The Lost Women of Rock Music

Female Musicians of the Punk Era

Helen Reddington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754657736
• eBook ISBN: 9781317025115
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In Britain during the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new phenomenon emerged, with female guitarists, bass-players, keyboard-players and drummers playing in bands. Before this time, women's presence in rock bands, with a few notable exceptions, had always been as vocalists. This sudden influx of female musicians into the male domain of rock music was brought about partly by the enabling ethic of punk rock ('anybody can do it!') and partly by the impact of the Equal Opportunities Act. But just as suddenly as the phenomenon arrived, the interest in these musicians evaporated and other priorities became important to music audiences. Helen Reddington investigates the social and commercial reasons for how these women became lost from the rock music record, and rewrites this period in history in the context of other periods when female musicians have been visible in previously male environments. Reddington draws on her own experience as bass-player in a punk band, thereby contributing a fresh perspective on the socio-political context of the punk scene and its relationship with the media. The book also features a wealth of original interview material with key protagonists, including the late John Peel, Geoff Travis, The Raincoats and the Poison Girls.

Chapter 1

A Ladder through the glass ceiling?

… these success stories had ambiguous implications. As with every other ‘youth revolution’ (e.g. the beat boom, the mod explosion and the Swinging Sixties) the relative success of a few individuals created the impression of energy, expansion and limitless upward mobility.¹

Hebdige, above, utters words of caution as the music press rejoices in punk bands getting record deals, bank clerks metamorphosing into fanzine editors (Mark Perry of Sniffin’ Glue) and then into music journalists and so on; subcultures become focused on ‘a handful of brilliant nonconformists’, he claims. By presenting the experiences of a group of contemporaries I interviewed, who were in bands in East and West London, Cambridge, Brighton, Oxford, Southampton and Manchester,² we will see how their experiences empowered them, and how the punk community supported them. What these women have in common is that they started playing instruments in bands around 1976–77, during the moment that punk first became a major youth subculture; their mass-cultural reference points are therefore very similar, although at the time their ages would have varied from 16 to 45. Some of these women (for example, Lora Logic) made recordings and were quite prominent musicians at the time, with reviews and interviews in the music press. Others made no recordings and gave no interviews, but were just as deeply involved in the production of music and living in the punk subculture.

Pinning down the energy and excitement of a movement, or a moment, like British punk is impossible to do in words, and boxing in the resulting captive within academia might seem like a crime. For a writer like myself, punk came first and academic education followed years behind it; analysis is necessary to consolidate the experiences of my generation, but should not distract the reader from the uniqueness of the punk experience for its community. The abrasive sound of the music matched our desperation; for us, it blew away the polished and smug sounds of progressive rock, epitomized by Rick Wakeman’s progressive rock musical on ice that featured the by-then familiar expensive lighting rigs and sound systems plus a massive cast including horses; not only did this way of presenting music have no relationship to young people’s life experiences, but it made music-making seem like a millionaire’s activity – how could the average person in the street afford banks of keyboards, stacks of amplifiers, and exotic stage dressing and costumes? At the other end of the spectrum, the undoubted genius of Kate Bush filled a very large gap in popular music. In 1978, her hothoused talent was advertised on hoardings, buses, the music press: the woman-to-end-all-women was not only a prodigy musically, but was marketed very much in terms of her sexuality, photographed in a tight T-shirt that left little to the imagination. She was obviously a very high-maintenance prospect in terms of music; even the average listener could discern that a huge financial investment had been made not only in her studio recordings but also in the presentation of her oeuvre. The world of music and its potential as either a career or a method of communication therefore seemed impossible to penetrate until punk came and changed all the rules by force. It bypassed the tastes of the traditional gatekeepers; we were creating an atmosphere, a homemade expression of anger and dissatisfaction, redistributing power, and it cost us next to nothing; this was often read by the establishment as a celebration of amateurism and shambolic organization. Sometimes it was admired, in the way that those who analyse extreme activities seem secretly to admire their subjects, and sometimes attempts were made to co-opt the energy of the moment and divert it to other ends. Capitalism is so woven into the developed world that rejecting it as a starting-point for creative activity seems incomprehensible, unless one is in a position where capitalism makes no sense whatsoever.

