"You must be the Singer of The Band"
...And other good reasons for Loud Women in music.
This past Thursday, I found myself drawn to the new episode of Song Exploder, by virtue of its title: “Shirley Manson on Siouxsie and the Banshees” in which the Garbage singer discussed her life-long love and idolization of Siouxsie Sioux, brought on as a 13-year-old by Siouxsie’s outsider status both aural and visual, of considerable appeal to a ginger-haired girl being bullied at school up in Edinburgh. It’s a great little episode (and Song Exploder keeps them suitably short), primarily because Manson is endearing, informative, modest and yet expletive-happy and absolutely unapologetic in her feminist nature. Right at the end of the podcast Manson, who will be 60 next year, she says this about Siouxsie’s influence:
“I also think it fueled my resistance through my career because without my fight, without my resistance, I wouldn’t have survived 30 years in the music industry, which is incredibly cruel to women. I mean, it’s cruel to absolutely everyone, but particularly to aging women.”
And then on Friday morning, I found myself reading the Slowpoke Substack’s second anniversary post in which author Becky noted early on how:
“Often when I comment about misogyny, whether in a direct, explicit manner or embedded within a rumination on art, I will get a small flurry of unsubscribes within minutes. I do find it disappointing that it’s so predictable, and I certainly never regret what I have written on those occasions. C’est la vie!”
I admire Becky’s positivity, but her experience brought home the legitimacy of Manson’s quote. We may think, us music types, that we have finally leveled the playing field, now that Chappell Roan (who I raved about here) and Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter are the biggest of pop stars, and half the great indie acts are female fronted, and we no longer judge female club DJs by their looks any more than we do the males, and we allow that nobody knows who is making electronic instrumental music until the artist(s) list(s) a gender, and at my end, I have frequently shared my appreciation for how the Rock Academy where I directed shows for seven years was at least 50% female and long ago disproved the blatant falsehood that women can’t rock as hard as the men.
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But clearly - evidently, based on the above quotations and further evidence we have at hand - we have not leveled the playing field. Progress is to be celebrated, but progress is not equity. How often do you see a woman mixing live sound? Or as an engineer in the recording studio, let alone as producer? Do women represent close to 50% of club DJ’s, of professional drummers, rock critics, A&R people, music executives?
No. And so, following on from some posts last year afterI realized that so much of the current music with cojones (I use the term consciously and with a humorous wink) was coming from the ladies/women/females, I am going to continue to shout out on behalf of Loud Women. I do so knowing that there is indeed, simultaneously, a crisis in which we are raising a generation of “Lost Boys,” something I feel within my own family. One issue does not negate the other; we should be capable as humans of celebrating and supporting all genders (including those who do not define according to society’s norms). Let’s get on with it!
First up, that episode of Song Exploder:
Next up, that Siouxsie & The Banshees song “Drop Dead/Celebration” that Manson references for being the musical epiphany of her life. It’s on the B-side to “Happy House” and though I bought the single in 1980, I had no recollection of the song until putting this post together. It is indeed, as Manson says in the pod above, “full of rage and terror and spite, all the things that women weren’t meant to display, impatience, disgust, fury,” as this home-made lyrics video makes clear from the off.
The new Garbage album Let All That We Imagine Be Light is great, btw – as with Morcheeba’s equally excellent new opus, I feel like I suddenly have a lot of catalogue catching up to do – and if you want reassurance that Manson is just as defiant on record as she is on that podcast, try “Chinese Fire Horse” on for size:
Now, to the wonderful Loud Women team, a core group of middle-aged women who have a band I, Doris, and who put on my fave gig of 2025 so far, and who run an excellent magazine-depth-of-a-website, which comes with the tagline “Putting more women on more stages, and turning up the volume.” Visiting the site for the purpose of this piece has introduced me to London’s brilliantly named Twat Union and their latest single, “Singer Of The Band,” the lyrics and video for which really help sum up what I was after with this post and have supplied the title late in the day. FYI, Twat Union are playing The Prince Albert in Brighton the night I am posting this (June 22) with that town’s own Shallow Honey in support, and should you be among the handful of readers on England’s south coast looking for something and somewhere to end your midsummer night’s weekend, I can only say that if the gig is half as entertaining and tuneful and raucous as the video, it will be worth the late night.
