She Bop , livre ebook

Jawbone Press - Lucy O'Brien

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130 pages

English

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“It will make you want to form a band, it will make you angry, it will make you laugh, and it will educate you.”GINA BIRCH

“This book is a joy on many levels: O’Brien enthuses about music so elegantly that one immediately has to seek out the records she describes, and she forces you to reassess the exploitative images of female songwriters and musicians that were, and still are, being used every day.” CAITLIN MORAN

“Dip in anywhere and you’ll instantly find yourself drawn into the rich world of female artists and their creative experience, personal struggles, and wide-ranging opinions. What unites us and what divides us.” MIKI BERENYI

“In the beginning there was She Bop: the comprehensive and entertaining music herstory. This new edition of Lucy O’Brien’s essential book includes explorations of gender identity that have bubbled to the surface in recent times. Every music fan needs this book.” HELEN MCCOOKERYBOOK

“Anybody who has shoved a bulging sock down their pants before picking up a guitar should read this book. Prick is something that will happen to your finger if you practice enough.” TORI AMOS

Drawing on more than 270 original interviews with female artists and women working behind the scenes in A&R, marketing, music publishing, and production, She Bop presents a feminist history of women in popular music, from 1920s blues to the present day. Talking to iconic artists from Eartha Kitt and Nina Simone to Debbie Harry and Beyoncé, acclaimed author Lucy O’Brien charts how women have negotiated ‘old boy’ power networks to be seen and to get their music heard.

This revised edition updates that story through many fresh interviews and new perspectives. Since She Bop was first published in 1995, digital downloading has transformed the music landscape. But has the issue of gender inequality changed too? In a new introduction and closing chapter, O’Brien celebrates the rise of unique women such as Lizzo and Billie Eilish, who are bursting through and creating new possibilities for female artists, while also looking at the struggles of artists like Kesha, and wondering whether the pop industry has had its #MeToo moment yet.

Published to celebrate the original book’s 25th anniversary – and in a year that also marks 50 years of Women’s Liberation – this new She Bop will appeal to a huge cross-section of readers, from music fans to the LGBT audience and women of all generations.

Sujets

Musique

Culture musicale

Histoire de la musique

LGBT

Music

History

Criticism

Informations

Publié par	Jawbone Press
Date de parution	06 novembre 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781911036685
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A Jawbone book
Published in the UK and the USA by
Jawbone Press
Office G1
141–157 Acre Lane
London SW2 5UA
England
www.jawbonepress.com
First edition published by Penguin Books, London, 1995
Second edition published by Continuum, New York, 2002
Third edition published by Jawbone Press, London, 2012
Volume copyright © 2020 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Lucy O’Brien. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.
Cover design by Paul Palmer-Edwards

For Malcolm, Erran, and Maya

CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
INTRODUCTION
01. RIFFIN’ THE SCOTCH
02. STUPID CUPID
03. THE REAL THING
04. CAN THE CAN
05. FINAL GIRLS
06. LADIES OF THE CANYON
07. LIPSTICK TRACES
08. SHE WEARS THE TROUSERS
09. I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY
10. IN SEARCH OF OUR MOTHER’S GARDENS
11. OYE MI CANTO
12. TALKIN’ TOUGH
13. TALKIN’ BUSINESS
14. GIRLPOWER!
15. THE FAME
16. FUTURE FEMINISM
ENDNOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘At home in my squat 1976’ (detail) by Gina Birch
Acrylic, pastel, and oil on canvas, 2019

