzy was the only woman on the collective at Birmingham Arts Lab, where she had her fingers in many pies, including graphic design for multiple bands and projects, and where she exhibited her visual diaries for the first time. She “supervised the construction of two Fat Slags” for Viz, and was involved with the visual look of Birmingham feminist punk fanzine Brass Lip. In this interview from 2014, she gives me an overview of her career as well as discussing punk and talking about the Arts Lab Press in detail.

“I was always very keen on comics" explains Suzy, "I used to make little books and stitch them together and do covers for them. When I was young we had little chequebook size comics with three frames usually, Mary Mouse and Rupert The Bear, and then the Beano and all of that. And I just used to write stories and make little comics, I still make comics and things, stitch them together in the same way, same kind of binding.”

She moved to Birmingham in 1970 “I’d just had a baby, married her dad, moved to Birmingham, all within six months. Which was a bit much really. And of course what I discovered having lived in Birmingham then for 16 years, and come back to my home town, what I realised was the way I’d been brought up was to trust people until they couldn’t be trusted. In Birmingham, it’s exactly the opposite way round: That you don’t trust people until they prove that they can be trusted. So I was constantly at odds with things in a funny sort of way. Us Geordies talk to anybody, you’ll tell your whole life story at the bus stop, and Brummies were much more standoffish than that.”

Despite being a talented artist, she hadn’t been able to attend art school for very long. Initially, her stepfather had refused to let her go, so she had worked after she left school before getting herself into art college and studying fashion for a year. But things didn’t go to plan:

“I was pregnant, and I was a bit of a revolutionary at college” meaning that she was no longer welcome. She later did a foundation course in Birmingham when her daughter, Hannah, started school but that didn’t last “Then I split up with her dad, so it was like ‘Well…’ realistically” she was forced to abandon her course. As she puts it “I had the baby and everyone else had the pill, I was right on that very edge and I fell over into it. I tried not to let it stop us, but obviously it did. And then of course when my daughter was fifteen, they all started settling down and having babies.”

She gradually slid into becoming involved with Birmingham Arts Lab “Well, it was one of those places we hung out, I knew a lot of people who were doing things there, creatively, in lots of different fields. I spent a lot of time there. When it moved from Tower Street across to the City Centre campus, and then became the Triangle, that was when we set the Arts Lab Press up. Dave and Martin and Hunt and Paul Fisher and I, were all part of that, and I was on the collective as the token woman.”

The Arts Lab was located in an old building on Tower Street.

“There was an art house cinema, there was theatre space.” This played host to The People’s Show, which involved Mike Figgis. “John Bull Printing Company. And there was always music in the building, Jan Steel was very keen on Gamelan orchestra’s and other kinds of esoteric world music, so there would be music performances and research and all sorts of things. We had a coffee bar and a couple of galleries. We did modern dance because, in Tower Street, we were lucky enough to get Judy McCarthy, who did modern dance, contemporary dance. We started in the old arts lab in Tower Street, and then we got Judy to come regularly when we moved across to the Triangle site on Gosta Green. The Arts Lab had a very nice gallery, with a sprung floor, cos it was round the court yard, and we used that, we did dance class there every weekend, once a week and every weekend. So there was all that going on as well. and this women’s art group had exhibitions in that gallery, I had a sketchbook exhibition in the coffee shop at the arts lab cos I kept sketchbooks, a visual diary, for a long time. And I did an exhibition of that. But the Arts Lab was marvellous, absolutely marvellous. Just fantastic.” 

Suzy’s comic, Heroine, which was published in 1977, came directly out of the Arts Lab press. “The lads said ‘Why don’t you do a women’s comic?’ So of course I had to [do it]. Women doing comics in those days was very few and far between.”

Women’s comics had been around in the US for a few years and the US women’s comics maker Trina Robbins had visited Suzy in 1977, after Suzy had contributed to one of her works. “She had a daughter the same age as mine, and they came and stayed with me. Then I went over there in ’78, Hunt [Emerson] and I went. We went over to the states and stayed with Trina and women cartoonists around America, and Trina also contributed to Heroine.”

