SYD SHELTON As you talk to people you’ll get very different views about what Rock Against Racism was. It took a while to get going and for people to understand what we were doing. And attempting to bring together black and white people also meant addressing major cultural differences and attitudes amongst the bands and their audiences.
KATE WEBB As we put on more gigs and RAR groups began to establish around the country there were a lot of accusations against a lot of reggae groups for misogyny and particularly language about women and their periods and lack of cleanliness; the use of the word ‘bloodclaat’. The importance of Rasta as a heritage and culture to those black musicians and what it meant was not fully understood then, so those clashes happened all the time.
BRINSLEY FORDE I can write a song and the amount of times journalists have come back and said, this song is about this and is about that and I’ve gone, ‘No.’ I can understand where all that misconception came about. I may not believe that being gay is the correct order of things but I am not going to discriminate that person for his belief. It’s the same situation I’ve been fighting for: ‘Look, I’m black. I can do this. I can do that. Why don’t you give me an equal opportunity?’
LUCY WHITMAN At the RAR ‘Dub’ Conference in Birmingham, David Widgery asked me to facilitate a discussion about sexism and music which didn’t go well at all. I was twenty-two and completely out of my depth. Poco and Clarence from Misty In Roots and Michael and Brinsley from Aswad tried to defend sexism within Rastafarianism by saying, ‘It’s our culture.’ I was stumped and I wasn’t able to articulate any sensible argument even though I didn’t agree.
BRINSLEY FORDE I don’t know the exact text but I imagine they said, ‘No, man. Man is the head. Women listen to man.’ I subscribe to this point of view but it’s not that this woman must be subservient to me. It doesn’t mean that. It’s the relation of how life is. There’s a place in everything in life just like there are certain foods I won’t eat; just like in a natural state the hog is there to clean the earth. If you have an aquarium a catfish will eat a dead goldfish but a goldfish won’t eat a dead catfish. It’s just the order of things. I believe that the guidelines have been set in the Bible.
PAULINE BLACK I admired that Aswad existed but I’m afraid I didn’t go too much for the English variety of it. We had a bit of a run-in much later on the television programme I hosted, Black on Black, about women and the Rasta religion. That didn’t go down real well. Rastas were outsiders from Jamaican life so they were to be admired for that but if you start breaking down how they felt about women then that wasn’t too good. But you could say that about men in this country who probably felt equally bad about women and they weren’t Rastas.
WILLIAM SIMON Who’s equal to who? I don’t think woman is equal. I think she’s superior because she can do things that I can’t do. She’s the mother of my children. I could never be that.
SYD SHELTON Misty were out of their heads most of the time but they were totally passionate about changing people’s minds. They understood the argument. They were always first on the line but it was riddled with contradiction: they’d sing, Do you remember Judas Iscariot, all this religious crap which I’d argue about with them for hours and everybody would go, ‘Rastafari’ and ‘Jah’ – but they were good to dance to.
WAYNE MINTER Misty had strict rules about women and what they were allowed to do, particularly if a woman had a period – then she was unclean and she wasn’t allowed anywhere near anything. There were a lot of debates going on about that.
RED SAUNDERS We had to deal with ultra-lefties and ultra-feminists and the Rasta debate. My line was always, ‘You can’t choose your friends to your perfection fucking level on your bloody temperature gauge. This guy is prepared to stand with you now. He is 23 per cent on your gauge of what you want someone to be. Do you want him with you as the fascists come running in the door with fucking broken glass or not?’ I had that simplistic argument: ‘It’s an emergency. Asian greengrocers are being stabbed to death in Brick Lane, right now. Altab Ali is dead.’ People were being attacked and murdered. The National Front were kicking, punching and knifing their way into the headlines with great success. They were terrifying the ethnic and immigrant community.
DAVID HINDS I didn’t hold the Rasta view that women are not equal to men. We weren’t about that. We were not against women expressing themselves. I’m a believer that if you’ve got a smart woman why not utilize her mindset. If she’s capable of doing something, give her the right to do it. Just because she’s wearing a skirt she shouldn’t remain behind the kitchen sink. But there were Rasta: ‘You can’t wear trousers. You got to wear a skirt. Girl, keep your head wrapped.’ I never stooped to that. We recognized Rasta was a new philosophy to us and anything new also meant there was room for development and change. Religion is all about rules and environment and people making up rules according to their financial circumstances: ‘Who wants to wear shoes anyway? I’m a Rasta man.’ But as soon as fame and fortune came there you find them with a pair of Clarks. I said, ‘To hell with that.’
