Nothing made last night’s documentary Girl in a Band: Tales from the Rock’n’Roll Front Line’s point about sexism in the music industry as much as realising how strange it was to see the women interviewed by presenter Kate Mossman play guitar. Older women, most of them – from Carol Kaye, bassist on more than 10,000 recording sessions with everyone who was anyone from 1957 onwards, and June Millington of Fanny (look, it was an American band, ’kay?), to Lita Ford of the Runaways – which only added an extra layer of strangeness that spoke to an even wider sexism and threw in a dose of ageism awareness, too.
Kaye dealt with pricks by – well, calling them pricks and telling them to “fuck off” on her way to her next session with Ritchie Valens, Sinatra, Glen Campbell (according to decade). Tina Weymouth did a lot of driving, tea-making and sandwich-serving for Talking Heads in addition to her contribution as a bassist. Singer Elkie Brooks broke away from her ungenerous stage partner Robert Palmer and became successful in her own right. Viv Albertine and her bandmates in the Slits were attacked in the street – singer Ari Up was stabbed twice – but carried on uncompromisingly. The Runaways suffered at the hands of their manipulative manager Kim Fowley and others, though how much, Ford only discovered years later. “There were a couple of us who were violated … I wasn’t raped, but I didn’t know Jackie [Fox] was. Those are the things that actually make me sick. That shouldn’t have happened. Motherfuckers.”
The last bastion of male musical supremacy to fall was heavy metal. It fell to the all-female British band Girlschool when Motörhead invited them to be the support for their first British tour. They didn’t make any tea. “They brought us crates of Special Brew,” remembers singer and rhythm guitar player Kim McAuliffe with a grin.
We came up to the present day via New Order’s Gillian Gilbert, The Fall’s Brix Smith Start and Lush’s Miki Berenyi – who remembered being expected to be flattered when Alex from Blur bit her on the bum, to Savages’ French lead singer Jehnny Beth, who remembers having to graciously decline to get her tits out for the lads at a gig in Yorkshire. But it has only happened to her once. “So maybe,” she shrugged Gallically, “it’s just Bridlington.” Ah, progress! With such baby steps you totter towards our welcoming arms.
