The archive continues to welcome new donations of material – please get in touch at wlmmusicarchive@gmail.com if you have anything you think would be relevant and should be in the archive, or if you were involved and would like to write about your experience of that time. Hopefully the project will continue to grow, gaps will be filled in and more entries created.

Physical items that have been donated to the WLMA will be housed by the Feminist Archive South  and will be available for viewing and research purposes at the University of Bristol by arrangement with the Special Collections Archivists, who can be contacted at special-collections@bristol.ac.uk

Unique offer! The CD ‘Music and Liberation: A Compilation of Music from the Women’s Liberation Movement’, which was created as part of the Music and Liberation exhibition funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and curated by Dr Debi Withers, a co-founder of the WLMA, is still available. This comprises twenty tracks by some of the feminist musicians from the 1970s and 80s – Abandon Your Tutu, Bad Habits, Bright Girls, Fabulous Dirt Sisters, Feminist Improvising Group, Frankie Armstrong, Friggin Little Bits, Ginger and Spice, Hi-Jinx, Jam Today, Mistakes, No Rules OK, Ova, Proper Little Madams, Sadista Sisters, Siren, Spoilsports, Stepney Sisters, York Street Band – plus an informative booklet. Don’t miss this fantastic opportunity to revisit or discover some of these sounds – or introduce friends and family to the music and activism of the era! All proceeds from the CD will be used for the upkeep of the Women’s Liberation Music Archive, and we are grateful to Debi and all the women who made the CD possible who kindly agreed that its sales will benefit the WLMA, a not-for-profit, voluntary and otherwise unfunded project. Please contact the archive at wlmmusicarchive@gmail.com for more information if you’d like a copy. Following the Music and Liberation exhibition, Debi has now left the archive, while Frankie Green continues as Administrator with project support from the WLMA Steering Group. We thank Debi for her work on the archive and good wishes for her future career go with her.

Please get in touch if you have any ideas or questions about the archive. If you have a website or blog you’d like to add to the list of links on our blog posts page please let us know, and please link to us to help spread the word. Thanks! And don’t forget you can advertise your gigs, music releases and other relevant happenings on our ‘Events’ page.

Happy May Day!

A speech about the music archive given by Frankie Green is posted here by request:

‘A big thank you to everyone who has come along tonight, and to Debi for inviting me to speak and share some thoughts on the Women’s Liberation Music Archive. Coming to south London tonight, as I thought about how the archive came about, I felt accompanied by many ghosts. There is much feminist and lesbian history around us. For example, in March 1972 women who’d met through Women’s Liberation and the Gay Liberation Front women’s group gathered at the council flat of Hazel Twort, a founder of WLM and the Peckham Rye WL group, and began the first feminist band to come out of the movement (to the best of my knowledge): the London Women’s Liberation Rock Band (a catchy little title) [which was shortly followed by the Northern Women's Liberation Rock Band.] In the mid-70s I lived myself in Peckham and rehearsed in a shed with women met through a notice in the London Women’s Liberation Workshop newsletter, in a band called Jam Today, whose members continue in musical careers. And at that time, just down the road in Vauxhall two whole terraced streets were women’s squats, a dyke community with one of London’s first feminist discos in a local pub and the first South London Women’s Art Centre in one of the houses in Radnor Terrace. Nearby there is the rich history of Brixton’s squatting, anti-racist, women’s and LGBT activism. And so on …

Patching such pieces together is the kind of work we are doing in the archive, to create a bigger picture of the political context, in which to make real that which may otherwise be fragmented and lost. And some women from that era are no longer with us. I feel passionate also about honouring their memory.

I count myself very lucky to have been involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement from the late 1960s onwards, and in making feminist music with many great women back then, as groups proliferated all over the place in many musical genres. Over subsequent years when we met we said to one another: we really must collect and document our music from that time, to ensure women’s achievements are not yet again ‘hidden from history’! We began dragging out stuff we had kept in boxes, in attics and under our beds, and, around the turn of the century, sorting it out, digitising some dusty old cassette tapes and talking seriously about what to do with it all.