RANKING ROGER There’s lots of conflict as far as Rastas and women go but you have to realize that Rastafarianism is a way of life. It’s not a religion. So that means there’s always room for improvement and change. The twenty-first-century Rastafarian is a lot more aware of gay people and lesbians and women.
LESLEY WOODS I remember once talking to this Rastafarian who said that he’d seen a woman coming up the street in a tight skirt and he thought she deserved to get raped. I said, ‘Well, if you walked up the road in a tight skirt you’d deserve to get raped.’ There was that Peter Tosh interview in Melody Maker with Vivien Goldman, when he said, ‘Sometimes many wives deserve battering. Seen? You have some women if you don’t clap them twice a month they’re not alright.’ It was quite shocking. Historically, women in left-wing politics, their role was if somebody was going out to do something like bomb a railroad she would be expected to fuck him the night before so that he felt virile and strong and manly. Look at people like Angela Davis: she had a pretty hard time of it confronting endemic sexism. There’s that saying, ‘They’re your brother in the street but a fascist in the bedroom.’
RUTH GREGORY It was always an issue with the Rastafarian bands, but the same could be said of most of the white bands. Just like white people understanding that racism is a white issue in the same way sexism is a male issue. Unless men are ready to take on the battle and want to equalize things then we’re not going to get all that far. It’s a bit like anti-slavery groups coming from the slaves themselves; you can’t just do it on your own. Quite often men will be in a group of men and they will say things they wouldn’t say in front of women, but those men don’t speak up. It’s like racist jokes that get told. People feel embarrassed but don’t really want to stand up against it. Like the Special AKA said, If you have a racist friend now is the time for your friendship to end. Those discussions have got to be had. But sexism wasn’t on the agenda. Even though punk presented a blindingly obvious opportunity, the world wasn’t ready for it. And with Margaret Thatcher as the leader of the Conservative Party the whole situation was rife for Rock Against Racism to go into Rock Against Sexism.
LUCY WHITMAN There was one band called Rape. And I remember a very articulate letter from a group of seven women who had been to a Fabulous Poodles gig at Brighton Poly, saying, ‘If you’re against racism you should also be against sexism.’ And how upsetting it was for them to go to a Rock Against Racism gig and then feel threatened as women. After that we had a protocol so RAR groups had to check out bands in advance. But a lot of women said, ‘We need to have a Rock Against Sexism to promote women musicians and challenge sexism in the music industry.’ Our motto was ‘LOVE SEX HATE SEXISM!!’ We started issuing a bulletin called Drastic Measures and I wrote:
If women musicians don’t play up to typical expectations of beauty / sexiness, insults are hurled at them from all sides – Patti Smith is ‘as ugly as hell’, Poly Styrene ‘has a somewhat prolonged puppy-fat problem’ (NME), etc., etc. You can’t win. And indignant male rock journalists have been known to write spiteful reviews of concerts to pay performers back for refusing to go to bed with them. Women journalists who sleep with some of the musicians they meet are of course denounced as slags and groupies, but men who sleep around are studs to be admired.
Women in music were under constant pressure from the record companies to flaunt their bodies in order to sell more records. I remember booking this pub on the Tottenham Court Road to have our meeting and I said, ‘It’s for Rock Against Sexism.’ ‘What’s sexism? Are you against sex?’ That was not unusual. We had to argue what we meant by it. Another piece I wrote was written after we got a short slot on the radio:
When Capital Radio interviewed me about Rock Against Sexism last night they asked me what I objected to in the Stranglers. I said, ‘How sadistic some of the songs were,’ and they obligingly faded an extract from ‘Sometimes’: Someday I’m going to smack your face / Somebody’s going to treat you rough / Beat till you drop, and then the interviewer rounded off by saying, ‘Well, I still think sexuality is a vital ingredient in rock ’n’ roll and I don’t think rock singers can be too sexy but if you disagree you can contact RAS.
