Women saving the world?

A retrospective of Ivor Cutler's work is due to be released on Chemikal Underground this month. Titled Return To Y'Hup, it will be released on 24th January and features re-imagined Cutler songs by Citizen Bravo, Raymond MacDonald and friends. A taster single, 'Women of the world' has been released, featuring the vocal talents of Tracyanne Campbell.

I wasn't familiar with this particular Cutler track, and it's fair to say that the Citizen Bravo/Raymond MacDonald/Tracyanne Campbell version is probably very different, but I really love it. It's got a straightforward simplicity to it, both musically and in terms of the message.

It reminded me of a particularly hopeful song by Helen McCookerybook, also called 'Women of the world', and that in turn got me thinking about the mid eighties post punk opus that is Martha and the Muffins 'Women around the world at work'.

McCookerybook's 'Women of the world' feels almost like a re-affirmation of Cutler's message in that it is also a call to arms. But it also feels like a series of observations on female solidarity and a c-change in society.

It was this latter aspect that got me thinking again about the Martha and the Muffins track because 'Women around the world at work' isn't a call to arms at all, it's an observational take on the long view of women's history. It's a roll call of women getting on with things: Mundane things, brave things, ordinary things... while copping a lot of shit along the way. It's the kind of song that is political by its very existence, rather than because it is explicitly a protest song. Its message is oblique rather than explicit.

Each of these three songs could be regarded as feminist, and as a protest song, but taken as a trio they are also a reminder that there are many ways to express this.

Florence + The Punk Women, or, How I Stumbled Into The World Of The Personal Essay

Back in November, I wrote a piece for Journo Resources about the ethical dilemmas involved with writing and commissioning personal essays. 

The idea was to provide a guide to writers and editors, to talk to those in the know and to discuss how such essays can be commissioned, written and edited responsibly.

What I didn't mention at the time was that I was also dipping a very cautious toe into the personal essay oevre.

I'll be honest here: I don't really do personal essays. That is, I like reading them (especially the more quirky end of the market as exemplified by the Secret Lives section of Narratively) but I don't write them. For one thing, they're a lot harder than you'd think to do well, and secondly, I prefer telling other people's stories to telling my own.

That's not to say I don't do any personal writing - clearly I do. There's this blog, plus my newsletter to a certain extent. I also wrote highly personal fanzines for years as a teenager. Some of which feature in fanzine related books and were, for a bit, in the British Library. Which is horribly like having your teenage diaries archived and then made available to the public. I mean, my fanzine (Aggamengmong Moggie) always was available to the public, it just didn't feel as available as it did after it had been in books and the British Library.

As such, the personal essay that I have just published over on Medium was written slightly reluctantly. It stems from a surreal but personally inspiring moment that happened to me at British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park back in July.

Some of you who also attended British Summer Time might have wondered at the time why I didn't review the festival, to which I would say three things:

1) I was a victim of the arbitrary wristband policy at this years event and, as such, had a crap view of Florence + The Machine during their headline set

2) The part of the festival I wanted to write about wasn't that part of it

3) If you do still want a Florence review of the set that night, all I can really say is that they played a blinder, I just couldn't see very much of it. I did meet some lovely people in the crowd though, while trying to negotiate a semi decent spot for myself. About halfway through the set I finished up by the entrance to the pit (where the people without wristbands couldn't go) along with a load of other people, who had turned that area of grass into an impromptu dance floor while also getting a good view of one of the big screens, so it wasn't all bad.

Publishing the essay on Medium does feel uncomfortably like standing on a hilltop in my pants, screaming. Which is something I try to avoid doing. But what I wanted to say about this particular moment at the time was so important to me and so hard to say simply and briefly to the people I wanted to say it to that, in the end, a personal essay was the only way to do it.

I'm not sure how best to sum up what I'm trying to say but, in the simplest sense, one of the things I'm trying to do is explain the punk side of my life to the Florence + The Machine side of my life, the set of people who read me for the punk stuff to the set of people who read me for the Florence + The Machine stuff. So that they might understand and appreciate each other, and how they have become intertwined with each other.

I hope I've succeeded.

Photo of multi coloured roses by Denise Chan on Unsplash