Prior to Heroine, Suzy had been part of the comics collective at the Arts Lab Press, which had produced “a fanzine magazine of women’s art, and what was going on around that time.” This was called Mama! (‘Women Artists Together’) They also “had this postal event that we ran, and ended up having exhibitions all over the place - The ICA and Australia, Manchester, all over the shop, with this women’s art thing, this postal event, called Feministo.” 

Feministo: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman was first exhibited in 1976. It was an explicitly feminist art project and the exhibition was comprised of small but powerful artworks in a range of artistic media, using a variety of conventional and unconventional materials, by women across the UK. The size of the artworks was decided by the nature of the project: each piece of art had to be delivered onto the next artist via the UK postal system. Speaking of the isolation many of the women as wives and mothers felt, the exhibition included such works as Lyn Austin’s ‘Bubble Bath Suicide’, in which a doll is positioned face down in a bath that has been filled with Styrofoam beads, representing bubble bath. Another piece, by Phil Goodall, was a drawing of a naked woman with butterfly wings, a pin stuck between her breasts. A review of the exhibition by Linda Melvern for the London Evening Standard was headed ‘Wife is a 4-letter word’. 

“In ’77 when I did Heroine I also did the first micro comic, which is an A6 comic. I just made this one night, I sat there and I made this little comic, and I said to the lads, ‘Shall we do this as a comic?’ you know, ‘Shall we start an imprint, like a mini comic thing?’ Anyway, it had a big heart cut out in one of the pages, and we couldn’t afford a dye cut so I had the heart printed black on one side and red on the other, and I cut them all out. And I only broke one of them. Somewhere I’ve got a bag with 999 paper hearts, printed black on one side and red on the other.” Suzy’s mini comic was called Paper Doll Heroine, and others were to follow in her footsteps.

One of the projects Suzy was involved with at the Arts Lab Press was a feminist punk fanzine, Brass Lip, which only ran for one issue but which packed a powerful punch with its use of satire and interviews with some of punk and post punks most ferociously intelligent bands, such as the Au Pairs. 

“Syd Freake [Brass Lip’s editor, along with Connie Klassen] was one of the local people around the place, and obviously she knew what I did. I did quite a lot of graphics for people, I did posters for bands, there was a pub theatre company I did regular work for, obviously I’d done Heroine by then… I did loads of publicity for the Au Pairs when they first set up, and lots of bands around the town actually.” 

One way of promoting bands, and gigs, was by creating a ‘vision collision’ on a hijacked billboard. “They’d turn up with old billboard posters, I would cut things out and do a big vision collision thing, and they’d go with their big ladders in their white coats and they’d hijack a billboard.” She laughs as she concedes that “it was quite good fun!”

Suzy was really excited when punk happened.

“My boyfriend was the drummer in Fashion, and he would turn up on his Triumph motorbike after 12 and go ‘I was just at the Wolf Inn in Wolverhampton at a Sex Pistols gig’ when they were just starting to play little impromptu pop up gigs. And obviously I knew a lot of the local bands who were punk bands, but the hard scene of it, with all the pogoing and gobbing and everything…” although Suzy didn't join in with the gobbing and pogoing, she did see the Police, Blondie and Ramones live.

“And of course in Birmingham we had Martin Degville and there was the Kahn and Bell shop, they made clothes, they were the Westwood and McLaren of Birmingham. So all of that punk stuff was exciting, on every level: Fashion, music, and I became much more involved, kind of that post punk bit, with the music and the bands and being in a band. Just when it had crested a little bit. But I was very aware of the hardcore of it in Birmingham.”

I asked her whether she felt it was more shocking for women to be punks than for men.

“Punk was liberating for women, coming hot on the heels of the feminist stuff. We were all in consciousness raising groups by 1971, and I think it was very liberating for women, the punk stuff. Especially when it meant that they could also be in bands. Obviously there was a lot of provocative stuff that went on, I remember when Trina Robbins came over from the states in ’77 to stay with me, she couldn’t get her head around this nihilistic view of the world that the punks had. You know, being American, couldn’t get the negativity. But it was sort of threatening, it could look quite threatening - all the spiky hair, and all the chains, the safety pins and the girls wearing odd garments or re-appropriating. I think that was probably the first time, really, that street fashion re-appropriated bondage gear and things like the Nazi uniforms. There was a lot of very dubious references going on in the fashion, in the way that people looked. And I think it was quite aggressive with it. There was often a riot or a fight going on down the front.”

