'Vagenda: A Zero Tolerance Guide To The Media'

The enthusiasm of Vagenda creators Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter cannot be denied. I’ve heard these women speak, and the passion for their favoured topic of pointing out the stupidity of the women’s magazine market is rampant. But after reading a whole book in ‘Vagenda-speak’ (ie shouty hyperbole, gleeful and self-referential yoof phrases, and droll asides) I felt both exhausted and old (I’m only 36).

On every level, I agree with their points that the women’s magazine industry is an advertising-led, manipulative, contradictory, shallow and deceitful one. And I say this as someone who spent most of her 20s working for a lot of the magazines ripped to shreds in the Vagenda book, and recognising pretty much every stereotyped media character brought to life in its pages.

But even though this was a book I agreed with and supported the stance of, I was left feeling deadened – not by the force of Cosslett and Baxter’s arguments, but by the volume of their language. While I appreciate every writer needs to have a voice, I think there’s a distinction between being overly chummy and between good writing practice. More importantly, I think the tone and language used in a short blog post needs to be tempered for a full-length non-fiction book.

Maybe I’m showing my age, but I don’t think I’m that much older than the authors. However, the Vagenda book wasn’t speaking to me. It was speaking about a culture I worked in until recently, and an industry I still buy into (heck yes, I know women’s magazines are evil but I still something trashy to read in the bath, but please don’t make me feel bad about that, Vagenda ladies), but I couldn’t get my head around the volume of noise coming off the printed page.

Perhaps a little more time in an editor’s hands would have helped, but as it is, sadly the Vagenda book reads like one that was rushed out to cash in on a successful blog and a pleasantly buoyant demand for young feminist literature. But at the risk of sounding like an old-fashioned school report, Cosslett and Baxter are capable of producing a much better book than this.

Lynn Barber - 'A Curious Career'

If you loved the book and/or film of Lynn Barber’s previous memoir An Education, then you definitely need to read her frank and funny memoir A Curious Career, recounting many of the high profile interviewees she has encountered in her relentless career for the broadsheets.

In An Education, we encountered teenage Lynn being seduced by a conman whose dominance threatened to ruin her life. But we also encountered a fiercely intelligent and feisty young woman who walked away from that situation determined never to be taken advantage of again.

A Curious Career doesn’t quite pick up where An Education left off, but it does join Lynn in the late 1960s when she starts working for Penthouse magazine and lands a plum gig interviewing Salvador Dali at his home. Discovering she has quite the talent for putting celebrities at their ease, and playing up to her own inherent nosiness, Lynn rapidly progresses to interviewing for the big titles in the UK, ultimately ending up in the rare position of being able to pick and choose her subjects. An almost unheard of luxury for a journalist these days.

What Lynn really does well in A Curious Career is spill the beans on who was naughty (Marianne Faithfull, Martin Clunes) and who was nice (Shane McGowan stands out in a league of his own). As well as discovering how hideous sportspeople are to interview – I can thankfully say in that in 15+ years of being a journalist, I have managed to avoid ever having to interview a sportsperson: and can’t imagine a more boring subject!

As you’d expect from the woman dubbed The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Lynn doesn’t hold back on the gossip and the facts about those she met who were despicable people, and that makes A Curious Career all the more delicious to read. Coupled with the fact you also get the impression Lynn is giving a pretty fair impression of them and their behaviour, you feel as if you’re reading the notes of a woman who really doesn’t give a toss if their lawyers complain.

And what a fantastic position to be in that is.

Lynn Barber is in Bristol on Thursday, May 15, talking about A Curious Career at the Festival of Ideas. Please click here for more information.

'Death & Treason, Rhyme & Reason' at Bristol Old Vic

A few years ago, Bristol Old Vic hosted a family show called Hey Diddle Diddle in which the characters from beloved nursery rhymes are set free. Well, in Death & Treason, Rhyme & Reason the same company (Twisted Theatre) takes those same characters one step further in what can best be described as the very opposite of a family friendly show.

Many people know that the Ring A Ring O’ Roses rhyme was inspired by the millions of grisly deaths at the hands of the plague, but did you also know that Mary, Mary Quite Contrary was about the troubled reign of Mary Queen of Scots and her inability to produce an heir? Or that Pop Goes The Weasel is apparently about the deaths of the working classes from poverty-induced hunger?

