Todays piece from the Medium archive was a follow up to a piece I wrote for The F-Word in 2017 about the lack of female headliners at festivals. I hadn't planned on re-visiting the issue but, as regular readers will know, the rage I felt at the really weak, patronising arguments being put forward by the live music industry as to why they weren't booking women to play festivals went deep.
In this piece, I turned my attention away from festival headliners and focused instead on the ratio of male:female artists across a number of festival bills in the summer of 2019.
It's a long piece, with a lot of data in it, but I think it was worth it. It didn't perform well on Medium at the time but it has, since, been regularly viewed and read - both pre pandemic and during the pandemic - which suggests the issue is very much a live one.
While I relied on the BBC stats for that piece, in this case I've gathered my own.
I can't guarantee that my research has been as rigorous as that done by the BBC but I've done my best with the tools available to me. I've tried to make the piece fun and interesting to read amidst all the facts and figures. Not sure if it'll excite any debate or not, probably not, but then, who knows?
London sunset over British Summer Time Festival, 13th July 2019
Regular readers of this blog will remember that, back in summer 2017, I got a bit obsessed with the whole issue of women and music festivals.
Not so much the issue of women and safety at music festivals (although, alas, that issue is always with us... including this summer) but with how few women get to headline, or play at all, at music festivals in the UK.
I think the comments that really stung were the ones suggesting that there simply aren't any women with a high enough profile to headline Glastonbury, which I still reckon is bollocks. Admittedly, Glastonbury currently has a crowd capacity of 203,000 people, but I think that may be part of the problem: It takes a special kind of festival to book both Kylie Minogue and Janet Jackson to play in 2019 and not have either of them headline the event.
This summer I decided that I wanted to re-visit the whole issue of women and music festivals. Not just women headliners, but - again - how many women get to play UK music festivals at all in comparison to men.
In short, I did a gender audit of 10 UK music festivals of varying sizes.
I will be publishing a piece next week which will explore my findings in more depth but, if you want to see the headline stats, you can read them in Sticks 'N' Strings issue 4, which will land in your inbox on Saturday morning. If you haven't already signed up and would like to, you can do so here.
After a bit of a flurry of longer length articles a couple of weeks ago, today has seen me writing about individual tracks and compiling this month's F-Word music blog post and playlist.
Writing about women and music around the same time as International Women's Day is always a bit weird.
It's as though all the PR companies and record companies wake up to the fact they've got some women on their rosters and, for one day only, start promoting the hell out of them.
OK, some of them remember to promote their female artists the rest of the year as well, but it's frustrating when you spend 364 days of the year receiving largely irrelevant promo (all of which I listen to, by the way) and then one day a year where pretty much 100% of it is relevant and useful.
It isn't great for a writer to receive a press release that contains a lot of stats, data and musical content that would be best served by an in depth piece... on the day that the PR wants the story written about and promoted. It's especially unhelpful when you've received about seven other equally interesting, in depth and complex press releases of equal interest on the same day.
I like writing women and music stories. I'm the music editor at a feminist website, I have licence to write those kind of stories, and commission them, 365 days of the year. As such, it would be better for me if I was given tip offs on interesting stories across the full 365 days, not all at once on one day in March.
Some PR's are very good and do pitch stuff to me with the feminist angle in mind, but most PR's don't. In a way, this is good because it means I have to actively seek out artists and music myself, which stops me getting lazy and complacent, but it's also bad because it means I get sent a lot of highly irrelevant music and music based press releases, that I still feel compelled to waste time listening to.
Long time readers will also be aware that another thing that annoys me is the lack of women headlining music festivals in the UK. I wrote about this two years ago, and it is touched on in this month's F-Word Music blog post, but I don't think I'll be leaving it at that. I think I'll be revisiting the issue before the summer is out. Watch this space.
Earlier in the week, I also published another of my whimsical pieces for Medium, this time about possible historical predecessors to the podcast. As per usual, I had a lot of fun writing the piece, though I'm not massively convinced that a lot of people will read it. If you do take the time though, I hope you like it.
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'.
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.
Anyone who's been regularly reading my blog since the end of June will know that I've been posting a lot of stuff around the theme of women and festivals recently.
This all stemmed from a detailed report that the BBC did into festivals over the past ten years, which revealed a distinct lack of female headliners at festivals as well as that festival headliners were getting older and whiter. The report was released on the eve of this years Glastonbury Festival, which tends to be the sacrificial goat when it comes to festival criticism. I think the fact that Glastonbury is the biggest and most well established of the UK festivals, not to mention the most televised, might have something to do with this. Although the festival's radical, idealistic post hippie roots combined with its contemporary ticket prices are also part of the reason why it tends to get the most stick, rightly or wrongly.