The links between punk and reggae were clearly established on the Birmingham scene, and Suzy and her friends would often go to reggae gigs in Handsworth. Post punk Birmingham was also a very creative place, and Suzy found herself getting sucked into the music scene around bands such as Fashion, The Denizens, The Ever Readys, The Prefects, and The Nightingales. There were also more surprising moments.

“UB40 played their first gig at my 30th birthday party. I put five bands on, hired the hall, did the invitations, baked the cake, organised the PA and the lights, got the bands to play for nowt. The Au Pairs played that actually, but UB40, it was their first gig, I introduced them to Simon Woods, who became their manager, and they had the first independent single in the Top 10.”

Suzy was in a band called Twist, a mixed lineup band comprised of two women and two men. She played bass as well as writing “half the songs, did all the publicity, carried the amp - this great Dan Armstrong cabinet for the bass - had a permanent bruise on my arm. Me and the drummer would carry it in and out of my flat.”

In addition to Twist were The Strumpets, an all women supergroup made up of women from all the various punk and post punk bands across Birmingham. “So there would be Bridget Enniva, who was in the Tadpoles, she still plays music, Dawn Tibbett, she was a bass player and she still plays, and people from other bands, Janice Connelly from the Ever Ready’s, who’s now Mrs Barbara Knight, the stand up comedian. And us girls all got together, we were Strumpet”

Comics, and their longform version, graphic novels, have a greater degree of respectability these days, as Suzy was quick to acknowledge. 

“I think it was Will Eisner who coined the graphic novel term, and he did books that were in that form, but I think it was really when Art Speigelman won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus, I think certainly publishers knew what to do with comics. And I think up until that time they didn’t know what to do with them, and graphic novels have obviously made them respectable, I mean Bryan and Mary Talbot have just won the Costa last year [2013, for Dotter of her Fathers Eyes], the first time a graphic novel has ever won a proper book award.”

Suzy’s own style has changed since the 1970s. In 1984, she moved back to her hometown of Newcastle to work with a women’s art organisation, Them Wifeys. “Them Wifeys means ‘those women’.” 

It was a different way of working “So my style changed quite a lot, cos it needed to be a bit more accessible for a community group. And then I did quite a lot of artists residencies, comics workshops, I did a comic for the BBC, I did a comic for Thames TV, I did a contraceptive comic… So I started doing a lot.” 

Out of this came projects such as a commission for Virago, The Comic Book of First Love, a paperback for young teenagers to which several women comic artists contributed. Suzy also contributed to the alternative comics publisher Knockabout Comics, who had an imprint called Fanny, which was “the women’s comic arm of Knockabout comics.” Penguin later picked up and re-published The Comic Book of First Love “and got us all to do The Facts of Life. So we did that as well.” 

She found herself doing a lot of issue-based work. “I just find it really useful. It’s a great way of educating. We’ve used comics and illustrations for education purposes for a long, long time. And there was a piece of research that the Pentagon did, in the 90s, they won’t say when or which department fo the Pentagon, but they did a piece of research for people in the army, to teach them to do things, they tried using photographs with text, they tried using illustrations with text, and then they tried comics… well, you guess which worked best. So the information goes in in a very different way, and is very, very accessible. I just think it’s such an underrated and underused medium.”

Suzy Varty is still creating comics today and, most recently her work has been represented in the touring exhibition Women in Revolt: Art, Activism and the Women’s Movement in the Uk 1970-1990.

Build your own bondage trousers

Levenshulme antiques market today

When I set out to speak to women about punk, I (naively perhaps) never imagined that we would spend so much time talking about clothes. 

