Bring back live music but don't bring back sexual harassment at gigs - Revisited

When I began researching the topic of sexual harassment at gigs back in 2018, I couldn't have known that there was going to be a pandemic in 2020, or that it would turn the once thriving and lucrative world of live music into a smoking ruin. 

For a long time in 2020, when I was ready to actually write the piece, I held off because I knew it wasn't the right time. There was a moment in late summer/early autumn when it looked like it might be a good moment, but that moment suddenly passed and I was forced to put it back on the shelf again.

The piece was eventually finished in March 2021, and it was published at the beginning of April in the wake of the Sarah Everard murder and revelations about rampant sexual harassment and abuse in UK schools. Ideally I'd rather these events hadn't happened and that my piece had felt less timely as a result of that, but, given the sense of rage and injustice both events inspired, it really did feel like the best moment to publish it. 

I'm still really proud of this piece, and it has been reasonably well read, generating a small amount of positive feedback. But it was hard work, and it was emotionally draining, so I was pleased when I could eventually hit publish and Let It Go. 

Photo by Hanny Naibaho on Unsplash

New piece, three years in the making: Bring back live music but don't bring back sexual harassment at gigs

 Sometimes you start a piece and it becomes an odyssey...

I first began researching and talking to people about the issue of sexual harassment and sexual violence at live music venues and music festivals back in 2018, not long before I left my job at the University of Manchester. It was not a happy time so, in retrospect, choosing to research a topic as dark as sexual harassment and sexual violence at gigs wasn't the wisest decision I could have made.

What made me want to investigate these issues initially was that, having written the previous summer about a lack of women headliners at music festivals, I was beginning to appreciate the ways in which the two issues related to each other, both directly and indirectly.

Life got in the way in 2018 but I didn't entirely let the issue go, in fact events in 2018 and 2019 conspired to make me believe that it was just as vital a time to be writing about the issue of sexual harassment and sexual violence at gigs. Artists were tweeting about it, journalists were writing about it, YouGov were publishing findings on it, and there were activists and academics working in that area who would be interesting to speak to and, when I did speak to them, had a lot of really good stuff to say.

By late 2019, I had a new day job and my writing time was being increasingly squeezed by it, meaning I had to - reluctantly - put the research to one side again.

Then, Covid happened.

Like a lot of people, I was suddenly left with a lot of time on my hands.

Unfortunately, it wasn't a particularly great time to be talking to people about sexual harassment and violence at gigs, what with live music being on indefinite hold and everything.

By Autumn 2020, things were looking a little bit more positive and the issue was being talked about again by activists. Time to jump in again.

The article I have just published over on Medium was pitched to a number of newspapers and music publications in the summer of 2019, albeit in a very different form and with a different focus to the one it now has. No one was interested, which I don't take personally as this is often the case and I'm really crap at pitching. In 2021, it has been re-angled and re-focused to reflect the current times we are living in, but I feel it's all the better for that. I didn't re-pitch those publications I'd sent it to in 2019, mainly because I felt like I wanted to write a no holds barred piece and it's not always possible to do that if you're working with publications, but I am hoping people manage to find and read the piece all the same. 

If you'd like to read it, you can do so here. 

Photo by Hanny Naibaho on Unsplash

Sticks ’N’ Strings: A manifesto

The image of Florence + The Machine fans at British Summer Time Fest never gets old...

Why Sticks ’N’ Strings?

Over the past ten - fifteen years digital disruption has shifted the economic focus of the music business away from record sales towards live music. It is no longer enough for bands to have a platinum selling album: Not when you need 100 streams of a song to count as one sale and payment per stream is so low. If you want to have a successful career you must sell a lot of t-shirts and tour. A Lot. For years at a time, on as many continents as possible.

From a fan point of view, bands and artists who might previously have been less available to you are now much more accessible to fans thanks to social media. Also, whereas once you might have seen your favourite band live about once every five years or so, now you’re seeing them at least once every couple of years, often more than that. In an experience economy led age, more and more people are going to gigs, and to festivals. Sadly, where you get increasingly large groups of people, you also get an increased statistical likelihood that bad stuff will happen.

Women being groped at gigs. Women being sexually assaulted at music festivals. Women being upskirted at music festivals. And the more subtle behaviours that can also ruin a woman’s night out. 

It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happens often enough to send a specific message.

That perhaps our concert halls, clubs, pubs, arenas and festival sites are places where women and girls are not welcome on our own terms. That our attendance and enjoyment is contingent on the whims and behaviours of the men in the crowd, and the unspoken assumption that women’s bodies are always up for grabs, whether on a crowded train or up against a barrier at a concert.

The UK Live Music Census 2017 highlighted that 66% of music venues surveyed “do not have a sexual harassment policy” and that, similarly, 87% of promoters surveyed “do not have a sexual harassment policy”. The survey raises similar concerns about child protection and terrorism and page 71 of the census report covers specific recommendations to address these issues.

If we move from the moshpit to the stage, things aren’t necessarily any better. The ratio of women headlining music festivals in the UK in comparison to the talent pool available to organisers, is woeful. Having reported on the issue in 2017, the BBC returned to the issue in 2018 to see if things had improved: They hadn’t. 

In a related note, there’s no guarantee that even if you score a headline slot on a tour or at a festival that you’ll be paid as much as your male contemporaries: HAIM famously sacked their booking agent last year after being paid a tenth of the fee of a male performer they shared a festival bill with. They have since hired Florence + The Machine’s booking agent, Emma Banks. On the subject of Ms Welch, while Florence headlined Glastonbury in 2015, making her the first British woman this century to do so, and the youngest person in a long time to do so, she hasn’t headlined Glastonbury since and, British Summer Time aside, the festivals she does headline are the smaller ones. That she sells out both her arena tours and these smaller festivals would suggest, once again, that this is an example of an artist punching below their weight.

If we look at concert hall gigs, clubs and pubs, things aren’t any better: Sexist promoters who treat women performers as a novelty are not unusual.

What now?

I felt this image of my desk would be more realistic than Unsplash...

I am all too aware that I cannot solve these problems myself. But I do want to at least try to make a difference, and to do so by using tools that I know I can use: Words and information. 

Sticks ’N’ Strings is being launched as a monthly newsletter that will promote women in the UK live music arena. It will do this by:

• Providing a monthly gig guide of gigs coming up by women/non binary artists

• Providing information on campaigns that aim to make festivals and gigs safer places for women

• Shining a spotlight on music journalism that bigs up women/non binary artists and which has interesting stuff to say about women and the music industry.

• Bigging up female gig promoters, activists, websites and other supportive folk.

The focus will be on all-women, women-dominated, women-fronted and non binary bands and artists of all musical genres and of all levels of success. From bedroom bands to stadium stars, choirs and orchestras to rappers and beatboxers, and all points in-between.

I don’t expect to change the world by putting out this newsletter, but I know that I will enjoy acting as a klaxon for the amazing pool of women and non binary musicians out there, many of whom are punching well below their weight right now and are not being given the attention they deserve.

Similarly, for all the gig going girls and women out there, if I can introduce you to some new gig going pals, get you inspired to go and see some fantastic bands and artists you might never have heard before, and point you in the direction of campaigns for safer spaces, I’ll be happy.

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