My own response to the BBC report was critical of Glastonbury, in as much as I agreed with the NME that Florence + The Machine should have been offered a headline slot in their own right in 2015 rather than have got a headline slot by accident, but I did try not to single out Glastonbury for criticism specifically because I feel the issues raised in the BBC report are issues affecting festivals in general, not just Glastonbury.
As to why I, personally, can't ever envision myself attending Glastonbury this is a basic equation of: Cost of ticket, travel and camping equipment combined with not knowing in advance who you are going to see = Approximately £300 (probably more, if we include food) spend on festival with potentially very few, or no, bands playing I would like to see. I did spend something in the region of £300 attending British Summer Time last year (I'm including the London hotel bill there..) but I did that knowing who I was going to see, which made all the difference.
As an interesting sideline, it's food for thought that Jeremy Corbyn's appearance at Glastonbury this year gathered equal amount of interest/coverage to that of any of the musical headliners. Which in some ways is a positive thing, reflecting perhaps the youth surge in the 2017 General Election, but it's equally as much a sign of the times so far as changing attitudes of festival audiences are concerned. Not necessarily as much of a warning sign as the New York Times' decision last year not to cover Coachella and Bonnaroo anymore, in that they felt that both festivals had become a poseurs paradise, the various bands playing effectively no more than decorative wallpaper to the punters gazing adoringly into their phones, but a definite change nonetheless.
With all this in mind, it was oddly heartwarming to read Lifeonlauralane's recent blog post about the fantastic, above and beyond, support she received as an attendee of this years Glastonbury Festival. Despite the traumatic circumstances that led her to contact the festival and ask for help, it's clear from her story that the event staff went above and beyond to ensure she felt safe attending the event. There are reasons why Glastonbury is the most popular and well attended of UK festivals and, hopefully, the attitude of its staff is one reason why people keep coming back.
Having had my own response to the report, and to the World Service's coverage of the report, published on The F-Word last week, I've been thinking of ways that I can promote some of the women I mentioned at the very end of my piece.
As I was coming to the end of the piece, I was starting to think about the kind of festival that I would pay to attend. Who would it be comprised of? I used Florence Welch's answer to the 'Which women would you like to see headlining Glastonbury?' question when she was asked it in 2016 as my starting point, as I liked her choices. I then started to think, seriously, about who I would want to see and how I would arrange the bills.
The upshot of this is that I have made lists of 7 possible festival bills that I would happily pay to go and see. These are small bills, 7 or 8 artists a time, for a fictional one day festival that I would call The Fever Festival. I've arranged the bills in terms of smaller, newer artists towards the bottom of the bill, emerging and semi established artists in the middle, and established artists headlining and taking the 2nd, 3rd and (in some cases) 4th place on the bill.
I've tried to mix it up musically, and in terms of age, ethnicity and sexuality. I didn't get very far with being disabled friendly though, and I think the invisibility of disabled artists within the music industry is something that needs tackling on a wider scale anyway, and at this stage, it would be hard to tackle it in any meaningful way by an exercise as frivolous as this.
Needless to say, all of the artists I've included on my fictional festival bills are artists I'd happily pay to see live.
Of the 7 actual headliners I've picked, only 1 of them (and regular readers will be able to guess straight away which one) has headlined a festival in the last 10 years. Given some of the choices I've made, this might surprise you as, in slight deference to the prevalence of what the BBC report describes as 'Heritage acts', I have included two headliners who would fall into that category. This was consciously done, not because I think festivals should be always headlined by artists in their sixties and older, but because I wanted to play the promoters at their own game and also would love to see the two artists in question headline festivals in their own right, having both been second on the bill to male acts over the past couple of years.
Of the other four headliners, I would say that one is very established artist who has been around for nearly thirty years and has played at many festivals, several times, without being offered a headline slot, one is a young singer who is very big in the pop world but not in the festival world, one created a big splash with her debut English language album last year and played some festivals, was not high up the bill, but would do justice to a headline slot, and the third one is an established but not best selling artist who has recently launched a solo career, has never made it to the main stage of a festival, but is an electrifying performer who would be more than up to the job of headlining a festival.
These are, of course, personal choices and readers will no doubt be able to create their own versions of their own fantasy festival bill, just as I have.
I'm going to post a series of live clips between now and the end of August of all the 53 performers I identified in my piece as being festival and/or headliner material. Ideally, I would be posting well filmed clips of the artists playing at festivals, as many of them have put the hours in at innumerable festivals. Unfortunately, this hasn't always been possible because, while many of them have played festivals, their performances either weren't filmed or were filmed badly and, as such, aren't useable. The way I've approached this problem is to use the following criteria;
1) Is there a clip of the artist performing at a festival and is it of useable quality?