Once you get to the early-mid 1980s, the time period when I would perhaps have encountered my first punks on the streets of Greater Manchester, there would have been a definite punk ‘look’ and things had become very uniform and codified. In the early days of punk, certainly pre Grundy, it was a gloriously creative time for street fashion and people were largely making it up as they went along.

Possibly because girls were more likely to be being taught how to sew in school back in the mid-late 1970s, girls and women did have the basic skills needed to take in a pair of trousers and turn them into drainpipes. Even if they didn’t, there were other ways to customise and make clothes, including buying up cheap secondhand stuff and customising and re-purposing it. I had been aware that this was going on in the 70s, but I don’t think I appreciated the scale of DIY fashion in the punk era until I began speaking to people.

Charity shops and army surplus were regular ports of call for my interviewees, but I did also meet and interview someone who’d made her own pair of bondage trousers because you could buy the straps etc from local market stalls and just sew the relevant bits onto a suitable pair of trousers. Taking a pair of scissors to clothes also proved to be a decent shortcut to punk fashion, much to the horror of at least one parent. 

I also love that, at a local level, major cities and towns had their own punk boutiques selling cheap knock offs of whatever they thought punk was at the time, and that this would have provided a specific set of local reference points and fashion evolutions that would have interacted with the local punk scene in a number of interesting ways. To give an example of this, it is possible to build up a picture of the variously named punk shop at Levenshulme Antique Market through the pages of Manchester’s legendary City Fun fanzine. The shop clearly went through a number of phases and iterations, depending entirely on the prevailing fashion winds blowing through Manchester between 1978 and 1984, including punk and the 1950s revival of the early to mid 1980s.

But I think my favourite, or most ironic, punk fashion discovery came when I found out that the chains used to customise Zandra Rhodes Conceptual Chic collection, ie her couture take on punk, were the same chains previously used to deter shoplifters in her London shop. 

I bet that went down really well with the punks down the front at a Sham 69 gig.

Sitting in the library reading Mental Children

I find it hard to imagine that when hundreds of young punks put pen to paper back in 1976 (and after) to create their fanzines that they ever envisioned that they would one day find their hastily xeroxed works archived for research purposes in libraries around the country.

Maybe that’s come as a surprise to those of you reading this as well. But, for me, it was an absolute godsend when it came to researching punk.

There are a number of libraries and archives around the country that include punk fanzines in their collection. One of the largest I was able to access was in the British Library at St Pancras in London, and the great thing about the British Library is that anyone can easily apply for membership (though not online anymore, alas...) and apply to access their archives. All you need is the money to travel to London, the time to trawl through the archives, and good organisational skills. I became a big fan of the British Library reading rooms over the years, and also of the culture around research and researchers at the library. 

It’s best to arrive early, before the library and reading rooms open in the morning. Because people have evidently come down by train for the day, trekking from all over the country via Euston station, there is always a queue to be let in. Recognising this, BL have established a cafe immediately outside the library that opens before the library does, providing researchers with breakfast and coffee. Once the doors open, and everyone has been bag checked, there’s a mad rush downstairs to the lockers where everyone leaves all the prohibited items and belongings they can’t bring into the reading rooms, and bombs it back upstairs to get to their reading room of choice. 

When I first used BL, I didn’t have a clue which reading room would be best to use, so I ended up being placed in Rare Books and Music, which suited me, but must have looked very odd to the people studying esoteric books and music manuscripts, occasionally looking up to see me engrossed in scruffy fanzines with titles like Mental Children, Guttersnipe and More On. 

Another archive I used extensively was the Working Class Movement Library in Salford, mainly because it had an almost entire run of City Fun, the legendary Manchester punk and post punk fanzine that featured Liz Naylor and Cath Carroll amongst its alumni. Lynette at the WCML invited me to do a talk about punk fanzines at one point, which then led (directly or indirectly) to a commission to talk about punk fanzines in Manchester and Riot Grrrl in Birmingham. This was in the early years after 2010; all such funding for such activities has, obviously, long since dried up.  