This was a temporary subcultural and musical revolution stirred up by the concurrent activities of a group of very different but equally creative women who were active in different locations at the same time, and it is necessary to sail through what might seem like a sea of sociology in order to put this into a political and social context. History is not complete without attempts to fill in the missing parts, and this book is my attempt to right the misconceptions about what punk could mean to women (or, at the time, often girl) instrumentalists who were involved at its revolutionary core. For to some of its protagonists, punk was a social revolution; for a while, it certainly introduced some revolutionary behaviour into the ‘frame’. It was also a musical revolution, and the female punk bands had a particular sort of influence on British pop music that is also frequently underplayed, especially in their incorporation of reggae into the musical discourse. Arguably, if male bands had developed the sort of innovations in music that The Slits and The Raincoats, for instance, made, they would have become household names.³ Later, we will see that a sort of closed shop mentality was in operation in the written histories of subcultures in general, let alone those that had music at their core. I will place punk in the context of other youth subcultures both before and since; mostly, those involved in writing ‘serious’ histories of youth subcultures have concerned themselves only with the young men involved. The tensions between music-makers and the recording industry have a profound effect on gender perceptions among music fans of all ages, and I will show how frequently writers in the academic field subscribe unwittingly to gender-hegemonic assumptions and values. All too often, new eras for women in rock music are discovered⁴ but the inroads made by women into this genre of music are temporary, and always on male terms. As US journalist Toby Goldstein remarked in 1975:

Every women’s band has been called a sign of some dawning era. So far that includes Birtha, Fanny, April Lawton’s Ramatam, Suzi Quatro and perhaps, if they had ever been reviewed at the time, Goldie and the Gingerbreads way back in 1964 too. Women’s bands proliferate in today’s media, to be sure. But women playing music are still badly underreviewed and consequently underestimated. The ‘times’ have been giving signs of things to come for as long as rock has been reviewed. When women are no longer asked why are you, you? [sic] we’ll know the millennium has arrived.⁵

Carson, Lewis and Shaw report that, post-2000, Goldstein’s millennium has still not arrived; they quote an interview in Cleveland Scene with Bikini Kill’s guitarist Kathleen Hanna in which she challenges the reporter for asking her about feminism rather than music, and he acknowledges that three-quarters of the way through the interview he has yet to ask her about the music.⁶ There are constant attempts to isolate women’s achievements in the fields of art and music, with a resulting detachment of experience that makes it very dificult to assess and value even one’s own work, as articulated by the lead singer of The Slits, Ari:

It’s really hard to relate to people after you’ve been through a revolution, because it’s like talking to a Vietnam veteran, you know when the Vietnam people went though a war like that and they seem really normal and okay, and they come to this point when they can’t talk about things ’cos they’ve got no one to relate to, so that’s like with me, I keep that point quiet then suddenly I go into this memory. Right now I’m like a Vietnam veteran, feeling all these emotions, all these things, all these good explosions that we had, expressions of freedom that we were able to make, [remembering] at the same time this completely tormented, constant sabotage that we were getting.⁷

Various different elements enabled the women players to begin their career (or sometimes, hobby) as rock and pop instrumentalists. Bayton⁸ has already identified many of these factors; there is no doubt that the moment of punk rock resulted in a much higher visibility of female instrumentalists in bands and an acknowledgement (sometimes grudging and misogynistic in tone) by the music papers normally targeted at a young male rock audience that some women were becoming present in more ‘male’ roles in bands on the entry-level circuit of pubs, clubs and student venues. The punk moment, and its attraction for the unemployed, provided a unique context for changes in music-making.

Extended Childhood and Creative Opportunity

Virginia Caputo’s study of the ‘transformation, through various processes, of the child into a competent member of adult culture’ describes childhood itself being regarded as inconsequential by adults; it is merely a stage during which the child makes up for what they ‘lack’ in order to grow up: ‘This conceptualisation depicts children as “partially cultural”’⁹ This is useful in discussing what could be described as the permanent childhood state of punks which was a feature of the subculture, as they were unable or unwilling to undertake the rite of passage provided by employment. As Glyptis writes:

One of the main confirmations that adulthood had been reached was the attainment of fulltime employment, which signalled the beginning of ‘real’ adult life, in an adult world and on adult terms, with concomitant financial independence.¹⁰

Caputo provides another useful insight in her essay, commenting:

With regard to the issue of time, this element is significant for both youth and children. While one could argue that, for children at least, it appears that there is a connection between the loss of control over their time and a decrease in the production of culture, it cannot be substantiated.¹¹

There is a logical link between ‘control over their time’ and the fact that by nature of being unemployed and therefore infantilized, the punks, both male and female, developed a productive subculture to continue and replace that of their childhood in a reversal of what happens to a child as school absorbs more and more of their time. This productive involvement, whether musical, political or otherwise, in the creation of their subculture would have been psychologically rewarding. Stephen Harding’s study, Values and the Nature of Psychological Well-being, investigates what people do when they have nothing (compulsory) to occupy themselves with – for i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A ladder through the glass ceiling?
• 2 Media gatekeepers and cultural intermediaries
• 3 The Brighton scene
• 4 Noise, violence and femininity
• 5 The aftermath
• 6 The social context: Academic writing on subcultures, the rock press and ‘women in music’
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index