Album review: Helen McCookerybook, Drawing on my Dreams

As regular readers will know, North London singer/songwriter Helen McCookerybook is no stranger to this blog. 

The punk and post punk alumni of Joby and the Hooligans, The Chefs and Helen and the Horns has been prolific in her output these past five years or so, with albums such as Green and The Sea standing strongly alongside 2020's concept 7" album, Pea Soup.

With Drawing on my Dreams, McCookerybook has created an album that is unmistakably her own but which also nods to one of this years key musical themes: Minimalist introspection fuelled by home recording and home producing.

Lockdown has obviously shaped a number of artistic and creative decisions musicians have made over the past two years, hence the increase in introspective observation, acoustic guitar driven songs and Logic and drum machine orientated tracks. The other side of the coin of course is the "Wooh! Hedonism and glow sticks!" school of thought, leading to a Mercury Music Prize shortlist that was (in the main) relentlessly upbeat this year. The judges clearly signalling with their selection that they were done with soulful introspection after two years of being sat indoors in a onesie with only a screen for company, thank you very much. 

I mention this only because while Drawing on my dreams was home recorded, home produced and contains a number of songs that are fairly introspective, it doesn't feel like so much of a departure from McCookerybook's previous works as, say, Florence + The Machine's Dance Fever or Harkin's Honeymoon Suite both did for those artists. I mean, album closer 'Dear Life' shares a similarly self depreciating sense of humour as Florence + The Machine's 'Girls Against God', but the sound of exasperation north of the river is more pastoral and gently wry than Welch's weary-but-seething-despair over lockdown life in South London.

We open with the gentle finger picking minimalism of 'Beachwalk', where the vocal creates the melody as McCookerybook sings of the healing powers of a good sea walk and the serendipity of random shore discoveries away from the madness of the world.

It is followed by the wistfully pretty 'All I Want', an ode in which she seeks happiness not for herself, but for a friend who is tormented by shadows. It's the kind of singularly stylish and classic sounding song that would have suited both Kirsty MacColl and Doris Day.

Third song 'Wake Up' has choppier guitars and more of a political edge to it, equating as it does the boiling of the coffee with a desire for social change. McCookerybook urges the listener to feed their soul as the violin (provided by The Raincoats Anne Wood) twines in and out of the choppy guitar and sharp/sweet vocals like a smoky cat. 

In 'Amazonia', she returns to a theme she's often blogged and spoken out against: Worker exploitation. The song begins with references to a Bangladeshi garment factory fire, possibly the one in Dhaka that happened last year, but probably also the one that happened in the same region in 2012. Apple's factories in China, which relied on child labour, and "the deep dark depths of the fulfilment centre" of Amazon hell are also mentioned. The song is a lyrically skilful analysis of worker exploitation that has the same kind of restless energy of post punk intelligentsia such as Young Marble Giants. It also harks back to The Sea's title track (a scathing take on the refugee crisis) in the thoroughness of its assessment. 

Equally fierce is 'Pandora', a reference to the unfortunate Greek woman with the box and the ways in which the worlds problems are used as a stick to beat women with. 

More subtly political it seems is the deeply touching 'After the Storm', which has a real sense of gentle catharsis and a world taking a breath following the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 US election. The song has a pretty pastoral melody and a lovely wistful vocal and is one of my favourite tracks, alongside 'Wake Up'.

'Woodwide Web' is a welcome slice of gently strummed and sung whimsy inspired by the natural world, which showcases McCookerybook's eye for detail and sense of fun. The lyrically poetic 'Little Egret' works on a similar level and shares a similar sense of curiosity and wonder. 

With 'Coffee and Hope' the upbeat tune and lyrics are set off by the choppy guitar and quiet vocal as our author sips coffee and hopes for a better world, a feeling echoed by closing track 'Dear Life'.