That’s what we were up against!
CAROL GRIMES If they signed a woman in the sixties it was a woman up front being sexy and packaged. I was hauled into the office to see Robert Stigwood and told, ‘You’re not playing the game.’ I was supposed to hang out in the right clubs where they all went. I was supposed to be seen, be photographed and screw the right people; have a nice juicy affair with a big rock star. In radio interviews I had hands up my skirt and fingers groping my tits. And if you said anything, ‘Oh, it’s just a bit of harmless fun.’ That was the culture in the music business. It happened in studios, bars, at gigs. Women were treated really poorly. Anything that flagged strong women saying, ‘Hang on a minute, we’re not putting up with this anymore,’ was a positive thing.
SUE COOPER In the early seventies, through the Women’s Movement, there was a band called the Northern Women’s Liberation Rock Band and they did a series of weekends in Liverpool to encourage women to play music. I had a go on a drum kit and the bass. It was using music as a way of empowering women. What had been presented to me as a teenager growing up was that music was mainly men. If you saw women on stage they would sing, and that was about it. Punk was very much overthrowing the status quo and doing alternatives, and that meshed for me with a feminist perspective which was also about challenging the balance around gender roles.
LUCY WHITMAN It was very hard to get any of the women artists to say they were feminists. Punks didn’t want to be associated with an organized movement, whether it was political or feminism, because they found that to be too constraining. Feminist music was very much wavering-voiced American folk music because that was the antithesis of cock rock.
JUNE MILES-KINGSTON In the Mo-dettes, we were always very anti-industry because of what it does to women musicians. We were all pretty strong feminists but without saying the word. Punk was: anyone can do it. Feminism was: you’re the underdog. It labels you as someone fighting for something and stops you growing. We were already there. We weren’t fighting for our place. We had a place. All we were doing was proving it. We didn’t do, ‘We’re women and we’re strong.’ Fuck that. If you’ve got to explain it, it’s not going to happen. We wanted to prove that we could do it but we didn’t have to preach it. We could still be sexual. We could still wear feminine clothes. Ramona loved to wear short skirts and little heels and she looked beautiful. Jane had a great mean look with cropped blonde hair and mean eyebrows. Kate had a white stripe in her hair and that New York swagger. She was absolutely brilliant. We said things like, ‘Feminists are just bored housewives.’
LESLEY WOODS We didn’t shirk away from being labelled as a feminist band. If I was asked if I was a lesbian I would say yes, because I didn’t give a fucking shit what they thought. I would steer clear of personification in songs. If I was writing a love song I wouldn’t use he and she because love songs are always written about men and women. They fail to acknowledge that these feelings are things that gay people or transgender people go through. I love that Barbra Streisand song: we’ve got nothing to be guilty of. It doesn’t ever let you know that it’s a man and a woman saying it to each other. It could be anybody.
LUCY WHITMAN I spent many hours trying to persuade musicians to say they were feminists. But it didn’t matter, because what they were doing in their music was challenging to conventional ideas of femaleness – the Slits were singing about ‘Typical Girls’ and not looking like typical girls and Poly ‘I-den-tit-y’. They were saying, ‘I’m not going to be your plaything.’ I’m not going to be bound or confined by expectations of being a housewife or a dutiful girlfriend. That’s why in Temporary Hoarding I spent a lot of time quoting people’s lyrics, because they were challenging. Punk as a whole was very anti-romance and most songs were not about boys meet girls. It was ‘White Riot’ or ‘God Save The Queen’.
JUNE MILES-KINGSTON We didn’t feel Rock Against Sexism was the way to present the band. We had four different views on everything. We didn’t all stand behind the singer who represented us. It wasn’t like the Slits, where they were all competing.
SUE COOPER The Slits supported the Clash on the White Riot tour. It’s really hard to explain how unimaginable it was to have women on stage playing musical instruments. You just didn’t see it. There was a contradiction because punk was quite macho but the Pistols and the Clash were so anti-establishment.
NICKY SUMMERS There was nothing to refer to, growing up. There weren’t girl bands. There were just Sixties girl singers who were manipulated. Then the Slits came along. They were quite rakish musically and they had wild personalities; very inspiring and groundbreaking, but challenging. It was such an exciting period. The whole thing was exploding and we were at the beginning of it.