In Death & Treason you revisit these well-known characters from your childhood, but they’re not looking quite so rosy cheeked or blooming as they did when you sang their stories in nursery school. The origins of nursery rhymes are in dispute and there are no definite answers, but the Twisted Theatre group brings to life some of the suggestions and sets them to a brand new score of heyday nightclub music (with a backing band of violin, viola, cello and many types of percussion).

Led by enigmatic Australian Nuala Honan, the group engages in a playfulness and interaction that, while clearly very scripted and rehearsed, is reminiscent of the abandoned glee of the nursery school… with an added delightful darkness. The recurring refrain of “dead eyes see for seven seconds” has the brilliant coda of Nuala’s eyes maniacally spinning around her sockets like a demented Victorian doll.

The Brizzle version of the Jack and Jill rhyme is a highlight… recounting Jack’s cider-induced seduction of Jill in the apple orchard via the medium of spoken text messages and SMS slang. The death of Jack in the original rhyme bears a more poignant meaning in the Twisted Theatre version… with calamitous repercussions for poor Jill. And while on face value the Brizzle tones could be thought to play to the Bristol Old Vic audience, one version of the origins of the story refer to it being inspired by the 1697 events in a Somerset village when a local spinster becomes pregnant after her amour falls down a hill and dies after smashing his head on a rock… and her own subsequent death in childbirth. It’s all a lot less jolly than you thought it was, eh?

It’s fun trying to work out which original nursery rhymes the Twisted Theatre versions are playing to, and in some cases I couldn’t figure it out. So it would have been good to have a signpost in the narrative to help locate the new songs in memory and time. Because of this confusion, it felt like we were at times presented with a formless collection of enjoyable sleazy music and performances, but one that was somewhat dislocated due to not having the context in which to put them.

But ultimately? Death & Treason is silly, but it’s fun.

Death & Treason, Rhyme & Reason is performed at the Bristol Old Vic until 10 May. For more info, please click here. The show is also touring around the South West in September and October. For more info, please click here.

Sarah Records - "We were opposed to the sexism of the music industry"

Outside the Arnolfini, Bristol - May 3, 2014 

There was so much interest in the Sarah Records retrospective in Bristol last weekend that it sold out far in advance, leaving fans clamouring for tickets. The afternoon talk with label founders Matt and Clare was moved to a bigger events space to accommodate the growing demand until the auditorium was packed out. And all this enthusiasm for a label dismissed as twee at the time. Incorrectly so considering Sarah’s political leanings, feminist inception and anti-capitalist philosophy.

Sarah Records ran in Bristol from 1987-1995 and thrived in a society that was celebrating the emergence of the ‘lad culture’ of bands like Oasis, the grunge guitars of Nirvana, where women were treated like decorations and feminism was as unfashionable as it’s ever been. Which makes it all the more fantastic that Matt and Clare of Sarah stood their ground and did things exactly as they wanted to.

Back then, the music press tended to ignore anything that didn’t happen in London, meaning the best way to find out about exciting new bands from the rest of the country was to read fanzines (an early form of social networking), which were sold by their writers at gigs and posted out across the country and wider world. Many of those fanzine writers then formed lasting friendships, united by a shared love of music.

Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes at Arnolfini, Bristol - May 3, 2014

Matt and Clare started out as fanzine writers, who met after Clare tried to sell Matt her fanzine at a Primal Scream gig in the Bierkeller. Before long, even though she was still at university, the pair had launched Sarah Records as a two fingered salute to the money-grabbing major labels that just wanted to rip fans off rather than celebrate great pop music.

Matt says, with his tongue in his cheek: “The label was in opposition to the capitalism of multi format releases on the major labels. We were an anti-capitalist business, changing the world through the power of the 7” single. CDs in 1987 were £15, and major labels wanted everyone to re-buy their record collections. While 7”s were £1.50, so they were accessible and affordable.”

