Wind of change? Just 19% of children learning bass and electric guitar are female. Photograph: Corbis
It was a moment pitched somewhere between indignation and red-hot embarrassment. I was 13 and sitting in the back room of a north London guitar shop, thwacking out the bassline to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit on the Fender Squier bass guitar that was about to constitute three years' worth of Christmas and birthday presents.
"What," a male voice said from the shop-floor, "is that noise?"
"That," another unidentified man replied, "is some girl who thinks she can play the bass."
I wasn't offended by their disparagement of my playing - I was, and never stopped being, seriously amateur - but the idea that a girl picking up a bass guitar was roughly equivalent to a dog walking on its hind legs chilled me to the core. And yet those men had a point: girls learning guitar are few and far between. As a study of school music classes published yesterday by the International Journal of Music Education indicates, just 19% of the schoolchildren currently learning bass or electric guitar are female.
I can understand why girls are put off. Deciding to learn the guitar is to step into a world inhabited by unbelievably nerdy men obsessed with the size of their Stratocasters, men distinctly mistrustful of the infiltration of women into a club founded on unchannelled testosterone and endless discussions of slap-bass versus plectrum-plucking.
Every time I stepped into a guitar shop for a new strap or strings - something seemed to get broken after almost every gig I played with my all-girl band - I would have to face down the most patronising of stares from shop assistants asking if I was quite sure I could string my guitar all by myself (the answer, in a strained half-shout, was "YES!").
Better that, however, than wasting my time with the flute (89% of the current students of which are female, according to the survey), an instrument from which I had tried, and failed, to evince a note. Neither did I much fancy the harp, of which girls currently make up 90% of students. OK, it looked elegant and feminine, all curves and gold-leaf, but I couldn't see it working with our band's punk-rock aesthetic. Oh, and it wasn't on offer at my comprehensive school (who are all these schoolgirls whose parents have the money to learn an instrument costing about as much as a small house?).
No, it was the bass for me - although the too-male world of rock didn't exactly abound with female role models (and still doesn't). My enthusisam was driven by D'arcy Wretzky, the fantastically glamorous bass guitarist with the Smashing Pumpkins, and Annie Holland, Elastica's floppy-haired bassist (other top female bassists? Please enlighten me).
They, and others like them, proved that women in rock could do more than sing and look pretty (although they were also very good at the latter). Yet a generalised mistrust persists today, among both music journalists and fans, of the idea that women can actually play their instruments. Each time a new girl-band emerges, this fact tends to be flagged up in a way that would never happen if they were male ("Ooh, look! They're female! And they can actually play!").
The only way for women to face down this unacceptable musical sexism is to play the instruments they want to. Schoolgirls of Britain, unite: put down that flute, set aside that violin, and pick up a bass. Your country needs you.