A fanzine that I was always sorry I never got access to was Sharon Spike’s Apathy In Ilford, which was in the Jon Savage archive at Liverpool John Moores university. I did approach the university, asking for access, but was told I couldn’t have access unless I could produce either a contract with a publisher or a letter from an academic supervisor, neither of which I had. I think access to this collection might have changed now as JISC says the collection is open for consultation, and you just need to ask them, so maybe I’ll try again at some point. Though it is possible that I might get rebuffed again.

The restrictions around access imposed by Liverpool John Moores is in strong contrast to the access rules and regulations at both BL and the WCML in Salford. BL might be formal and codified in its access arrangements, but it will let everyone in as long as they apply in the proper way and abide by the rules. By contrast, WCML is run on socialist grounds and everyone is welcome, the staff are friendly, and the atmosphere is very informal. 

In a related note, it was once possible to get access to many university archives and collections both as an academic/student and, often, as a member of the public. It’s always worth checking individual library websites to see if they still offer this. Certainly pre Covid it was often possible to get visitor access as a member of the public to university libraries, just as it was possible to get access via SCONUL as an member of university staff, an academic or a student (Oxford and Cambridge excepted that is). During the Covid years everyone restricted access to their own students and staff, so there may be some hangovers from that in respect of access.

I regularly used to gain access to London Metropolitan University Library as a visitor. I could have gone through SCONUL at the time, because I was on the library staff at another UK university and had the right to full Band A membership, which would have given me borrowing rights. I chose not to do this because I was going in to look at Spare Rib, a selection of women’s glossy mags from the punk era, Shocking Pink, and some Riot Grrrl fanzines, so it didn’t seem worth it when I could get the access I needed as a member of the public. All of these items were in the Women’s Library archive, which has now transferred to the LSE library collection as a result of cuts during the financial crash and austerity. It does look like it would still be possible to get access to these collections, though I might have to explain that I’m an amateur and unaffiliated researcher and see what they say.

I am, in case you haven’t figured it out by now, a big fan of the public getting access to libraries. Whether that is for pleasure or for research, and whether it’s academic libraries and archives, or public libraries. I am a firm believer in throwing the doors open and letting everyone in. I would still have it that you have to apply for access to archives, but I’d make it easy to do so, and make the process more user friendly than it currently is. 

You never know what you’re going to come across in an archive, and I think it’s really important that as many people as possible are able to access their cultural past, whether it’s punk fanzines or Chartist and Suffragette tracts and newspapers, or Shakespeare folios. Everything is important to someone. 

Photo by CrowN on Unsplash

Hemlocke Springs - The apple tree under the sea

For those of us used to the giddily energetic electro pop of Hemlocke Springs' debut EP, Going, Going, Going... gone!, opening track 'the red apple' comes as something of a surprise.

It signals, more than anything else on this album, that there are hidden depths at work and that her craft and ingenuity extend far beyond the ability to write memorable earworms such as the TikTok favourite 'Girlfriend' (not that there is anything wrong with 'Girlfriend' of course...)

'the red apple' marks the opening of what has been described as a 'concept album' reflecting on Isememe Udu's growing up in North Carolina and her cultural background as the child of "devoutly Christian Nigerian parents"  It is sparse and pared down, showcasing the simple purity of Springs' vocal. 

This sparse thoughtfulness soon gives way to slightly more familiar musical territory via 'the beginning of the end', which opens with the arresting line "Sometimes I think I should avoid the simpleness of filling holes with opioids" before going all in on the kind of inventive, restless, glitchy electro pop she's best known for. It then ratchets it up a notch into something altogether more muscular via the use of heavy guitars. The result is exhilarating to say the least. 

'hands, shoulders, knees and ankles' meanwhile bounces around like an early (but weirdly angry) Gwen Stefani trapped in a giddy Alice in Wonderland multicoloured world before seeming to crash in on itself and implode in a splintering of rainbow shards. It then picks itself up again, dusts itself off and re-starts itself as the kind of demure, highly mannered, orchestral pop you might find on the soundtrack to Bridgerton, albeit without the lyrics 'Hell we can break his arms together'. All in just over three minutes. 