RICHARD BOON The Slits empowered women with their attitude: Silence is a rhythm too, but touring with them was hard work because they were really brattish, particularly Ari. She was terribly young: fourteen, fifteen. You’d have thought they might have needed some help but there was no one to give them any guidance or boundary. People were like, ‘Yeah, it’s really fun. It’s the Slits.’ That wasn’t applauded by me, in men or women, but they were also fun to be around; and possibly for the same reason.
MYKAELL RILEY We played with the Slits reluctantly. You look at their style and it’s not very Rasta. Steel Pulse was redefining itself and that was not in the image of the Slits.
DAVID HINDS They were a law unto themselves. They were outrageous. Prior to going on stage they asked me to tune their guitar and when I did they said, ‘I don’t like that,’ and grabbed the guitar and started detuning each string and said, ‘That’s better.’
RANKING ROGER It didn’t matter if they could play their instruments or not. I could hear all the mistakes but also I could hear a groove. They were really brave. We were like, ‘Give ’em a go.’ We used to call them the Sluts.
DENNIS BOVELL The Slits’ take on rhythm was quite feminine. I was like, ‘Listen. It’s a hybrid. It’s a new style. It’s called Fem-punk!’ Ari had this fascination with marrying reggae rhythms with rock drums; she would mouth the beat and Budgie would play it. Tess would then have a very heavy bassline. Then Viv would come with guitar parts and get the lyrics together for Ari to sing. I was fascinated by such a young girl who had all these big ideas. But I wasn’t surprised, because she was German and classically taught. One of her party pieces was to put a coin on both the backs of her hands and then do piano scales without the coins falling off: ‘This was something I learnt when I was a child!’
TRACEY THORN I’m a bit uncomfortable with the idea of female rhythm. Rhythm’s rhythm, isn’t it? I can appreciate the idea of just being women in a band and making up your own rules – that’s what we did in the Marine Girls – but if you’re going to make a strong case that you’ve defined some essentially female version of rhythm then it doesn’t help if both your producer and drummer are men. I was never comfortable with versions of feminism that used female essentialism as being part of its defining thing. That’s dangerous. You end up on shaky ground saying ‘women are this’ and ‘men are that’.
FRANCES SOKOLOV In my own sense of rhythm, three-four time is more female than male. It has associations with waltzes: 1, 2, 3; it’s not driving. It’s spinning. It’s going round in circles whereas the male march, 1, 2, 3, 4, is driven.
JUNE MILES-KINGSTON The cover of Cut was fabulous and it got everybody talking about the Slits. I used to secretly wish I’d played in them when I was in the Mo-dettes. It was the tribal beats. And then I played with them just before Ari died. She was fucking amazing; a complete and pure natural.
DENNIS BOVELL When people saw the Slits cover they were like, ‘Bovell, come on, what’s the story behind you with these three naked girls?’ I’d be like, ‘They weren’t dressed like that in the studio!’ When they were taking their clothes off and hosing each other down I was in the swimming pool and somebody said to the girls, ‘Why don’t you jump in the pool?’ I said, ‘NO! NO! NO!’ Suddenly all three of them jumped in the pool and somebody whipped out a camera and went snap. I went, ‘If that fucking appears anywhere I’m going to kill you.’ They were very brave. They weren’t page three. They were page one.
PAULINE BLACK The Cut cover came in for a lot of flak at the time from feminists: ‘It’s sexist.’ ‘Why get your tits out?’ That wasn’t getting your tits out. That’s how they looked. It was pretty damn primal.
TRACEY THORN I was seventeen when the album came out and just discovering feminism, so suddenly having your tits out on your record cover, albeit covered in mud and obviously not meant to be sexual, I really wasn’t quite sure what to make of it at all. There was something slightly hippy about it; and ideas of liberating the body. It was very challenging and defiant. I think men were probably frightened by them, which was no bad thing. And the looks they’re giving are very ‘fuck you’.