I’d actually visited the Loud Women site to read their interview with the super-young Hull trio WENCH!, who blew me (and everyone else in the audience) away at the Loud Women’s Hope & Anchor promotion in February that was such a salve for the soul. The interview, in advance of WENCH! Playing the Loud Women stage at the Rebellion Festival in Blackpool in early August, is here, and it contains this pin-up quote related to the festival at hand:
You’re playing the LOUD WOMEN stage this year. What would you say to someone who maybe doesn’t understand why we still need things like LOUD WOMEN?
We need organisations like LOUD WOMEN because as young AFAB people, we are sick of being treated like a novelty, we are tired of not feeling safe at gigs, we are tired of being harassed and sexually assaulted at gigs. AFAB, trans, and other queer people NEED representation, and they need to feel like they can play in a safe environment, with a community who accepts them. LOUD WOMEN is important because – not only do we fucking rock – but we are more than what’s between our legs. We weren’t made to just sit there and look pretty and be polite; we were made to make noise.
Amen to that, but a couple of necessary observations. You can look at the line-up of the Rebellion festival (below) and remark how far we have come in terms of women in bands, by virtue of the fact that almost none of the original punk/new wave/ska/retropunk bands on the bill featured a woman anywhere in their lineup. Or you can look at it and see how far we have yet to go for the fact that this festival still leans so predominantly male, and that the website does not even list the Loud Women stage on its line-up page! (What’s up with that?) Honestly, the Rebellion festival feels less rebellious than being a brothel-creepered greasy-haired Teddy Boy in 1977, and when there is SO MUCH great new music in the world, and SO MANY great bands coming up, I would not be able to abide attending this malarkey, even to see The Damned, whose live show is as good as anything out there.
Knowing the demographics of my readership, there may be a few among you who have already got your tickets, so, y’know, enjoy it for what it is, but see if you can’t get to check out the side stages for something a little more, y’know, relevant than the fucking Exploited. Or save your money for a Loud Women club gig, like their own mini festival coming up in Bristol on the same September weekend as their ten-hour extravaganza in London; both nights feature another group with a purposefully provocative name, The Menstrual Cramps, and while it would be an even more hilarious moniker if they were an all-female Cramps covers band, they are not. Though while on that subject, I so want to see Slady live, and will happily replay their joyous - and suitablyt LOUD - video of “Cum On Feel The Noize” until I can.
Next observation. When I wrote up that Hope & Anchor gig, I stated that WENCH! had yet to release music, and was subsequently corrected by Kit (the drummer, though the name be a coincidence) after posting the review. (Kit was born right up the road from where my mother had died only two weeks earlier; there was weird cosmic kismet about seeing WENCH! in London that night and deciding to have a chat with her afterwards.) So: ne song has made it into the world, it’s called “Shreds,” it dates back to October of last year, and I may be just pre-disposed to the comparison and influence today, but it sounds like Siouxsie & The Banshees deciding to vent their internal combustion engine by revving it up to overdrive rather than breaking up the band. But now I just have to double down: can we please have some new more recorded music from you soon, please? (WENCH!, that is, though Siouxsie is welcome to release some also if so inclined!)
Loud Women also host a radio show which goes out on Louder Than War radio as well as its primary outlet, the physical south London station Resonance Radio. I was pleased to see via the group’s own IG account that a recent show featured WENCH!’s younger sisters from another mother(lode), my home area’s own Mona Freaka. Three now ex-Rock Academy students I had the great pleasure of watching grow as people and musicians in front of me, they just released their second song, it’s called “Melancholy,” it’s a musical step above their consciously simplistic debut, and I have to apologize now if they’re reading that I won’t be at their (your) July 12th show either. (I will be on Staten Island where I attended my Top Gig of 2023.) But you rock and you know it and I can’t wait to watch you grow further.
Oh, and shoutout to MF front woman Roxy for posting an IG of herself in this t-shirt the week after the Presidential election in November, in which 77,000,000 people, including tens of millions of women, voted for a sex offender:
Talking of which, here are a couple of top pics from the Kingston No Kings protest last weekend, which I wrote about in advance. Our event was incredibly well attended, totally peaceful (there was one twat, it was a man), positive in nature, and succeeded in much piss-taking of the president with the small penis.