'w-w-w-w-w' begins taut and Prince like before taking a hard swerve into unabashed glitchy electro pop with the kind of irresistible big chorus and hook that made 'Girlfriend' such a massive cult hit. As well as shades of Prince and the Revolution, it also nods briefly to Archandroid era Janelle Monet and Control era Janet Jackson before quickly casting aside all three and becoming resolutely its own thing. Tremendous. 

The fast and furious beats underpinning 'Moses' feel very 90s techno, giving a more muscular dance feel to what is essentially a high energy pop song. 'Sever the blight' meanwhile, as one of the older songs on the album, feels closer to the songs on Going, Going... gone, but it's at times ethereal at other times bouncy (Kate Bush vs Le Tigre if you like) pared down 80s electro pop fits perfectly here. 

There is further sonic experimentation on the textured mood setter 'sense is (prelude)' while 'sense (is)' goes big on 80s synth pop with the kind of dark mood and taut vocals that would pair well with Allie X's most recent album, Girl with no face. Now, that is a tour I would like to see...

'set me free' opens with a strangely satisfying, echoing call before heading into smoother r'n'b flavoured pop territory. It is gently anthemic while more restful than previous tracks.  

This all too brief album closes with the cathartic upbeat, unabashed electro pop of 'be the girl!' which sees Springs reflecting on her younger self while also acknowledging that she has come a long way and isn't that person anymore. It's a fitting end to an album of experimentation and exploration, one that demonstrates the sheer fearlessness of Springs as an artist. 

Further works will be very eagerly anticipated. 

 

Shouting Out Loud: Lives Of The Raincoats by Audrey Golden

It would be fair to say that I gorged on this book.

And I really do mean that as a compliment.

There are some music books that take weeks to read, regardless of how many pages they have, and then there are those that are so interesting and, ultimately, readable that they just get devoured in a matter of days.

This is one of those books. 

Golden's hymn to The Raincoats, their birth, death, rebirth, death, rebirth again lays bare not only how much there is still to say about punk, it's music, it's influences, its afterlife, but also how much there is still to say about The Raincoats, a band whose story has only ever been partially told at best. 

What I love about this book is that it does effectively, vividly and evocatively tell the story of The Raincoats but that it does so in a way that is neither straight, conventional biography nor straightforward polemical music book: It's not either, it's its own thing. The result is a passionate, enthusiastic, highly readable page turner of a book that just happens to tell the story of possibly the most exciting band to come out of the UK punk scene of the 1970s while also telling the story of their astonishing international cultural legacy, as well as their triumphant repeated return.  

Golden has been given a tremendous amount of access to The Raincoats, to their archives, diaries, and correspondence. She's also spoken to those around the band such as Rough Trade's Geoff Travis, writers and activists such as Vivian Goldman and Lucy Whitman, as well as fans who became friends such as Kim Gordon, Kathleen Hanna, Tobi Vail and Kathi Wilcox. She has used this impressive amount of access, long list of interviews and frankly impeccable research to weave a story that is as remarkable as it is compelling.

One of the contradictions of The Raincoats is that they are ordinary people making extraordinary music and, at times, I've often wondered if this is partly why they are so repeatedly downplayed in histories of punk and alternative music: Journalists and writers do love a 'Character' after all - it makes our lives so much easier when writing about a bands music, and it tends to be 'characters' who get remembered, albeit not always fondly. The Raincoats were more subtle and insidious than that, their music didn't so much scream in your face and hit you over the head head as gently worm it's way into your soul and bone marrow, changing you gradually and permanently. 

With this in mind, one of the books many strengths is its ability to demonstrate to an unarguable degree the extent to which The Raincoats had a long lasting impact on music fans around the world. Not only in the UK and US, where their influence is known if not always properly acknowledged, but with music starved fans in Cold War era Warsaw, with prisoners in the Maze prison in Belfast, German artists, and with fellow travellers Kleenex/LiLiPUT.

They were, and are, a remarkable cultural phenomenon. One that has touched many across multiple continents and multiple spheres from music to politics and activism to art.

Long may they continue. 

