Tag Archives: Fans

Claire, Hester, this one’s for you….

Media and Life, Teaching, , , , , , , , , ,

I just gave an inaugeral. The most terrifying and life affirming thing I’ve ever done at work. It was a room full of amazing people – I was blessed to have four generations of my family there and loved the opportunity to make my 89 year old mum and my 7 year old grandson all swear in unison.

 

There’s a recording coming at some point, but there are some things that I really want to share, in a written form, for those who might not be interested in the main body of the talk itself, but might be facing similar questions in their negotiation with the academic structures around us.

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How the fuck are we going to get through this shitstorm, intact, together, and without throwing each other under the bus? Who has got our back? and what can we learn from those who have negotiated the faultlines of the shitstorm before us?

Continue reading Claire, Hester, this one’s for you…. →

Indie Rock-a-Nore

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CW: Suicide

This post was originally commissioned by the CIRCY blog. Many thanks to Janet Boddy for all her support. I’m working to develop this into a broader project so thought I’d revisit it for a bit.

The Indie Rock-a Nore Festival was held on 21st October 2017 at the Hastings and St Leonards Angling Association.  It was “[a] one-day indie-pop festival (midday to midnight), bringing together current indie bands and those of yesteryear. Raising money for Brighton based suicide prevention charity, GrassRoots, who provide support across East Sussex (Charity Number: 1149873)”. Alongside the bands there was a raffle, a pool tournament and a buffet.  CIRCY made a small contribution to hosting costs, ensuring that all money taken on the door could go straight to the charity. Over £2500 was raised on the day.

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Viv Albertine’s pioneering women (and what happens when we meet our idols)

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*Guest post by Laura Cofield*

A moment of pure joy washed over me last Wednesday as I  watched my two favourite feminist icons sit on stage together and chat about pioneering women in music as part of The Odditorium series of events for Brighton Fringe Festival. Viv Albertine, writer, artist and guitarist of The Slits was invited to talk in conversation with Lucy about the women she had come to recognise as influential in her life. It was like ‘grasping at straws’ she described, born in the fifties and with so few women visible in the public eye, let alone pioneering in alternative and subculture.

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Your punk politics will be privileged, or it will be bullshit

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An assault on an all female band by a member of security staff at this weekend’s Undercover punk festival in Brighton has brought the online mansplainers and slut shamers out of the woodwork.  It also raised some issues that need to be resolved, some feel new, some are as old as punk itself. Can women make a new space in a scene and politicize it from within ?  Is there ever a way to reconcile the punk politics of the past, and the intersectional politics of the present?   Can we actively build a politics where race, gender, age and subcultural identity intersect ?– the answer, it seems to me, to all of these questions is the same; not really, no. Continue reading Your punk politics will be privileged, or it will be bullshit →

KISMIF: Process not subject – it’s the way that we rhyme

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I’ve just got back from the most mind-blowing conference I’ve ever been to.  Keep It Simple, Make It Fast, is a conference/music and literary festival/art show organised around DIY cultures, Spaces, Places.  Events were held across various venues in Porto, bringing together academic presentations, some celebrity guests, live performances, exhibitions with daily book launches and a summer school. The event is convened by Paula Guerra and Andy Bennett with an incredible team of international volunteers. I went with my Subcultures Network army (Matt Worley, Petes Webb and Ward, David Wilkinson and stayed in a seminary with the Punk Scholars Network and Steve Ignorant from Crass).

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Press Release: An Anthem for the People’s Republic of Brighton and Hove

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Contemporary historian Lucy Robinson has spent the last five year’s listening to, writing about and thinking about charity singles.  From Oxfam’s association with the Beatles in the 60s, to ‘Do they Know its Christmas?’ in all of its various incarnations, the charity single has turned fans into communities, and allowed over indulgent celebrities to show their caring side.  Now finally her work has come to life in a brand new charity single.  She has been volunteering her expertise as Minister for Nagging in the newly launched People’s Republic of Brighton and Hove.

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How many historians does it take to start a cover band?

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When we began the Brighton hub of Wellcome’s sexology and Song-writing project we imagined that the young women involved would undertake some sort of original research and then write songs about it. It quickly became clear that the young women participants and the youth work and music practitioners had some different priorities.  The practitioners wanted to concentrate on building a secure and supportive environment in which to build a collective group identity, and the young women wanted to sing songs that they already knew and liked.  The young sexology song-writers didn’t want to write songs.  They wanted to cover and recover them.  Once we recognised that the priorities of the practitioners and of the young women needed to be our priorities too, we moved towards their goals.  We weren’t training them to be researchers.  They were training us in their modes of re-enactment: an active and creative intervention in a cultural circuit that brought together the legitimacy of publicly celebrated singer-songwriters, with their own experiences and voices.

Continue reading How many historians does it take to start a cover band? →

#RIPZayn2K15 Thoughts on being The Hot One

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I’ve spent a lot of the last five years living with One Direction. For a while, most conversations with my daughter involved The Boys in some way and a life size Harry Styles greets you from the front window of my house.

The Boys have even joined us on a picket line. They opened up the chance for me to work academically with one of my favourite people in the world, documentary maker Daisy Asquith who made the Channel 4 documentary Crazy About One Direction. Between the two of them my daughter and Daisy have helped me connect my feminism with my love of fandoms.

I have a lot to thank The Boys for.

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Archive Grrrls: Scoping the Fales Library, NY

Media and Life, Subcultures, Teaching, , , , , , , , , , ,

Doctoral researcher Laura Cofield and I have just returned from a research trip to New York in order to scope the Riot Grrrl Archive in the Fales Library.  There are hundreds of different zines in the archive across 18 individual collections that cover the years 1974-2003.  The trip was funded by the Santander Mobility Fund and set up by Simone Robinson, Tracey Wallace and Paul Roberts from the Doctoral School at Sussex.

Laura’s in the first year of her doctoral research looking at the c20th and c21st history of pubic hair removal as a way into women’s experience of their bodies and the relationship between pornography and feminism. Laura and I were totally inspired by our visit. Everyone was incredibly helpful, going out of their way to help us, from Anthony on the desk at Gem hotel Soho who filled us in on a quick history of the queer politics of Wonder Woman, to Campbell the security guard at Fales who not only recommended where we should get lunch, he rang ahead and made sure we would get in, to Marvin Taylor the Fales Archivist who shared his prize acquisition of a set of homoerotic photographs from 1905 with us.  But to top it all off Steve Haugh was our Angel of New York and toured us round Manhattan in his beautiful Jag.

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Fan-Tastic at Sheffield Documentary Festival

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I was part of a panel discussion on fans and music documentary at this year’s Sheffield Documentary Festival.  The panel was organised by Emily Renshawe-Smith.  We discussed work by Daisy Asquith (Crazy About One Direction), and Nick Abrahams (The Posters Came from the Walls) and Jeanie Finlay Orion: The Man Who Would be King.  If you stick with it, you can hear me have a bit of a debate with the one and only Peter York.