Now to throw back a couple of generations. We have all been, or certainly should have been, mourning the genius – and though the word should never be thrown around lightly, it applied here - that was Brian Wilson. During that process, I introduced my partner Paula to the biopic Love & Mercy, one of the better and more accurate in a highly flawed genre, and it was hard not to observe that that the entire music world was male back then, unless you were willing to be exploited as a singer by the likes of Phil Spector.1
Or, unless your name was Carole Kaye. The cool-as-f**k bassist (and guitarist) is legendary not just for being a lone lady in the LA men’s session world but for her contributions to some of the greatest recordings of all time, “Good Vibrations” among them. By coincidence unrelated to Brian Wilson, she is in the news this week for turning down, at the age of 90, induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Rather than summarize, I will do her the due honor of allowing her words, as shared on social media, to speak for themselves:
“People have been asking: NO I won’t be there……. I am declining the rrhof awards show (and denny tedesco process)…..turning it down because it wasn’t something that reflects the work that Studio Musicians do and did in the golden era of the 1960s Recording Hits…….. you are always part of a TEAM, not a solo artist at all….there were always 350-400 Studio Musicians (AFM Local 47 Hollywood) working in the busy 1960s, and called that ONLY ….since 1930s, I was never a ‘wrecker’ at all….that’s a terrible insulting name.
Just so you know, as a working Jazz musician (soloing jazz guitar work) in the 1950s working since 1949, I was accidentally asked to record records by producer Bumps Blackwell in 1957, got into recording good music, w/Sam Cooke, other artists and then accidentally placed on Fender Precision Bass mid 1963 when someone didn’t show…….I never played bass in my life but being an experienced recording guitarist, it was plain to see that 3 bass players hired to play “dum-de-dum” on record dates, wasn’t getting it…..it was easy for me to invent good bass line…..as a Jazz musician, you invent every note you play……and they used a lot of Jazz musicians (and former big-band experienced musicians on all those rock and pop dates too)………..I refuse to be part of a process that is something else rather than what I believe in, for others’ benefit and not reflecting on the truth – we all enjoyed working with EACH OTHER……..Thank-You for understanding. Carol Kaye”
Equally coincidentally to any of the above, only the last few weeks, spurred by someone I met in Kingston who took in-person bass lessons from Kaye, I had been surfing YouTube for examples of her technique. (Her archived web site which contains no less than 150 detailed bass-playing tips.) The process led me to an excellent long-form video interview, which is apparently only available for viewing on YouTube. So here’s a couple of pics of Carole at work in the mid-60s, and a link to “For Bass Players Only” which has its own lengthy interview with her here. And here is the YouTube link to the excellent interview I watched:
To be clear, as I hope we are, celebrating Loud Women does not mean it’s all about volume. I see the word Loud as an emotional descriptive; the loudness is in demanding to be heard in the first place. No reason then, not to shout out once more the Cloud Collecting Substack, which once a month offers a Women of Ambient round-up. The June one highlights a dozen said artists and provides Bandcamp links for all. A suitably quiet shout-out to the artists who named her project Buildings and Food.
I will also re-up my enthusiasm for Ms. Ezra Furman, whose full-band show at Rough Trade East on the eve of the FA Cup Final was the kind of unexpected treat you give yourself when in London on a Friday with nothing to do and no plans to stay out late. I have found myself frequently returning to the new album Goodbye Small Head, a CD of which was included with the show ticket, and was equally pleased that Paula also gravitated to it likewise when hearing it in the car on return from the Lake Placid marathon two weekends ago. So many great songs fitting so many moods, with raw emotion linked with powerful lyrics. Of the stellar set, let me offer you, as prime example, the highly poetic “Power of the Moon.”
In that second anniversary post of hers, Slowpoke’s Becky recommended all manner of new music herself, much of it noisy punky and largely masculine. But it was her one-line description of Kathryn Joseph as “angry Scottish lady with a piano collaborating with an electronic magician” that had the effect of sending me straight to listening to her recommendation. We Were Made Prey is an intriguing album, for sure, comprised of eleven songs with one-word titles (all in caps, which is SO 2025 and is not going to wear well) and I would question that Joseph sounds angry anywhere. On songs like the highly restrained “Deer,” she sounds pensive, inquisitive even, and I hear traces of Kate Bush as filtered through the myriad of contemporary home studio effects. Also, the “electronic magician” appears to be herself; there are no other credits that I can find.
