Taking stock

A nice festival moment: The crowd during 'Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)', Florence + The Machine at British Summer Time festival, 2nd July 2016. 

Looking back over this summer from a purely musical perspective (and even then it still means a summer not without tragedy) I find myself wondering if I had any kind of inkling that I was going to devote so much time to thinking about, or writing about, or sourcing secondary material about Women And Music Festivals.

Had I been asked about it in, say, mid June, I would have been very surprised I think.

While I had a grounding in the two basic issues: Lack of women playing music festivals, and the issue of safety for women attending music festivals, it would never have occurred to me to write about them myself due to my lack of personal festival experience. It's amazing where a bit of full on rage, provided by the right stimulus (thank you, once again, BBC World Service), can take you.

A friend of mine attended a large UK festival in about 2010 or so, partly to offer moral support to a (female) musician friend of hers who was performing there that year. They had a bit of a walk about the site afterwards, found a nice woody kind of place to sit and chill out... A couple of days later, after news of a rape at that particular festival had been reported, she thought back to that moment of peace and tranquility and realised that the rape had happened not very far away from the area where they had been chilling out.

It doesn't make you feel safe.

Around the same time period, as I recall, women were being raped in tents in Occupy encampments.

What conclusions do you end up drawing from that as a woman? As a female who is into music? Who is politically engaged? It screams out at you 'This is not for you'.

I mentioned in an earlier post a very positive story that, while it emerged from dark circumstances, showed the concern and care the staff at Glastonbury showed a young woman who attended this years festival. Unfortunately, later in the summer, there was another festival tale, this time from British Summer Time in London, where another young woman had been forced to get staff there to intervene when she caught a man taking up skirt shots of her in the pit. While it did sound like the staff reacted really quickly on that occasion, the police are not prosecuting. The incident has instead inspired a petition to clarify the legal rights of those who find themselves violated in this way.

To look at the musical issue, and the representation issue, I don't want to repeat what I've said in my piece for The F-Word, but what I will say is that we should never be putting our female musicians in a position whereby, at every music festival they perform, they are made to feel as though they carry the expectations of the rest of their sex on their shoulders; that's just too much for anyone to bear. Instead, we should be working towards a situation whereby a female performer at a festival is treated exactly the same as a male performer at a festival, both in terms of bookings, and in terms of respect. She should be judged only on performance, not on her sex, and not on performance purely through a prism and series of expectations defined by her sex.

I found when I was sourcing clips for my series of fantasy festivals that, even when women have performed at the big festivals, such as Glastonbury, there isn't always good quality footage of their performances available online. This is because such performers have often played on the smaller stages, and were not filmed by the BBC. The footage available tends to be patchy at best, often nonexistent.

Consequently, I lowered my expectations and began looking for good quality live clips in general, not necessarily of festival performances. My biggest friends in this quest turned out to be NPR, KEXP and Audiotree, all multimedia US based platforms who recognise the importance of broadcasting and releasing online live music, and who seem to take a particularly strong role in supporting new and emerging artists. Florence + The Machine had BBC Introducing (who have also recently championed Georgia) early on in their career, Overcoats have NPR, KEXP and Audiotree.

This lack of festival footage of female musicians is worrying though. It makes it easier to erase those performances that have happened if they are not filmed, written about, discussed. It means that they don't embed themselves in an audiences psyche, they don't become a seminal musical moment. That they will never, ever appear in one of those dead tree press Greatest Gigs Of All Time lists.

History, increasingly these days, happens online or is not officially happening until it is online. But YouTube clips are ephemeral. What happens to all those memories in a post YouTube world? where can I relive those moments when that platform has gone? Have I really experienced Florence + The Machine at British Summer Time Festival in July 2016 if I haven't since watched the few clips that exist of that gig again and again on YouTube?

These are wider issues, obviously, that I can't solve myself.

But when I spent a Sunday morning in June crawling around the living room floor with bits of paper with different artists names on them, arranging them into embryo fantasy festival bills, I wasn't trying to solve all of those issues. I was just trying to do something, however small, for visibility. I wanted to big up those performers I had listed at the end of my piece for the F-Word. I wanted to tell them that they matter.