By Frankie Green
The changed life into which most of us entered was a revolution in itself. No home life, no-one to say what we should or should not do, no family ties, we were free and alone in a great, brilliant city, scores of women scarcely out of their teens met together in a revolutionary movement, outlaws or breakers of laws, independent of everything and anybody, fearless and self-confident.
– Annie Kenney, Memoirs of a Militant, 1924
Annie Kenney’s statement reminds me of the early 1970s, at the time I was part of creating the London Women’s Liberation Rock Band https://womensliberationmusicarchive.co.uk/l
Our band members were Alaine (whose surname I’m sorry to have forgotten,) guitar; Angele Veltmeijer, vocals, flute; Eleanor Thorneycroft, bass guitar; Frankie Green, drums; Hazel Twort, vocals, keyboard.
At the 1972 Manchester National Women’s Liberation Conference, women from the Gay Liberation Front and Women’s Liberation began planning to make music together. I’d played drums in the mid-60s and was keen to combine music with politics in that exciting time.
Frankie drumming sometime in the 1970s
A notice in the London WL Workshop’s newsletter brought many responses. We met at Hazel’s Peckham council flat. At the first practice our instruments were acoustic, and I was drumming on saucepans with chopsticks. Helped by donations, we acquired instruments and a primitive PA. We played at the next national WLM conference at Acton Town Hall in 1972, handing out song sheets and inviting women to join in.
We practised in squats, pub rooms, council flats and community centres around Hackney, Kings Cross and Islington where most of us lived in squatting communities. We went to gigs to see great women singers like Carol Grimes, Marsha Hunt, Maggie Bell and Elkie Brooks. Our musical influences were eclectic: the Velvet Underground, Bowie, Janis Joplin and Pink Floyd, and the album The Mountain Moving Day is Coming by The Chicago and New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Bands, who had similar politics to ours.
http://www.cwluherstory.com/listen-to-the-mountain-moving-day-album.html
Naomi Weisstein of the Chicago WLM Rock Band wrote about conveying celebration and resistance … a politics of strong, defiant women, absolute democracy, and an intense desire for audience participation. With our bad-ass revolutionary poetry, we shouted: we can have a new, just and generous world, a world without female suffering or degradation.
Frankie with drum kit
Music-making was entwined with the rest of our lives which involved communal houses, political meetings, campaigns, demonstrations, running women’s centres, consciousness-raising, spray-painting excursions, producing leaflets, dealing with court cases after arrests while squatting or demonstrating, being evicted and moving frequently. The band was self-funded, most of us in low paid jobs or on the dole.
Gigs included a 1972 benefit disco for the Fakenham women strikers; Essex University’s 1973 women’s festival; women’s discos at the Crown and Woolpack pub in Islington; WLM Workshop benefits in Covent Garden Community Centre and the first National Lesbian Conference in Canterbury, 1974.
We contributed music to the 1973 film The Amazing Equal Pay Show (British Film Institute: http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/132334) made by the original London Women’s Street Theatre group and the Women’s Film Group.
From the outset there was an emphasis on the band being a practical expression of our politics – challenging conventional splits between theory and activism. We wanted to take hands-on action in the world, in music, housing, work – taking control of our lives, living our politics. Feminists were doing everything possible to challenge male supremacy and heterosexism: songs reflected this. We wrote some original compositions (‘Body Squat’ connected taking over houses with control of our physical selves, asserting our right to bodily integrity, reproductive and sexual rights, an end to objectification) or altered existing lyrics (‘Street fighting Woman’ got us debating women playing ‘cock-rock.’)
Demystifying music-making itself, making it accessible to women, was part of this movement – the builders, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, car mechanics of the Women and Manual Trades groups and the musicians, sound technicians, actors, film-makers, artists, photographers, writers, magazine editors, publishers and printers, jewellery-makers, DJs, theatre and film groups, street theatre and performance artists, were all part of the same process.
Lesbian musicians faced not only sexism but ridicule and discrimination; lesbians in general were stigmatised and deemed mentally ill. Women prioritising relationships with women and singing about them was risky; k.d. lang was a long way away.
Collective goodwill often enabled the band. Support came from Spare Rib’s music journalist and bass guitarist Marion Fudger and other women who cheered us on, danced and sang along. When a rental firm refused us a van as we were going to play at the Lesbian conference in Canterbury, we returned despondent to the Women’s Liberation Workshop in Earlham St, Covent Garden, where our gear was stored. But women who were travelling by coach and cars picked up bits of drum kit and amplifiers to take with them, so we had a successful event. It felt we were all part of something, the band was not separate but embedded in the movement.
That band grew alongside others, the Northern Women’s Rock Band and the Stepney Sisters, as feminism created a way into music for women and an infrastructure of support, equipment sharing, practical workshops – and our own type of cultural/political event. WLM structures were local, regional and national, based on a network of groups. Feminist Archive North has a comprehensive chronology of the conferences, which included live music.
Barbara Ehrenreich has described such events in Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Metropolitan Books, 2006) as collective effervescence (a term from Emile Durkheim), with group dancing the great leveller and binder of communities producing intense feelings of solidarity … the basis of effective political action from below. She describes authoritarian societies subjecting dancing to stringent control. Hierarchy … establishes boundaries … festivity breaks them down. In our women’s liberation celebrations, the audience were not passive consumers of a spectacle but creative participants.
Ehrenreich views rock music as rebellion against conformity and racial segregation, the ‘rallying point of an alternative culture’ But this counterculture involved its own hierarchies, and ‘rock music did ‘“gender work” in constructing hegemonic masculinity’ as Mavis Bayton (from Oxford’s women’s band The Mistakes) writes in Frock Rock (OUP 1998). Carnivalesque mockery inverts power structures and as Mikhail Bakhtin writes, is ‘created and generated by people for themselves’. Unsurprisingly, many men were threatened and became violent when all-women groups were on stage and the women they were playing for enjoyed collective ‘choral dancing’ together.
I couldn’t write about this band without its context – a movement wanting to rip away the veil obscuring connections between patriarchy, sexism, capitalism and racism, understanding how these forces operate in women’s lives, how the political shapes the personal, in order to make change. I was moved by the 1970 pamphlet ‘Why Miss World?’ (reprinted in Misbehaving, Merlin Press, 2020) *. Our goal was not equality within an unequal society – liberation meant radical transformation of the social, sexual, political, economic system – a feminist revolution.
Feminist music-making incorporated politics not only in lyrics and methodology but striving toward a different way of living, collective working, radical production values, creating political culture. As anyone who’s been involved in political organising and/or communal living knows, this is easier said than done. It was certainly exhausting, that intense period in the1970s. I remember it as fun as well as involving stormy relationships, arguments and fallings-out. We were angry about all injustice and exploitation. It was a watershed time of extraordinary energy, an upsurge of political activism that encompassed and changed many women and vast swathes of life, and I was lucky to have been in the right place at the right time.
The London Women’s Liberation Rock Band at the the first National Lesbian Conference in Canterbury, April 1974
*A copy of the original 1970 Why Miss World? pamphlet can be viewed on HOWL. Access it via the Miss World story in this section of the website.
*Frankie was also part of a later band, Jam Today. Read about at https://womensliberationmusicarchive.co.uk/j/
*This piece is a shortened version from Frankie’s original 2010 blog on: https://frankiegreenvariouswritings.home.blog/page-2/