Rock Against Sexism event in Manchester this Saturday

Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash

This Saturday Mancunians, and other interested parties, will have the exceedingly rare opportunity to hear writer and cultural commentator Lucy Whitman talk about her involvement in Rock Against Sexism. The event, which is taking place at the Friends Meeting House on Mount Street, is free to attend, but you do need to register. 

I first became aware of Lucy Whitman (neé Lucy Toothpaste) through reading Jon Savage's England's Dreaming when I was 15. She was later quoted as a secondary source in my series of punk women essays for The F-Word, which ran between 2010 and 2011.

I hadn't been able to locate Lucy in 2009 when I was researching the series, though I did try.

In the end, she tracked me down and we met for the first time in 2010. An interview piece, based on that first meeting, was eventually published on The F-Word in 2011.

At the time of our interview, Lucy had been interviewed by a number of writers, most recently Helen Reddington and Daniel Rachel, about punk, women and punk, fanzines, Rock Against Racism and Rock Against Sexism, but she had yet to write her own account of the period. Something that, in 2019, she does intend to do.

The event in Manchester should be highly interesting, and will shine a light on an area of cultural history that is rarely discussed. Rock Against Sexism was a much smaller organisation than Rock Against Racism and, as such, it's often hidden from history.

Fangirls

Hannah Ewens book, Fangirls, was published in July. A slender tome (it comes in at just under 250 pages) it nonetheless has a very important story to tell, that of the secret, rarely accurately depicted, world of the fangirl.

What makes Fangirls different to previous cultural accounts of fandom is that Ewens is interested in exploring female experiences of fandom in depth, and that she's not just after a quick take on the more extreme, hysterical end of fan culture. Similarly, while the book does feature accounts of One Direction fans, she goes far beyond the usual female fan/male object of desire definition of fandom. In Fangirls you will find accounts of Halsey fans, the Beyhive, Lady Gaga's Little Monsters, Amy Winehouse fans and older Courtney Love fans, amongst others.

When I come to think about the defining characteristics of previous accounts of fandom, I see them as largely falling into two camps. There's the autobiographical 'We were crazy and we were wild, but I'm now a sensible, grown up adult' school of thought and the 'They are crazy and wild and debase proper fandom with their hysteria' school of thought. I could be being simplistic, and Ewens' book certainly hints that there has been a good deal of positive work done within academia so far as fandom is concerned, but as her discussion of the fallout from a notorious One Direction documentary explores, the stereotype of the two dimensional deranged, screaming teenage girl with stalker tendencies is alive and well.

In one of the early chapters, Ewens travels to London's Brixton Academy on several nights to speak to fans queueing for various artists. She vividly portrays a world that few get to see, explaining the attraction of camping out overnight, how it fits into fan culture, how it becomes part of the social scene around an artist, part of friendship networks and cliques within the fandom.

Perhaps the most powerful moments in Ewens book are when she actively advocates for fangirls under attack, firstly in the chapter about emo and mental health, and secondly with her chapter on Ariana Grande, where she speaks to survivors of the Manchester Arena bombing. On the strength of the Ariana Grande chapter alone, this book deserves to be read and showered with awards. It's a powerful take on an incredibly dark moment in musical history that manages not to be sensationalist, is sensitive but also powerfully angry.

Similarly, the chapter on Amy Winehouse and her relationship with her young female fans is a new take on Winehouse, and makes for a far more interesting, three dimensional portrait of her than any of the usual accounts of her life written since her death.

The book closes with an account of Courtney Love's older fanbase, which includes Ewens herself, and gently demonstrates the ways in which fangirl culture goes way beyond the teenage years.

As I have written in this month's Sticks'N'Strings, my own personal experience of fangirl cultures tends to be drawn mainly from the Sleater-Kinney fanbase and the Florence + The Machine Army, neither of whom are featured in Fangirls. To be sad about that would be to miss the point of the book though: A lot of what Ewens describes is universal to every fandom, and that's what makes this book so relatable, and so needed.

The End of Love (Music Video) - Florence + the Machine

The Florence + The Machine fan club put this video together. To say that doesn't do justice to the amount of work that must have been involved though: It's fairer to say that it was painstakingly assembled from live clips recorded by various people during the course of the High As Hope tour, then cut with some archive clips of Florence Welch.