In 2010 I went to the Women’s Library exhibition marking the fortieth anniversary of our first national WLM conference. It was great to see film of the London Women’s Street Theatre Group on the first International Women’s Day march through London in 1971, and a Spare Rib benefit poster featuring the band Spoilsports. I remarked to my old friend radical feminist Amanda Sebestyen – who I’m delighted is here this evening – that I’d like to see more about political-cultural activism, especially music, and felt an increasing urgency to write about this aspect of our movement which could otherwise could be marginalised or unknown. Amanda put Debi Withers in touch with me, knowing she was keen to research and archive this material. She and I began the work which has born fruit in this exhibition curated by Debi, and the Women’s Liberation Music Archive on which it is based. The online archive has grown since its launch in May 2011, with over fortyone thousand hits to date, and the physical collection of artefacts will be housed by the Feminist Archive South in Bristol.

While spending many months on the computer searching out contacts and networking, tracking down women I’d lost touch with for decades, and uploading masses of stuff to the website, it was moving from the outset to find the generous responses from huge numbers of women contacted by Debi and myself. In a very real sense it’s their archive and I am very glad we were able to facilitate it. They loaned and donated music, films, photos, lyrics, tickets, posters, hand-written set lists and some wrote personal pieces specially for us – women such as Frankie Armstrong, Rix Pyke from Clapperclaw, Paddy Tanton from the Lizzy Smith Band, who it is also wonderful to see here tonight. They made this archive possible through both their support now and (often unpaid) hard work decades ago.

Now, most of what we fought against then continues to rear its ugly head. Domestic and sexual violence; pornography; prostitution; trafficking of women and children; religious fundamentalism; the racist and xenophobic legacy of imperialism; Thatcher’s legacy of privatisation by avaricious capitalism that siphons off wealth away from the common good to the super-rich elite; right-wing attacks on working class and disabled people, savaging the welfare state and NHS, cutting essential benefits and resources with the ensuing deliberate impoverishment affecting our hard-won reproductive rights, incomes, housing, employment, childcare … patriarchy and heterosexism oppressing women in myriad ways around the world, through all the systems that view women as commodities and chattels, manifesting the same misogynist and male supremacist agenda.

Believe it or not, I am actually known as someone who looks on the bright side! Which is that: always and everywhere, women resist! Our resistance to oppression takes many forms. It springs up whenever we are downtrodden, sold, beaten, exploited and denied our human rights. We organise and fight back, we campaign and create solidarity, all over the world. Progressive cultural activism is part of this struggle. Opponents of justice and freedom know this, whether instigating the destruction of arts funding and education here, the Taliban banning music, or the jailing of Pussy Riot. I have always been inspired by political culture, by people like Chilean Victor Jara or Palestinian Reem Kelani, who know the split between political activism and culture is a false one. Nor are the arts an add-on or luxury. ‘Music is the spirit, music is life,’ said jazz legends Mary Maria Parks and Albert Ayler: ‘Music is the healing force of the universe.’

That was why I got involved in music in the 1970s and why I now want to let people know what we were about in Women’s Liberation. We wanted regime change; same as now. Not simply equality within an unjust world. At our most radical we were internationalist, anarchic, wanting revolutionary change. Our music and art and books and pamphlets and films and theatre and photography and poetry and posters and magazines and dancing and events were part of that. The sounds and songs we made voiced our passions and rage, humour and joy, demands and dreams, manifestos and hopes for a transformation of the world.

The Women’s Liberation Music Archive is valued by many people as an idea whose time has come. It will continue to grow and develop and hopefully be a useful resource – a testimony to feminist creativity and autonomy.

For as long as the world still needs it, may the struggle for women’s liberation flourish and prevail!’ 