Perhaps the most musically ambitious track though is 'Things Like This'. The song features hypnotic short guitar chords alongside a more finger picking style of playing and there is a catchy chorus of "Things like this don't happen to people like me" which sits nicely alongside the crisp drumming of The Go-Between's  Lindy Morrison. Emma Goss also features on double bass and the overall feel is of a slice of classy 60s beat pop. 

With Drawing on my Dreams McCookerybook has signalled a new level of sonic independence as well as a willingness to experiment. The result is a stylish and clever album by a singer/songwriter who is perfectly at ease with herself and her work. 

Drawing on my Dreams is available to buy via Bandcamp

Helen also does a very entertaining blog.

Grrrl lit

As a book reading, fanzine writing, punk listening grrrl in the 1990s I longed, and longed, to find a book that truly represented my teenage experience. 

Occasionally something would come along that seemed like it might possibly hit the spot - Douglas Coupland's Shampoo Planet and, later, Stephen Chobsky's Perks Of Being A Wallflower - only to not quite manage it: I read Shampoo Planet at least twice, but I barely got beyond the first page of Perks Of Being A Wallflower. 

A book that I felt closer to, at least emotionally and in a mental health sense, was Evelyn Lau's Runaway: Diary Of A Street Kid, which is made up of the authors diaries between 14 and 16. I read the book when I was 16. Our life experiences are massively different, but she can write like an angel. 

A few years after that came Linda Jaivin's Sci Fi erotic comedy Rock'N'Roll Babes From Outer Space, which was too wacky to be relatable but which, nevertheless, was still a book that made you want to read it in your Doc Martens and jump up and down to Babes In Toyland afterwards.

The (at face value) less relatable Beijing Doll (by Chun Sue) was probably the closest I could find to my own teenage experience, in that she was at least a teenage fanzine writer who liked punk bands. I think I was in my early twenties by the time that book came out.

With this in mind, you can see why the sudden appearance of not one but two (two!) books by women who were neck deep in the 1990s punk/riot grrrl scenes in the UK and US would make me very excited.

First out of the blocks has been Karren Ablaze!'s debut novel, Revolution On The Rock. Karren has been a fanzine writer since 1984 and was one of the Leeds and Bradford Riot Grrrls in the early to mid 1990s. She was also the singer in the bands Coping Saw and Wack Cat. I interviewed her for The F-Word back in 2016.

The second of the two books is Gogo Germaine's Glory Guitars: Memoirs Of A '90s Teenage Punk Rock Grrrl. While Germaine wasn't (at least during the course of this memoir) writing fanzines or playing in bands, she was a committed punk grrrl who was neck deep in her local scene from the age of 12 onwards. 

Cover by Joel Amat Guell.

The two books, while both very enjoyable, are very different in tone.

Revolution On The Rock follows the (mis)fortunes of Leeds sound engineer Bunty Maguire in the weeks before and after the EU Referendum of 2016, whereas Glory Guitars does exactly what it says on the tin: It's a vivid and often shocking, but also often hilarious, account of Germaine's teenage years in Nowheresville, USA.

I'd like to think that both of these books, following on from Carrie Brownstein's memoir Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl and the well meaning teenage novel Moxie, represent an opening of the floodgates when it comes to women writing about the 90s subcultural teenage experience. 

The lag in books appearing isn't entirely unexpected in that it's only since 2007 that we've really started to see accounts of the 1970s female punk experience being published. There was the odd exception before that, for example Deborah Spungeon's biography of/memoir about her daughter Nancy, the early parts of Toyah Wilcox's memoir Living Out Loud, plus the occasional book chapter or essay in wider works, but 2007 really was the moment when people started to make their voices heard again.

It takes a while for those who were present in a specific cultural moment, who saw and were seen, to decompress, take stock, process and document what happened. And the fight to have those testimonies heard is yet another battle in a long war within wider cultural histories in which women are not valued. With all this in mind, it's amazing that any punk women and punk grrrl books ever get published.

So, for this reason, I'm really pleased that these two very different punk grrrl books exist. But I also long for more.