2) If not, is there a clip of the artist playing a live gig to an audience, and is it useable?
3) If not, is there a clip of the artist playing a live session somewhere, ideally in almost gig conditions, and is it useable?
4) If not, is there a promo video available, ideally showing the artist simulating a live performance?
Of all the 53 artists I'm including, there was only one where I had to use option 4, and that was because the artist in question is so new that there's very little beyond promo videos available online.
Festival number 1 starts this Friday, and I will be posting a mock poster of the 'bill' later this week, along with an overview of my choices ahead of Friday. In terms of the videos I'll be posting, it would have been possible in a number of a cases to post full, good quality, festival sets in their entirety but I've chosen not to do so because it would widen the gap between my headliners and artists located further down the bill. Where I'm aware of a good quality full set being available online, I'll endeavour to signpost you to it in the blog posts that accompany each video.
As regular readers will know, I likened my recent (ish) experience of writing a chapter on women, punk and fanzines for a book on punk and fanzines to pulling teeth: Painful, long winded, with lots of agonising, re-doing, picking at it...
On Thursday 22nd June, I was half listening to the World Service while cooking my tea when they suddenly started talking about Glastonbury. No one I like is playing Glastonbury this year (or, indeed, ever seems to really, by and large...) so I wasn't really listening, until it became apparent that this was going to be a report on the lack of women playing music festivals, and I found myself listening, wearily at first, then angrily.
I seethed for about 24 hours afterwards, I think, then re-listened to the news bulletin in question on iplayer, did some further reading, and went to bed on Friday night feeling a bit more thoughtful about it. But still, ultimately, annoyed.
I got up for work at 7am on Saturday morning, had my breakfast, and as I ate, I began to get an idea for a piece about the whole issue of women and music festivals. I have to leave for work at 8:15am on Saturdays, which is a lie in for me because the 191 doesn't run on Saturdays so it's the 192 and they run more regularly. Anyway, this meant that I had exactly 15 minutes between 8am and 8:15am to plan the piece, which I did. In full. I then grabbed my stuff and legged it to the bus stop.
When I got home from work at just before 6pm, I sat down with the plan, read through it, switched my laptop on and wrote...
At about 8ish it occurred to me that I'd better have some tea. At 10 ish I remembered I was meant to have a shower. At midnight I thought 'I'd better go to bed now'.
I did sleep, but I was awake again by about 7am and up again, working on it, by about 8am. I eventually left it alone at about 10am in order to go into Manchester to buy the Gothic Tropic album at Piccadilly Records.
Then I had to go to the launderette and do the Co-Op leg of the food shop, then back home, work on the piece some more, do something else, work on the piece some more...
I finally stepped away from it at about half 11pm on Sunday night, having gone off on all sorts of weird and wonderful tangents throughout the day, many of which I subsequently excised around 11 ish just before I submitted it.
My final thought as I switched off the light and lay down in bed was: "There's an awful lot of Florence + The Machine in it. Will that be a problem?" I've been worrying about this a lot since, but now that the piece is up, I'm less worried. Because I know that I was using the band as an exampler and that I was writing in critical mode, not fan mode, and as such, I think it works.
It's not normally my style to write an opinion piece, or a j'accuse, and I don't think that the finished piece is one, as such, but it's much more of an opinion piece than I would usually write. Which I was uneasy about at first, but less so now. I was also uneasy because I'm not a festival veteran: As I wrote in my review of British Summer Time last year, my formative gig going years were spent at All Dayers, not Festivals. But, this is perhaps not so much of a problem as you might think, in that it allows me to take an outsider view on matters.
(Florence + The Machine, Ship To Wreck, live at British Summer Time 2016)
In recent years I've got very into a style of journalism that perhaps isn't traditional music journalism because it borrows from other areas, like economics, and which is generally less myth making and more dispassionate. I think the BBC report that inspired all of this falls into that category, and the articles from The Economist I've mentioned in my piece do as well. The Guardian, in it's reports on the industry side of the music business, also does interesting and enjoyable reportage and debate in this line.
As I see the piece up online, I am reminded, as I have been at intervals all week, of Paddy McAloon's 'I Trawl The Megahertz', a sort of stream of consciousness piece set to music, epic in scope. There is a pause at one point, a lull, in which the narrater, having expressed something close to mania just beforehand, concludes that the disillusionment that follows is 'The aftermath of fever'.
I hope that won't be the case. I have a lot of music to write about at the moment, if only because there are so many great albums out, but I'm not sure how those pieces will emerge yet, or when. I just know they will.
