My record collection is overwhelmingly male. My non-awaited second book, a kind of memoir through music, consists almost entirely of music by men. Perhaps, that’s because of the era I grew up in? I was brought up by a lone parent mum and she was pretty well the only woman I knew of who worked full-time. The other women I knew, neighbours, the mums of friends, relatives even, rarely worked and if they did it was usually part-time. Women relied on ‘pin money‘, handed to them by their husbands. My world – the whole world was not like this, I hasten to add – was a man’s world. And my first love, was music made by men.
All the music I got in the 1960s was made by men. There wasn’t a lot of it but the records I did get were by The Beatles and The Monkees. I suspect I didn’t even realise women made music until I entered my teens. Hearing Carole King’s Tapestry in rock’s finest year, 1971, was revelatory for me. Then there was Motown, with the Supremes, Gladys Knight and Martha and the Vandellas. I discovered Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, and later Carly Simon and briefly the hard rocking all female band Fanny on the BBC’s legendary Old Grey Whistle Test. Women could make music, after all, and they could rock.
Even then, through the Deborah Harry Blondie years I was still buying and listening to male-dominated acts. After all, I knew what I liked, which in the 1970s was mainly American music and from the late 1970s bands like The Clash. My music tastes stood still in the 1980s as I properly discovered girls and obsessed equally deeply with football and I hardly bought anything, hardly listened to anything. In the late 1990s, that all changed and the childhood music obsession was back – and some. While I still loved the old stuff from The Beatles, Steely Dan, Doobie Brothers and the like, I was drawn in to part of the Cool Britannia era. especially Blur. My music collection remained steadfastly and overwhelmingly male but then, in 2002, along came BBC 6 Music.
I had found that there was no music station for me. I was way too old for Radio 1, as anyone over 24 should be, and way too young for Radio 2. Commercial radio was still confined to a handful of stations, churning out generic and formulaic adult-oriented music, like Queen, Bryan Adams, Lionel Ritchie and so on. I found I wanted to be challenged musically and so it came to be that 6 Music became my pathway to new forms of music (at least new to me) and included in the new forms included numerous female artists who I quickly discovered were at least as good as if not better than many of the male artists of the day.
Gradually, I came to love Laura Marling, Clean Bandit, Sleater-Kinney, Caroline Polachek, Cate Le Bon, Melody’s Echo Chamber, Avalon Emerson and my current absolute favourite artist, Australia’s Courtney Barnett. Slowly, but surely I started to listen to and then buy music regardless of whether it was by a male or female artist. I don’t know whether I had an unconscious bias against women musicians, but knowing what I know now, that seems likely. Like with previous generations, women had a certain role in the world. Women didn’t do the same things as men, like working, going to the pub, playing sport. The gender roles were defined by nothing other than the way things used to be. Now it turns out they can do all these things and they sure can play rock and roll, as Courtney Barnett demonstrated so wonderfully at last night’s BBC 6 Music festival. Click here to watch her performance.
Taking the sex out of music, so to speak, has greatly enhanced my listening experience. It’s not like positive discrimination has played a part in this. It’s just me, opening up (what’s left of) my brain to something new or at least something that’s new to me. And in my life, that’s an unusual state of affairs, as I often cling to the safe and familiar in my little world. The great Sheryl Crow once sang, A Change Will Do You Good. Thanks to brilliantly talented women like her, a change has done me good.