Exhibition runs: 1 Dec – 13 Jan 

Thursday- Sunday 12-6.00 pm

The gallery is closed from 17 December – 9 January and will open again for the last weekend of Music & Liberation on 10 January.

EVENTS/OPENING: 30 November 

6.00-8.30 pm – All Welcome

Legendary folk singer Frankie Armstrong will sing a few songs and Jude Alderson, founder of cult performance act the Sadista Sisters will share her memories.

The talk by Jude begins at 6pm sharp so please get there early if you don’t want to miss it!

There will be tea, wine, nibbles, fizzy water and all the usual consumables.

8 December

The inaugural Queer Zine Fest London, 12-7pm. With its own programme of talks and DJ’s

8 December- 13 January

An exhibition of posters from Melanie Maddison’s Shape & Situate fanzine of inspirational women.

Closing Events – 13 January

2.00 – 3.30pm

A conversation between Barby Asante, founder of the South London Black Music Archive, and exhibition curator Deborah Withers about community memories, generational transmission and music. Chaired by Tom Perchard, author of Lee Morgan – His Life, Music and Culture.

4-5pm 

Film showing of a documentary about The Gluts, who are comprised of Hayley Newman, Gina Birch and Kaffe Matthews. ‘The Gluts resist the current dismantling of culture and our welfare state – market-led solutions, corporate greed, millionaire government types, capitalism and their roles within climate change and its ongoing effect on our world and people. We want life, not death: education not poverty: fulfillment not oppression. We want libraries with books in them, a healthy health service and a global commons for everyone to share and enjoy, now and in the future!’

The film will be followed by a Q & A, and the showing of Gluts’ pop videos.

The Glasgow Women’s Library is a partially accessible venue. For information about access arrangements to Glasgow Women’s Library, please contact them on 0141 248 9969, info@womenslibrary.org.uk. An RNIB Penfriend will be available at the exhibition to facilitate access for visually impaired visitors.

The exhibition opening is celebrated by the Sirensong Open Mic night, on Monday 29 October at 6pm-9pm. This event is free to attend and open to everyone, so come down and share a song, story or poem and have a look at the exhibition.

On Saturday 3 November there are also events inspired by the exhibition. 11am-12pm is the ‘Space for Song’ singing group. Whether feel you can sing or not, this is a safe space for you to try. This is followed at 1.30-3pm by a guided exhibition tour with the curator, ‘The Message was in the Music’. Come and hear in-depth stories about the artifacts, posters and music featured in the exhibition, and ask the curator questions about music in the Women’s Movement.

Featuring the work of Jam Today, the Northern Women’s Liberation Rock Band, Feminist Improvising Group, Ova, the Fabulous Dirt Sisters, Abandon Your Tutu, the Mistakes and many more, the exhibition brings together a diverse collection of women’s cultural heritage. Music & Liberation will inspire and inform contemporary audiences about the politics of music making.

The exhibition showcases rare ephemera and artefacts such as posters, songbooks, t-shirts, instruments and fliers. Visitors will be able to watch films, interact with installations, look at photos and, of course, listen to music. This is a unique opportunity to listen to unreleased recordings of practices, live performances and studio tracks from women musicians yet to be discovered by contemporary audiences.

Ten oral histories, which have been collected especially for the project, will also be available to listen to and watch. Music & Liberation: A Compilation of Music from the Women’s Liberation Movement will be sold at the exhibition.

The exhibition is touring throughout the UK and its second stop is Manchester from 1-14 October. Hosted by the well established Bureau Gallery at a special ‘off-site’ venue, Three Piccadilly Place, just minutes from Piccadilly Train Station, it will be open from 12pm-6pm daily. The venue is wheelchair accessible and an RNIB Penfriend will be available to facilitate access for visually impaired visitors

The exhibition site also features IMPRINT, a women’s arts festival that focuses on the work of experimental, feminist, cross platform artists. Co-hosted between Manchester and Newcastle, artists featured in the festival include Maggie Nicols, Tereza Buskova, Bunty, Caro Snatch, Bridget Haydn, Aby Vuillamy, Hannabiell, Joanne Tatham, Bela Emerson and Music for One, and many other established musicians, film makers, photographers and visual artists. IMPRINT events take place from 4-7 October, please check the website for full scheduling.