LESLEY WOODS Apparently, bus drivers crashed when the cover was put out on billboards. Cut was very important to me. It was all women. Typical girls get upset too quickly – I could relate to that. It was very brave of them.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS You were buying into something. They were women that didn’t care that they didn’t have perfect bodies. They were totally in control. They were taking rock ’n’ roll back for the girls. It was, ‘We’re not going to pander to any of your ideals of who we should be or how we should look.’ It was girls doing it and still managing to be incredibly feminine. On top of that, the record sounded brilliant. They didn’t try to be technically brilliant. They didn’t try and be girls playing boys’ rock ’n’ roll. They just did their own thing. It became my Saturday afternoon tidying-the-flat album.
LUCY WHITMAN The whole thing about punk is, it is very jokey. It’s very visual. It’s all about dressing up and it’s a bit of a pantomime. The way Ari used her voice was unusual. The statement was: I’m not going to be Cilla Black. I’m going to be something that will surprise you.
NICKY SUMMERS Punk was a different take on female style: you could wear a bin bag or spiked hair. You were not dressing for men. It was about creativity and expression, and the guys at the time supported you in that.
RHODA DAKAR I’d wanted to be in a band for a long time but it was all about boys that had been playing in their garages for about 100 years. Punk made it seem possible. And then I heard about the Mo-dettes being put together and they were looking for a singer. I thought, ‘Should I? Nah, I won’t.’ Then I went to see them at Acklam Hall and thought, ‘Oh, I really wish I had now.’ The Mo-dettes made more sense. I liked the punk-pop kitsch Sixties influence. It was more like who I was.
JUNE MILES-KINGSTON I loved the way that people of my age at last were taking control of everything. I was a huge fan of Tamla Motown and Stax, all that American pop soul stuff, and all those women were put up front with their hairdos and their dresses. The Mo-dettes was a reaction against all of those groups. We felt like punk gave us the opportunity to get away from that to say, ‘We’re all women. We’re all in a band. We all play instruments. We’re not just pretty faces. And we’re also taking the piss.’
SUE COOPER We had a women’s big band called Contraband. Musically it was a shambles, but it was amazingly empowering for the women who were in it: just the image of twenty-odd women playing Glenn Miller or an arrangement of ‘I Will Survive’.
JUNE MILES-KINGSTON Being female is not a disadvantage in any way whatsoever. Yes, of course, it is if you’re married to a bloke that’s going to beat you up or you work for a horrible boss that keeps you down. But then you fight to change it. I felt privileged being a woman.
NEIL SPENCER I remember going to a meeting with CBS Records and I said to them, ‘The future of popular music is with British black people, and women have to be accommodated.’ I got a lot of stick for doing the ‘Women in Rock’ cover on the NME but it brought the issue to the fore. And what did CBS say? ‘Where are your black lesbian writers, Neil?’ I always tried to recruit female writers onto the NME.
JULIET DE VALERO WILLS The music industry had managed to lag behind spectacularly in women’s equality like no other industry. I had a strong work ethic. That’s how I dealt with being a girl.
PAULINE BLACK Everybody knows that sex sells music. If you’ve got a pretty woman up front, the more flesh that she shows the more records you’ll sell. You only had to look at Debbie Harry.
LUCY WHITMAN Blondie’s first album was promoted with a picture of Debbie Harry and the slogan, ‘Wouldn’t you like to rip her to shreds?’ A lot of the imagery of women in early punk was very sexist because the whole industry was really sexist. It’s very hard for women to try to subvert sexist imagery, and given the history of the representation of women in our culture I don’t think there’s anything radical about baring your breasts. You might say you’re doing it satirically or ironically but it doesn’t make any difference because men still get off on it. I used to wear a little black plastic jacket covered in badges and I used to cut my hair with a razor so it would stick up in odd peaks. I didn’t want to conform to other people’s expectations of what a young woman should look like. What I found subversive was the sort of clothes Poly Styrene used to wear.
RUTH GREGORY I think Poly Styrene got more optimistic through Rock Against Racism. We gave her a voice into a different audience, different possibilities.