PROLOGUE
It all began in 1979, when a girl gang got together, spurred by the political activism that exploded that year after the Conservative General Election victory. They were from Southampton, a city perched at the top of the Solent, a day’s crossing away from Le Havre, France, and home of the QE2. It was a town of former glories, with sprawling docks, where cargo ships once unloaded exotic cargo and luxury liners would slide in from abroad. Bombed remorselessly during the Second World War, Southampton had a detached, prefabricated air long after the bleak restructuring of the post-war years. Ken Russell, the maverick film director, was born there, as was comedian Benny Hill – but like all good So’tonites, they escaped early. “I’m from Southampton” doesn’t quite have the same ring as “I’m a Geordie” or “I’m from Glasgow”. It was never cool or hip to come from Southampton – but maybe that was a blessing, as it became important to invent your own identity.
In the late 70s Southampton had a culture bypass. Excitement, allure, difference were all things to be resourcefully manufactured in a recession-hit area where venues had closed down and nightclubs, apart from the cattle market at Top Rank, didn’t exist. Into that vacuum leaped The Catholic Girls (before the Frank Zappa song, incidentally). Tina was our Siouxsie Sioux – hair dyed jet black, a member of the Anti-Nazi League, always wearing black when the school uniform was navy blue. Maddy, whimsical yet astute, and her older sister Judith, a rebel and the one most openly unimpressed with the nuns’ authority, were both hunt saboteurs and members of the environmental group Friends Of The Earth. And me, casually leaving copies of Spare Rib on the school common-room table and putting up feminist posters (‘You start off sinking into his arms, only to end up with your arms in the sink’) in the hope that I could convert 200 convent-educated sixth-formers to The Cause.
We produced a school magazine named Within These Walls (after a TV drama about a women’s prison), set up a young feminist group called College Women’s Action Group that lasted four meetings, attended one boring meeting of the Labour Party Young Socialists, and went on the Corrie Bill anti-abortion march in London. Corrie was a Scottish MP seeking to limit abortion rights, who in 1978 looked perilously close to getting his way. Our school dutifully closed its anti-abortion ranks, leaving the few dissenters sticking out like bumps on a log. The most vocal of that number – Maddy, Judith, me, and Tina – took the train to London and joined the march to Hyde Park.
This particular day was a flashpoint for us as we fell in behind an open lorry crammed with two Leeds bands: Gang Of Four and Delta 5. Their music was melodic, raw, cheeky, dissonant, and marked by the distinctive use of a melodica, an unlikely punk instrument. Seeing them squashed in a melee of singing and dancing on the back of the lorry was an inspiration. The next day Maddy said loudly at lunchtime: “I’m bored. Let’s form a band.” Tina went out and bought a melodica. Maddy purchased a pair of drumsticks. For several months that was all she had, tapping on table tops and the backs of chairs. Being 17-year-old schoolgirls, we didn’t have much money to buy instruments, so we made cakes and earrings, sold them at school, and bought a drum kit between us on hire purchase. Drums, being the biggest instrument, had to be secured first. Then, with savings from Saturday jobs, Judith got a bass guitar from Woolworths, I bought a synthesizer, and Tina a microphone. We were The Catholic Girls, and we were set.
True to the tradition of punk spontaneity, there we were one Friday evening on stage at the Joiners Arms in Southampton, having had two weeks to write four songs and assemble some chords. I walked on with my knees knocking through my tight jeans, my bare feet crammed into black 50s suede stilettos, a dark blazer adorned with a few pet badges (the anarchist feminist fist, the Anti-Nazi League arrow, the Gang Of Four logo). The stage was two feet high, but it might as well have been a stadium. In front of us was a sea of expectant faces – some amused, some interested, some nakedly hostile – all there to ‘check out the chick band’. Judith led with a few chords and we launched into ‘Bored Housewife’, our first song, which opened with the phrase: “She’s become resigned to life, She’s become a lonely wife …”
Simple words, but they expressed all that we didn’t want to be. We didn’t want to be sealed within the living tomb of marriage and domestic slavery; we didn’t want to be told what we could and couldn’t do with our bodies by the Catholic patriarchy; we didn’t relish the idea of being relegated to the small-talk sidelines in groups of men, just because we were girls and therefore ‘less interesting’. All this and more went into our songs: experiments in sound that were laughed at, derided, but also loved and admired.
In those gawky, nascent stages, it wasn’t so much what we sounded like but what we stood for that mattered. No one told us that we would eventually get to know our instruments, improve, and play them like they were part of us. No one told us that the ideas would eventually gel, the songs come easier and easier, the presentation more slick, confident, and loud. No one told us that promoters would rip us off blind, that boy bands would try to fuck us under the guise of chivalrous respect, that skinheads would come to our gigs, shout abuse at us, overturn the tables, throw bricks through the windows and beat us up; no one told us that we would pay for our own studio time and be included on a compilation album, yet wouldn’t see a penny of the profit (what profit?); no one told us that if we’d hung on to the nugget we had – ourselves, our youth, our sex, our music, our untutored, naive difference – we’d have got our own record deal; no one told us that other girls would both love us and hate us, caught between admiring what we were doing and ostracising what they saw as a threat; no one told us that we would have one of the most exciting years of our lives, that none of us would need boyfriends – as The Voodoo Queens sang later, why go out with boys when you had guitars? – that we would realise a dream (we could do it!). But most of all, no one told us that there were other girls out there too, apart from one sharp woman journalist who came to a gig we played in Bournemouth and said to us after the show: “You’re very raw, you remind me of The Slits when they first started. You’ve definitely got something.”
After a year I left the band to go to university in Leeds. The Catholic Girls transmuted into Almost Cruelty, continued for a while longer before juddering to a halt. I played with a few Leeds bands, including an all-girl outfit making a massacre out of Dusty Springfield songs that was the McLaren-esque brainchild of The Mekons’ Kevin Lycett, then gave up performing to write instead, combining twin interests of music and feminism. Judith pushed through a Women’s Studies strand on her Philosophy degree course and raised twin sons. Maddy went to study horticulture at Kew and became an expert on carnivorous plants. Tina became a social worker. The youthful enthusiasm that gave us the courage to ‘have a go’ faltered through lack of support, without the resources of a major urban network like London or Manchester; but most importantly, it was our lack of confidence as girls isolated on an all-male scene that led to a sense of being besieged and beleaguered. If Riot Grrrl, the inventive, energetic, flawed yet ultimately knowing fanzine/girlband network of the early 90s, had existed 15 years earlier, the future of The Catholic Girls might have been very different.
Being in a band gives you instant power. No wonder boys love it. The day after our first gig at the Joiners Arms, we walked into the Lord Louis, the pub on the seafront frequented by all the local punks, and we were magically accepted. We could hold conversations with boy bands about guitar riffs, synthesizers, hi-hats, and rehearsal space. We could swap dates: “We’re playing Pokesdown on the 15th”; “We’re doing a gig in Bournemouth next week.” We could trade demo tapes and support them at gigs (always as the novelty all-girl act, of course); we could walk together into a major-league Joy Division or Siouxsie & The Banshees concert, and people would whisper: “There’s the Catholic Girls.” We were Somebody. We were part of The Brotherhood. We were empowered.
* An addendum to this story is that over 30 years later, The Catholic Girls finally made it onto CD,