It was so affordable that in the mid-1980s you could put out a fanzine with a two-track flexi disc on the cover priced at 50p and still break even. “It was part of the post punk DIY ethos,” says Matt simply. And even now, in an era of illegal downloads and online marketing, Matt still thinks there’s no need for bands to sign to the majors: “I don’t see why any band now needs a record label, unless they’re going to invest millions in you. You can do it all yourself.” Although Clare adds that a website doesn’t have the same personal touch that Sarah offered with their hand-folded sleeves, personally written letters to purchasers and the postcards inserted into the records.

Sarah posters inside Arnolfini, Bristol - May 3, 2014

And the pair really did do everything themselves – famously they ran the label initially from their basement bedsit in Bristol’s Clifton, where they didn’t even have a telephone. And later from a house on Windmill Hill overlooking Bedminster train station. To start with, they didn’t even have a car! “We used to pick up 7”s from the distributor Revolver in a taxi,” remembers Matt, “then bring them home, put them in wraparound sleeves, add in the posters and postcards, and take them back to Revolver in a taxi.” 

Everything that could be done themselves, was done themselves, even if it took five times as long, because it was the only way to keep costs down. But as Matt adds, things changed quickly in the eight years of Sarah: “When we started in 1987, you’d take the record to the distributor on the Thursday and it’d be in the shops on the Monday. By the time we ended in 1995, there was a three month lead in for each release.”

Sarah 58 (aka The Hit Parade) at Arnolfini, Bristol - May 3, 2014

Matt and Clare insist they never intended to cause provocation by calling the label Sarah, and they chose the name with pretty much no discussion. “I’d just been reading Emma by Jane Austen,” says Clare, “and thought that if you could call a book Emma, you could call a record label Sarah. And Matt just agreed.”

But they really did rankle the mainstream music press, who hurled abuse and venom at the label with delight. Although perhaps this was less aimed at the music press’ dislike of the music, than their distaste for the labels’ founders who made it quite clear that they disliked the music papers! Clare says now: “You like to hope that some of the journalists might now be a bit embarrassed about some of the things they wrote about us. We never thought calling a label Sarah was a provocative thing to do. But we got a lot of patronising comments for doing it.”

One thing that fascinated me, was learning that when they launched the label in 1987, Matt signed on to the Enterprise Allowance Scheme where the government dished out £40 per week to help new businesses. This interested me because in 2013, I signed on to the New Enterprise Allowance Scheme… where my new business received £65 per week (that’s a rise of 62.5% in 26 years – which sounds a lot, but not when you consider that inflation overall has risen by more than 140% in that time). Anyway, I digress.

Amelia, Rob and Pete (formerly of Heavenly) at Arnolfini, Bristol - May 3, 2014

The feminism of Sarah Records was lost on many people, yet it was one of the inciting reasons for founding the label. At the time, Sarah was one of very few labels to have a woman as its co-owner. And even now, 25 years later, there are still hardly any record labels run by women.

Clare says: “We were opposed to the sexism of the music industry, we were a feminist record label. It got more important to us when we realised what we were up against. It feels like feminism is at the fore at the moment, which is great, but nothing has really changed. I feel like I’ve been whining about the same things for 20 years!”

But it was about more than just having a woman at the helm. At the time, fanzines and indie bands had a tradition of – when in doubt – dredging up an old cute photo of a 1960s’ girl in a miniskirt and putting this on their covers. Women were nothing more than decorations (which is still, of course, a big issue today).

As Matt says: “We came from an era when the girl in the band tended to be the boy in the band’s girlfriend. We avoided that at Sarah.” Clare adds: “My pet hate is women singing men’s lyrics, so we also avoided that as much as we could.”

But one recurring problem was with photographs. If a band had, say, five members and one of those five was a woman, the photographer would either want to put the woman in the middle of the picture, of foreground her while fading out the men in the background. Matt and Clare would repeatedly try to steer photographers way from this, which baffled them.

Both Matt and Clare make it clear that when they killed Sarah after 100 releases in 1995, that was it – they weren’t doing any encores. So there will be no deluxe box sets, no re-releases… nothing to make you spend money on what you already have. As Matt says: “A lot of the bands want their material available and it would be wrong of us to stop that happening, but we wanted the 100 records to be the end. So there will be no more Sarah records ever. But a lot of the stuff we released is available for download and that’s fine with us. It’s not important to have the 7”single 25 years later… it’s about the music not the product.”

The Orchids at Arnolfini, Bristol - May 3, 2014