KATE WEBB Poly Styrene was the greatest product of punk ever. She was part Somali, part Scottish-Irish and was like the advance party for the new self that was going to remake Britain. I think she captured the spirit of the time like no one else and brought that fantastic aesthetic style. She was so unprecedented and completely her own thing and of the moment. So many great songs like ‘Germfree Adolescent’ and ‘Oh Bondage! Up Yours!’ Bind me tie me / Chain me to the wall / I want to be a slave / To you all; it’s one of the greatest feminist anthems ever.
NICKY SUMMERS Poly’s message was different and important. It was about being female and not dressing or looking or behaving how you’re expected to. Punk had a different aesthetic of female beauty. It was beyond liberating.
RICHARD BOON Poly was a remarkable woman. She was talking to teenage girls about not being objectified.
DAVE RUFFY Being mixed-race with a brace on her teeth; and not being beautiful traditionally but being beautiful because she was young and exciting.
PAULINE BLACK Poly Styrene probably influenced me more than anyone. It wasn’t what she did or what she said, it was more that she had freedom to express what she was. No holds barred. The backdrop to these women was the Nolan Sisters or Chic or Donna Summer or whatever the fuck Diana Ross was doing. To come up with those ideas was extraordinary.
SARAH JANE MORRIS I wasn’t a punk but I loved the statement of wearing a very badly hand-knitted baby-pink dress and a brace; a pop singer wearing something that was always considered ugly. It was such a statement.
FRANCES SOKOLOV Males are very defensive when you try to speak to them about these things. It’s a male world and one is afraid of what’s going to come back at you. You want to speak your truth but there’s a risk involved. I don’t know whether that risk is real or imagined or part of the air that we all breathe in or whether every bloke has got the potential to hurt us.
PAUL FURNESS Frances was known as Vi Subversa. Her voice was a great rasping razor blade. She was in her forties but her age was seen as wonderful and she was up there with all these other young people doing what she was doing and couldn’t give two fucks about it.
FRANCES SOKOLOV I liked the excitement of rock music. I learnt to play the guitar because I wanted to join in the delivery of sound of large electric music. But I was forced to sing over this noise with not very good equipment. I’d end up with sore throats and headaches. I found the whole gigging thing quite unpleasant: too loud, and too noisy. But I had my message and I wanted to be up there doing it. If you’ve got something to say then bloody well say it.
RICHARD SWALES Frances is a really important person in popular music. There is nobody who has done anything like what she did: she was an evacuee during the war; with the anarchists in Soho in the fifties; a dropout in the sixties; ended up in Brighton in the seventies with two kids fathered by one of the editors of Black Flag; and then suddenly decided she could sing. It’s quite an extraordinary life experience that got channelled into rock music. There’s no other rock singer, male or female, who talked about the issues that she talked about. At forty you were well past it, and to stand up in front of 500 kids in leather jackets gobbing, singing songs about being a single mother and the anger and angst of all that, is something quite extraordinary.
FRANCES SOKOLOV I never dressed or called myself a punk. I was too old. People often thought I was the manager or somebody’s girlfriend until I got on stage. That was an expectation and certainly true of the early years. On stage I would get things like, ‘Get ’em off.’ It’s hurtful if you’re not taken seriously. In the end I stopped wanting to be taken seriously.
LUCY WHITMAN Frances was the most amazing poet. The NME mocked her as ‘a bulky middle-aged woman forced into a red satin skirt, which gives [the Poison Girls] a visual incongruity’.
SHERYL GARRATT I remember thinking Vi Subversa was so old and how magnificent it was an old codger like that was doing gigs.
RICHARD SWALES Anarchism was making the personal political and making the political personal, twinned with feminism and twinned with pacifism and anti-racism.
FRANCES SOKOLOV My obligation to myself and women is to try and say the truth as it is; our truth. My children didn’t like having their mum open to abuse. They didn’t know why I was talking about atom bombs and fear and poison. I feel very sad about what I put not only myself through, but also put them through. It was painful and I wanted to run away and hide many times, mostly just before a gig. I didn’t like the violence in the music. I was fed up to the bloody back teeth with violence in any form whatsoever. I just wanted to play music. I didn’t have a particular political agenda. I was a feminist by then more than anything else and that seemed to me as much as I could handle. I was too sensitive for the whole rock world, really.
SUE COOPER Poison Girls was a statement and a challenge to a cultural stereotype which is not only can women not play bass guitar or electric guitar but you don’t have to be young and pretty to do those things.