Staying in the UK, but heading on down to London, the new Little Simz album, Lotus, is truly tremendous. File it under “hip-hop/rap” if you must (as did Qobuz, my streaming platform of choice for its superior sound quality and its promotion of varied music by form of articles, interviews and reviews), but while Simbiatu Akijawu certainly raps, Lotus pushes the landscape far beyond what we currently hear from at least 95% of American hip-hop. As with We Were Made Prey, every song is a one-word title (fortunately not in all-caps), and Simz is so confident at this point, that she can afford to put herself in the sonic background as early as second cut “Flood” – only to follow it with “Young,” which could almost be Lily Allen from two decades back in terms of vocal delivery, but is chockful of lovable lines (“I taught myself to sing, and I taught myself to shout, I taught myself how to get by and without”) and includes a vocal shoutout to Amy Winehouse. As the video for the song shows, below, Little Simz knows how to mix fun and funk, how to be serious without taking herself seriously, and her smorgasbord of musical and lyrical influences reminds me how refreshing The Streets sounded when first on the scene. The difference here is that Lotus is Little Simz’ sixth album already, and she only appears to be headed in one direction: forwards.
And I’d like to thank Qobuz for making Infinity Club II by “Jamaican Canadian electronic producer Bambii (Kirsten Azan)” its album of the week this June 20th and introducing me to a semi-established artist in the process. A properly mid-21st Century dancefloor update on dancehall, Infinity Club II calls to mind that the Jamaican genre was once all about the singer, with assumptions that the people behind the music would be male, especially in a Rastafarian world of gender delineations. In this case, it’s Azan behind the desk with various guest vocalists – from Wales’s Aluna to Chicago’s Ravyn Lanae to London’s MC Lady Lykes – all contributing to a remarkably varied mash-up of jungle/drum & bass, futuristic dancehall and subdued beats. Listen on Qobuz here or at your own streaming platform.
Because there is SO MUCH GOOD MUSIC it is of course natural to miss some. And sometimes the recommendation come from unexpected sources. Just Friday evening, at a retirement party for Paula, I got talking to the husband of another retired teacher who had been at my Smiths event of May 31st and had finished reading my R.E.M. book that same morning. Turns out he was right age – 65 now – and right place – Brooklyn – to be at the right time to see everyone back in the day, from The Ramones at what became or had been the 2001 Odyssey of Saturday Night Fever origin fame in Bensonhurst to The Smiths at Danceteria on their one-off visit at the end of 1983. It would have been easy to wax nostalgic all night but he suddenly switched gears, pivoting from a radio interviewer asking a Beatles biographer who might be the new John Lennon to lauding his own fave artist of the current day, Hurray For The Riff Raff, and asserting that the pseudonymous Alynda Segarram’s last album, The Past Is Still Alive, was his favorite record of 2024, and for many a good reason – that they continue the spirit of the folk music protest movement while sounding resolutely modern, unashamedly pronouncing their queerdom while kicking against the pricks. I had not heard it and promised to make amends. It is not yet 24 hours later but I have done my best, and I am grateful for the recommendation; it is clearly the work of an artist very much on top of their game. I invite you all to listen to it in entirety, but if you only have time for the one track, try “Colossus Of Roads” and be sure to digest the lyrics.
Finally, yet another shout-out to the thrice-weekly Substack newsletter Flow State and its recommendation of “music that’s perfect for working.” The editor(s) honored the US celebration of Juneteenth by pointing its reader-listeners to Florence Price, a Black woman of whom I am genuinely ashamed to say I was previously unaware. I thank Flow State for correcting that injustice and quote their bio summary below:
Born in Little Rock in 1887, Price started playing piano under the tutelage of her mother, a music teacher, and gave her first recital when she was four. She attended the New England Conservatory of Music, studying organ and piano, and moved to Chicago in the 1920s. There she composed her first symphony, in E Minor, which was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933, making her the first female African-American composer performed by a major orchestra in the United States. In 2009, a couple preparing to renovate a house in St. Anne, Illinois, discovered sheet music which turned out to be lost compositions by Price. Several of those compositions are performed by the Catalyst Quartet on their 2022 record, Uncovered, Vol. 2.
We therefore end this celebration of Loud Women on a musically quiet note, with Price’s Negro Folksongs in Counterpoint for String Quartet: No. 1, Go Down Moses. Moses.
(Hopefully, viewers were able to conclude for themselves that it nonetheless took a woman, Brian’s future wife Melinda Ledbetter, to stand up to Dr. Eugene Landy.)