The closing of the exhibition on Sunday 14 October will be marked by a day of discussions about women and alternative music. Featuring women who played in bands featured in the exhibition, such as the Northern Women’s Liberation Rock Band, authors from the recently published book Women Make Noise and cult zinester Karren Ablaze. The event is free today attend and takes place from 11.30-5pm. Full details of the programme are on the website.

Music & Liberation is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. It is based on the Women’s Liberation Music Archive an online archive launched in May 2011 by Frankie Green and Dr Deborah Withers.

Music & Liberation: Women’s Liberation Music Making in the UK, 1970-1989 shows how feminists used music as an activist tool to entertain and empower women during the 1970s and 1980s.

Featuring the work of Jam Today, the Northern Women’s Liberation Rock Band, Feminist Improvising Group, Ova, the Fabulous Dirt Sisters, Abandon Your Tutu, the Mistakes and many others, the exhibition brings together a diverse collection of women’s cultural heritage. 

The exhibition will be touring to the following venues:

·      9-25 September, Butetown History & Arts Centre, 4 Dock Chambers, Cardiff, CF10 5AG

·      1-14 October, Bureau ‘off-site’, Three Piccadilly Place, Manchester. M1 3BN

·      29 October–24 November, Glasgow Women’s Library, 15 Berkeley Street, Glasgow G3 7BW

·      30 November-13 January 2013, Space Station Sixty Five, Building One, 373 Kennington  Road, London SE11 4PS

All venues except the Glasgow Women’s Library* are wheelchair accessible, and an RNIB Penfriend will be available to facilitate access for visually impaired visitors.

*For information about access arrangements to Glasgow Women’s Library, please contact them on 0141 248 9969, info@womenslibrary.org.uk

The exhibition showcases rare ephemera and artefacts such as posters, songbooks, t-shirts, instruments and fliers. Visitors will be able to watch films, interact with installations, look at photos and, of course, listen to music. This is a unique opportunity to listen to unreleased recordings of practices, live performances and studio tracks from women musicians yet to be discovered by contemporary audiences.

Ten oral histories, which have been collected especially for the project, will also be available to listen to and watch.

Music & Liberation: A Compilation of Music from the Women’s Liberation  Movement will be sold at the exhibition.

A series of events will accompany Music & Liberation, including participating in IMPRINT, an experimental women’s art festival taking place in Manchester and Newcastle in October.

Please check the website and twitter for further details of all events and project updates.

The opening event is an afternoon tea party on Sunday, 9 September at the Butetown History & Arts Centre, Cardiff, 2-4pm. There will be film showings and a guided tour of the exhibition.

Music & Liberation is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. It is based on theWomen’s Liberation Music Archive, an online blog archive launched in May 2011 by Frankie Green and Dr Deborah Withers.

Download the Press Release

]]> http://womensliberationmusicarchive.co.uk/2012/08/12/against-patriarchy-authoritarianism-for-feminism-secularism-justice/feed/ 0 wlmmusicarchiveuk FREEDOM FOR PUSSY RIOT http://womensliberationmusicarchive.co.uk/2012/05/01/may-day-greetings-on-the-first-anniversary-of-the-archive/ http://womensliberationmusicarchive.co.uk/2012/05/01/may-day-greetings-on-the-first-anniversary-of-the-archive/#comments Tue, 01 May 2012 09:18:32 +0000 wlmmusicarchiveuk http://womensliberationmusicarchive.wordpress.com/?p=2547 Continue reading →]]> Welcome to the Women’s Liberation Music Archive! One year on from the launch of the site on May 1^st, 2011, we thought visitors might like an update on how the project is doing. If you haven’t visited the site previously, we hope you find it interesting.