FRANCES SOKOLOV We had two men in Poison Girls and they would call themselves feminists and they would come in for quite a bit of flak about that. Radical feminists were saying, ‘Why are you playing with men?’ Working in all-women situations wasn’t what my life was like. It wasn’t who I was. Poison Girls’ lyrics were full of feminism. I knew there were other women making songs and speaking out and I wanted to be another woman; of that chorus of women’s voices which were coming up from under.
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JANE MUNRO The Au Pairs didn’t want to sound like a rock band. We wanted to be more challenging but not to go down the totally punky route of being a complete cacophony. So Rock Against Sexism chimed with what we were doing. We happily said to the press we were a feminist band. Feminism had bad press with the bra-burning stuff and quite a lot of women didn’t want to be associated with that, but that’s not the only way of being feminist. We could hardly deny it with our lyrics. I remember John Taylor of Duran Duran saying Lesley and I ‘would be better going off and working in a factory’. It was par for the course.
LESLEY WOODS One time, Jane came to me and said she’d overhead one of this all-male band saying about us, ‘It’s all right. It’s only a couple of birdies and two guys.’ That was like a red flag to a bull. It just made you more determined: ‘I’ll show him,’ kind of thing. The Au Pairs wanted to show that men and women could work together as equals. ‘Au pair’ means in French with equality: on a par; an equal member of the family. We were saying the personal is political: if a man and a woman in a personal setting have a properly functioning healthy relationship where it’s built on equality, but with the recognition of your differences, that can be a model for how society deals with the structures within it.
SHERYL GARRATT God, Lesley sounded like she meant it. A lot of her songs were about sex from a woman’s point of view and I’d never heard that kind of stuff. The Au Pairs were very subtle musically and doing things influenced by dub and space but also with an abrasive funk influence.
JANE MUNRO We recorded ‘Come Again’ for the TV programme Something Else and then were told it was unsuitable and too rude for the BBC. The song was about men’s cack-handedness and lack of skill at giving women orgasms; and the fact that a woman might want more than one, which isn’t unreasonable. It was the sort of territory that people didn’t go into. John Peel said it was the flip to ‘Je t’aime’.
LESLEY WOODS ‘Come Again’ is all about encouraging a woman to have an orgasm. I can feel you hesitating. Is your finger aching? I felt embarrassed about it for a long time. It was semi-humorous. I used to get young men come up to me at the end of a gig and say, ‘I really do want to give my girlfriend an orgasm. She won’t come.’ I was trying to highlight there’s an issue here that everybody’s shying away from articulating. [Our guitarist] Paul’s mum was really quite horrified and said, ‘That’s between a man and woman in the bedroom.’ I was trying to put the female orgasm on the sexual agenda. I don’t think it had ever been shouted out about in a song before.
JOOLZ DENBY I toured with the Au Pairs. Lesley was as thin as a rail and used to do press-ups like a man. I was terribly envious of her because I’m the big muscular type. They were a little bit older than me and very intense. They were polite but they were a sealed unit on a mission with an agenda to pursue for social justice. I remember the song, we’re equal but different. I thought she put that nicely.
LESLEY WOODS ‘It’s Obvious’ just about says it all really, doesn’t it? That definitely had a gay influence. That song crosses all those things: race, sexism, men–women, black–white; recognizing at the end of the day that we’re all individuals: we’re equal but different.
As a band, we were quite shy and withdrew from being in the spotlight. It’s one thing going down in the cellar, getting off your head and having a great time bashing your guitar and writing these lyrics, but it’s completely different from suddenly having to deal with the media. I had this golden moment to be on the front page of the NME and what do I do? I wear clothes from a second-hand clothes shop. I thought, ‘I don’t give a fuck. I’m not dressing up for the NME.’ You felt that you were beyond them; that you didn’t need their favour or need to be in their good books to be what you were. Female politics was quite topical in women’s groups and they used to have men’s consciousness-raising groups as well. Paul, our guitarist, went to one and said there was a guy in the meeting who said, ‘My girlfriend likes me to call her names and I’m not sure how to reconcile that to being a non-sexist man.’ I thought it was really sweet they were talking about things like this.
