She's A Punk launched in February 2019 and making it is a real labour of love for Siobhan: Despite working all day with audio in her day job, she spends her evenings and weekends recording interviews with inspirational punk women and editing those interviews into podcast episodes. She's doing the project entirely independently, DIY punk style.
In a related note, a couple of weeks ago I finally had the pleasure of seeing the finished version of Gina Birch and Helen McCookerybook's documentary film Stories from the She-Punks: Music with a different agenda.
I interviewed Gina and Helen about the project for The F-Word back in October last year, and I wrote about the work in progress version of the film back in 2016, so it was brilliant to see the final version.
Because I really, really love this film and I wanted to write about it for a new audience, I pitched the idea of a preview or review of the She-Punks to Louder Than War, who were very happy to commission me to write it.
Thinking about these two projects, I'm struck by how inspirational they both are. Both were borne of a combination of love and frustration: Frustration that their voices were not being heard. Women have been written out of punk histories for a long time, and it was a need to redress this imbalance that led Gina and Helen to make their film. Similarly, Siobhan began making She's A Punk because she couldn't find a podcast for women like her: Independent, awkward, resourceful women. Punk women.
While Siobhan's podcast could be seen as covering a different generation of punk women to the She-Punks, she has a very wide ranging definition of punk which should see her range of interviewees head off in all sorts of directions in the future. The She-Punks project, on the other hand, is part of a different but related narrative: A patchwork of punk women accounts now being written, published, shared, filmed... Most recently there has been Celeste Bell and Zoe Howe's Poly Styrene book, and Jordan Mooney has also recently published her memoirs. Serendipitously (well, for me anyway...) Between Two Books have just announced that their next book, which will be discussed at British Summer Time fest on July 13th, will be Lavinia Greenlaw's 2007 classic The Importance of Music To Girls. This memoir, while not exclusively about punk by any means, does touch on it. It was published in the same year as Helen Reddington's book The Lost Women of Rock Music, an academic account of punk's lost women musicians. Zillah Minx's She's A Punk Rocker, another DIY punk documentary, was released that year too.
Sometimes I think 'Surely there is enough evidence now? Enough accounts to re-dress this collective amnesia as regards women's creative and cultural input into punk?'. Then I'll read something, or I'll hear something, and I'll know that while we may have won a few battles, we are a long, long way away from winning the war.