The High As Hope tour concludes tonight at the Herodion Theatre in Athens, Greece tonight, a very special venue in which to conclude an epic tour.

I hope everyone enjoys their time off afterwards.

My Big Fat Festival Gender Audit, part 2

Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash

As promised in my previous post, I've written an opinion piece based around the findings of my festival gender audit.

In a funny kind of way, it's a sequel to my original piece on The F-Word two years ago, which started this madness...

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?

My Big Fat Festival Gender Audit

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.

It all started with a very detailed investigative report that the BBC did into the lack of female festival headliners, and some cockwomble esque comments made a pundit on the BBC World Service in response to the reports findings.

I had a pretty intense time writing my response to the report for The F-Word, and I had a hard time letting the issue go afterwards. I just couldn't stop writing about it.

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.

New book pile

Green is the colour

Helen McCookerybook often comes across, at a very casual first glance, as a pastoral folk singer but this is a bit of a misnomer: Musically and thematically, her work is much more complex. This is a reflection of McCookerybook’s musical history both in punk and post punk but also as frontwoman in the experimental band Helen and the Horns, who owe as much to Doris Day as they do to the Monochrome Set. 

Green is an album that encompasses musical nods towards folk, pop, jazz and swing while also containing a lyrical mix of gentle humour, wry observation and the out and out political. ‘Rainbow of the colour green’ features lovely harmonies and gentle melodies, while ‘Where is home?’ is almost French sounding, a gentle waltz of a tune with a perfect accordion sample that is reminiscent of Parisian cafes in the 1950s. It is a lullaby, a comfort blanket of a song. The pastoral lament of ‘New York’ meanwhile is short but equally sweet and ‘Change the DJ’ has an uptempo jazz feel that reminds me of Peggy Lee; it is one of my favourite songs on the album.

McCookerybook is especially good at telling complex stories simply and imaginatively, and this is showcased through two songs in particular: ‘Danse Macabre’ and ‘At the bathing pond’. ‘Danse Macabre’ opens with the irresistible line “Shoplifting books by the ton, piling them high in his room…” and is a giddy adventure of a song. ‘At the bathing pond’, as well as being structured as a great sing along, is a slyly subversive piece that relates the true life story of a peeping tom (plus his wife!) and his voyeuristic adventures at Hampstead Bathing Pond.

Green isn’t without its moments of melancholy, perhaps best demonstrated by ‘These Streets’ and ‘A good life with a bad apple’. There’s also political satire in the form of ‘So Long, Elon’, a particularly strong song:

 “We’re building a big rocket, with space for all our shoes” 

it begins

“with Bitcoin in our pocket, with nothing left to lose.” 

As environmental satire its more Randy Newman’s ‘Political Science (Let’s Drop the Big One Now)’ or Flanders & Swan than it is Barry McGuire's ‘Eve of destruction’, and there’s an atonal quality to the song which marks it out as the missing link between the Raincoats and Kirsty MacColl. Gillian Wood’s cello provides this worrisome note and her playing serves to gently suggest that things have all gone a bit wrong and that maybe we should be more worried about it all. 

This feeling of unease makes sense in the context of ‘21s Century Blues’ which, along with ‘Soldier Joe’, could be regarded as the most openly political of the songs on Green. ‘21st Century Blues’ appears to share similar sentiments to the Specials recent song ‘Vote for me’ only expressed in a more wry, observational narrative, while ‘Soldier Joe’ is about radicalisation and points to the ways in which fighters become victims of their ideology, a kind of modern day cannon fodder for a cause.

The album ends with ‘Saturday night with the London set’, which feels like the most complex song of the album. On one level it feels like the perfect jazz pop summer song, a modern day Spanky & Our Gang, until you listen to the bitingly observational lyrics. Thematically, the song probably has more in common with Blur’s ‘Charmless Man’ than with ‘Sunday Mornin’. But there’s also a wittiness that is more akin to ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion.’ 

I suspect that McCookerybook has witnessed a lot of celebrities and hipsters, who are ageing disgracefully, out on the town, but as the song nears its conclusion you realise that she isn’t just singing about The Beautiful People, she’s also celebrating those people who are merely out on the town having a good time. This realisation epitomises the heart of Green as an album: Even when McCookerybook is angry, she can still see humour and humanity in the situation.