Firstly, we’d like to say a big ‘thank you!’ to everyone who has made the development of the archive possible by sending material to the collection in the past year, or sent us much-appreciated comments. We’re happy to say the archive is gradually expanding with new and developing entries – please check out the ‘What’s new in the archive?’ page for details. We are grateful for all the feedback we’ve had and pleased that the archive has had thirty thousand visits from all around the world. The WLMA is now archived for preservation in the British Library’s special collection on women’s issues.

Publicity We’ve had some publicity for the archive this year – e.g., from the Guardian music critic, Alexis Petridis – and are happy to get more: if you would like to help with spreading the word, let us know – we can supply our flyers for your gigs, etc.

The WLMA has recently joined Twitter. We will use it to direct people to content in the blog, network and publicise events, so please consider following us @WLMA_1

Don’t forget you can advertise your gigs, music releases, etc, on our ‘Events’ page, which gets lots of visits.

Donating material and helping the site grow Our intention now is to carry on growing the project, to fill in existing gaps and create more entries. We also hope to widen our contacts to enable the archive to be more representative.

If you have digitised material you’d like to donate to the archive, do let us know. If you have something you would like to exhibit in the forthcoming Music & Liberation exhibition, please send this to Debi by July 2012. You can contact her at exhibition@hammeronpress.net

In March 2013 some of the material collected for the exhibition and the archive will be deposited in the Glasgow Women’s Library, so please do consider sending us physical artefacts for inclusion by January 2013.

Access for visually impaired people We regret that progress on improving access for visually impaired visitors to the site has progressed more slowly than we hoped. Due to lack of funds and technological expertise we began by using a free site, which, we discovered, was not amenable to widgets necessary for good access. We have made changes to the site such as changing the fonts to sans serif and adding descriptions of images in Alt Text for Screen Readers. We are working on better ways of providing access to the music tracks and plan to improve this further. We welcome people who have relevant expertise to get in touch if they can help with this and, as with other aspects of the site, any feedback and advice on this issue is always welcome.

Exhibition: Music & Liberation An exciting piece of news is that in January Debi heard that her application for Heritage Lottery Funding has been successful. The funds will be spent on making a touring exhibition, Music and Liberation, which draws on the histories in the WLMA. The exhibition will tour the UK later this year at these venues: Butetown History & Arts Centre, Cardiff 9 – 25 September 2012; Bureau Gallery, Manchester, 27 September – 25 October 2012; Glasgow Women’s Library, 29 October – 26 November 2012; Space Station Sixty-Five, London 30 Nov – 13 Jan 2013.

The HLF grant will pay for the high quality digitisation of audio and audio-visual material, including live performances, studio recordings, practices and TV appearances of Women’s Liberation music makers. A CD album of music included in Music & Liberation will be produced, and ten new oral histories collected. The music, films and oral histories will be available to watch and listen to at the exhibition. Ephemera and artefacts such as posters, songbooks, t-shirts, instruments and fliers will also be displayed. There will be a number of events that will take place as part of the exhibition, so we will keep you posted! If you live near Cardiff, Manchester, Glasgow or London and want to take part, please get in touch. So far Debi has recorded oral histories with Jam Today 3, the York Street Band, Maggie Nicols, Deirdre Cartwright, Barbara Stretch, Caroline Gilfillan, Angie Libman, Jana Runnals, Alison Rayner and Ruth Novaczek. Excerpts from the interviews will be placed in the archive site so please keep checking back to hear people’s stories and see what new material has been added.

*

Thanks for visiting – do get in touch with us with your ideas, information and feedback! Email us at wlmmusicarchive@gmail.com

We hope this site will be a useful and interesting resource. We have promises of more material to come and are looking forward to that. This is an open-ended project and we will continue to add material as and when we receive it – so if you haven’t yet sent us info but would like to, no problem! The archive has always been seen as a work-in-progress and once the process of networking, gathering material and mapping women’s music during the 1970s and 80s began, we realized how much there is to document, and that this is – hopefully – just the beginning!