Sixteen Again by Paul Hanley

Paul Hanley’s Sixteen Again: How Pete Shelley & Buzzcocks Changed Manchester Music [and me] is a delightfully refreshing, passionate, poignant and frequently funny biography of  Buzzocks, and particularly Pete Shelley. It also includes some personal memoir and recollections from Hanley, which - if anything - enhance the book and add weight to the truth that Buzzcocks, and Shelley, matter.

It feels like this shouldn’t need saying really but, of all the first generation UK punk bands, Buzzcocks do seem to have been particularly neglected when it comes to books, films, and the general public acknowledgement of their genius and legacy.

What I particularly like about Hanley’s book is the tone, especially the way in which he isn’t afraid  to puncture a few egos and expel a few myths along the way. Yes, he is passionate about his subject, and yes he really loves Buzzcocks, but he’s also not afraid to demonstrate in unforgiving detail the moments when some members of the band, or those around them, were behaving like total arses. Similarly, when the band released a duff record, he acknowledges that.

Maybe it’s a Mancunian thing, maybe it’s a Paul Hanley thing, but, having been party to some of his in conversation events at successive Louder Than Words festivals, I can attest to his no nonsense writing tone being well matched by his skill as a seasoned racconteur.

Long may he continue

Lurid and ridiculous punk stories from the UK tabloid and broadsheet press, part 1: The singing hairdresser

Back in 2014, for reasons best known to myself, I conducted a number of durational studies of a series of UK press databases. The idea was to get more of an idea of how the UK tabloids and broadsheets were writing about punk between the years 1975 and 1995. Why? Firstly, I hadn’t lived through the 1976-1978 period and wanted to have more of an idea of social attitudes at the time. Secondly, and the reason I chose to do a 20 year period for the search, I wanted to look at how punk had been written about over a long period of time to see how attitudes had changed and how punk itself had changed and been perceived. 

The results, it’s fair to say, were not entirely as expected.

Oh, there were the usual tabloid yuck and bonk style journalism pieces, but there were also a number of pieces that were a) surprisingly sympathetic to punks from surprising quarters or b) just plain weird.

In what is going to be an ongoing series, I intend to talk about some of the weirder and more interesting stories I discovered on my travels through the databases.

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail featured heavily in my search results. A fairly typical example of their coverage included a story from 30th December 1977, in which a teenage girl was arrested by police and fined at Liverpool Magistrates Court for wearing “an indecent badge with the name of a song by an American singer in a city centre railway station.” She was fined £10 under “the 18th century Vagrancy Act”. This story, while probably not untypical at the time, does raise a number of interesting questions about how the police were targeting punks as well as how punk was being covered by the tabloids. It gets more interesting when you read on and discover that the 17 year old girl who was charged claimed in court that the badge in question was being worn on her waist, under a jumper, but the police claimed that they could see it from about 10 yards away. Really? They could laser in on a badge from that distance? Incidentally, I like the way the description of the badge leads quite easily to the conclusion that it was probably for Jayne County’s ‘(If You Don’t Want To Fuck Me, Baby) Fuck Off’. Description of the defendants attire in court has her wearing “tight trousers, an old raincoat and a tartan bow tie” so it’s nice to think she made an effort for her day in court.

Perhaps my favourite bizarre story from this period - again, it was from the Daily Mail - was the one titled ‘Punk singing rocks a salon’, from 24th May 1978. Or, as I always remember it, the singing hairdresser one. This refers to a hairdresser who was sacked for allegedly returning from her lunch hour drunk and singing a punk song. As you’d expect, the management version of what happened varies somewhat to the hairdressers account. It says something about the social mores of the day that the Mail reports “The salon sacked her because they thought the scene was obscene and her behaviour was not ladylike.” Possibly fearing that this wasn’t sufficient grounds to get the readers onside, they add “And, they claimed, she spent the afternoon lounging in the staff room, which was later found littered with beer cans.”

The hairdresser herself claimed that she hadn’t been drunk and that she’d returned to work with a male colleague, who was singing Ian Dury and the Blockheads ‘Clever Trevor’, a song she happened to find funny. Something of a storm in a beer mug perhaps?

Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash