Gail Chester,
Year: 1981
Poster advertising ‘Reclaim the Note’ festival, organised by the Pre-Madonnas. We were delighted that notable feminist musicians such as Maggie Nichols, Carol Grimes, and Gwen Sampy ran workshops for us.
Summer 1981, in the middle of a trip to the States, I spent the weekend in Philadelphia with Pam, a Black feminist I’d met the previous year at the UN mid-decade conference on women in Copenhagen. Pam said, ‘It’s the sixth anniversary concert of Anna Crusis, our feminist choir, tomorrow night – would you like to go?’ Would I ever? On the way, Pam and her white partner, Helen, explained about the social segregation that operated in the different areas we drove through. They explained about where they could and couldn’t live together, and where they could walk together, even if they weren’t holding hands. It was all part of a very significant weekend for me.
So that’s how I found myself sitting in the middle of the imposing auditorium of the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, watching a woman who was eight months pregnant doing a clog dance on a large wooden box backed by 60 women singing in perfect harmony.
I was enchanted, I was enraptured, I fell in love on the spot with all 60 of them. I said to myself, ‘I want one of those in London.’ No matter that my teachers wouldn’t let me sing in the school choir – I knew I could sing, just not soprano or alto; and no matter that I couldn’t play a musical instrument, had no idea how to conduct a choir, and could barely read music. Nevertheless, this just had to be ….
Pam and Helen took me to the concert after-party where I met Cathy Roma, who founded Anna Crusis, and later founded MUSE women’s choir in Cincinnati. Despite my evident inexperience, Cathy was most encouraging, and even donated some sheet music to get us started (though it was a while before we were competent enough to use it).
Back home I phoned the only two women I knew who played the guitar: Janie I didn’t actually know, but she was the friend of a friend who said she might be interested as she sometimes performed in a duo/trio with Andrea; and Jenny, an old friend of mine, though I doubted if she’d ever performed in public. And as it happened, Jenny’s then girlfriend had a music degree.
We booked a space at Cromer Street Women’s Centre in King’s Cross – a dank basement in a dingy backstreet – and put a notice in the London Women’s Liberation Newsletter announcing the first meeting of the London Feminist Choir. We waited to see if anyone would turn up, and to our slight surprise, seven women did that first night, and the second week we had ten. Our growth was slow – we stuck at a dozen women for ages – just enough to do songs in three parts, or possibly four if we were feeling extra confident, and eventually we grew to around 25 members. Our weekly meetings moved around a lot in the early days – I remember a huge squat near Trafalgar Square, and several other front rooms, until we settled at the London Women’s Centre in Wild Court, just off Kingsway.
The London Feminist Choir was a rather boring name, so periodically we brainstormed to find a better one. Some of my favourite rejects were: The OK Chorale; Dame Nellie and the Melbas; Vamp Till Ready; and The Florence Foster Jenkins Memorial Chorus. After several years of arguing, we settled on The Pre-Madonnas, as we were famous before she was!
There was already a Sister Singers Network in North America with about thirty feminist choirs, but we were the first one in Britain, so we had to be inventive in finding songs. Looking back, it seems miraculous that we assembled as wide-ranging a repertoire as we did, and most importantly, that were arranged for women’s voices. We learnt Balkan chants off Penny Whistler records, we sang choral arrangements of feminist artists such as Holly Near and Sweet Honey in the Rock, we sang
songs in Yiddish and Italian, we wrote new words for old standards, commenting on the politics of the day – ‘Locomotion’ became ‘Dyke Promotion’ in protest against Clause 28, and we sang the SAD (Sisters Against Disablement) Access Code to the tune of ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. Kirsten Hearn, one of our blind members, was particularly gifted at rewriting words.
The Pre-Madonnas performed at benefits, on marches and at women’s camps. We sang at the Hackney Empire on International Women’s Day, at Sadler’s Wells in the European Lesbian and Gay Choir Festival, we were part of a massed choir which provided a backing group for Kylie Minogue and Elton John at the Royal Albert Hall! We organised our own events – perhaps the most adventurous was Reclaim the Note: the first national women’s choir festival, with workshops led by notable feminist musicians, and out of which Bradford Women’s Singers grew.
Many relationships sprang from the Pre-Madonnas, many musical skills were shared, and much political debate ensued. I loved it, but after it ended in 1997 I yearned for a choir where you didn’t have to argue over every note and could just do what the conductor told you. Unfortunately, that never happened, but that is another story.
Find the only known recording of the Pre-Madonnas (and much other feminist music) at https://womensliberationmusicarchive.co.uk/
Reprinted with permission from Write Women in History, Hackney Howlers