How to navigate your way around the site: information about bands, musicians and musical projects is gathered under names listed alphabetically on the A – Z pages above. You will also see, on the right of the screen, under the heading ‘blogroll’, a list of relevant websites about women’s ongoing music-making, feminist activism and other archiving projects, enabling you to follow up information found in the main pages. The ‘search’ field will direct you to all pages featuring the object of your search. You can read more about the project’s aims and scope on the ‘About the archive’ page.

As you will see, there is quite a lot of info on some musicians, bands and projects and little or none for others. Please help the archive to grow and to fill the gaps! Feel free to leave a comment on the blog. All support in achieving the aim of creating an archive which will be as comprehensive and inclusive as possible is much appreciated. We welcome personal stories, photos, anecdotes, memorabilia – and, especially, of course, audio/visual material.

We will post regular updates here on the home page to let you know about new material as it’s added. Please contact us for any further info, to provide feedback and to send us material you feel should be included.

Many thanks again to everyone who has encouraged and enabled this project to get underway.

‘Women have always been told to look nice, work behind the scenes and shut up. Quite rightly, women have disobeyed. We’ve grouped together, created music, written lyrics, sung, recorded, performed, organised and showcased our talent in our own way for as long as we have existed – which is forever. Our music is political because our visibility is political, our strength is political and our unity is political. Official records have written it out of history. Music mags, radio shows, Best Of lists, festivals, popular history, newspapers and many awards shows have ignored or marginalised the enormous contribution women and feminism have made to music at all levels and in all genres in one massive act of erasure. The truth is that feminism has changed the world and is changing the world. The Women’s Liberation Music Archive celebrates and restores its rightful place in culture. And it’s freaking cool.’ ~ Bidisha

‘This is an invaluable record of how, in the early days of the Women’s Liberation Movement,  the message was in the music as much as in the spoken and written word.‘~ Sheila Rowbotham

Feminist music-making from the 1970s and 80s

Press release for 1^st May, 2011

 An exciting new online resource is launched today: the Women’s Liberation Movement Music Archive, at http://womensliberationmusicarchive.wordpress.com

This project documents the bands, musicians and musical projects that were part of, or influenced by, the great burgeoning of cultural creativity generated by the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) of the 1970s and 80s.

During this era, women’s music, film and theatre groups, visual art, literature, performance art, street theatre and other activities proliferated, fusing artistic activities with politics to develop and express feminist ideas. Feminist bands and musicians were not solely about providing great entertainment but embodied a world-changing commitment to putting politics into practice and advancing women’s rights. Challenging sexism and stereotyped gender roles, their lyrics and style reflected the values of the WLM. They were a vital and integral part of the movement, yet are often omitted from or marginalised by the media and historical accounts. Many operated outside the commercial mainstream or alternative circuits – or indeed were oppositional to them – and are not widely known about. Most were self-funded, grassroots groups who worked on a shoestring and many were unable to create lasting material.

Concerned that this part of women’s history is at risk of being lost, Archive Co-ordinators Dr Deborah Withers and Frankie Green believe the achievements of these music-makers should be mapped and celebrated. This work-in-progress collection comprises testimonies and interviews, discographies, gigographies and memorabilia including photographs, videos, recordings, flyers, press clippings and posters, plus links to ongoing women’s music-making and feminist activism. The project is an independent, voluntary and (as yet) unfunded venture. Funding possibilities and a safe eventual home for the physical archive are being investigated.

All women who were involved in women’s music – as solo artists, in bands, as DJs, MCs, in distribution networks, recording studios, photographers, journalists, events organisers, etc – are invited to contact and contribute to the project.

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT wlmmusicarchive@gmail.com

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