In 1982, a group of women found their collective voice. “If I can strike, you can strike, she can strike, we can strike,” they sang during a performance in Plymouth, passing the chant like a baton as they performed playground rhythms on woodblock percussion. Calling themselves Lining Time, this assemblage of dance and theatre students arrived at their own understanding of music as creative expression.
Training in theatre language at the Dartington College of Arts had given the group a medium to tell their stories; injustices such as Thatcherite policies, the Falklands war and endemic violence against women compelled them. It was in this cultural moment of post-punk attitude and resurgent feminist movements that Lining Time – Claire Bushe, Cathy Frost, Lisa Halse, Cathy Josefowitz and Mara de Wit – came together.
“During our year in Plymouth we all lived and worked near the naval docks and I remember the constant harassment endured walking anywhere and at any time of the day,” Bushe recalls. “I remember the Reclaim the Night march. I was very anxious doing it even with so many women taking part. It took a lot of guts to walk through the centre of that city at night. There was jeering from groups of men as we marched and sang.”
Strike, Lining Time’s sole cassette of primal yet potent folk music and protest songs, drew influences from Françoise Hardy, Bob Dylan and flamenco along with improv, wordplay and choral elements, arriving at a remarkable sound that sits between their post-punk forebears the Raincoats and successors Life Without Buildings. “We played with no rules or conventions, adapting and adopting anything we liked or what made us laugh,” explains de Wit. The album was an adaptation of their shows, which were sequenced to tell a story – “how five different women reached their ‘Strike’ moment”, as de Wit puts it. Forty years after it faded into obscurity, it is being reissued as part of a retrospective on the late Josefowitz’s artistic career, and its resolute calls for bodily autonomy and queer liberation are as pertinent as ever.
Swiss-raised Josefowitz and Holland-born de Wit formed the musical core of the group, covering guitar, clarinet, drums, bells and more besides, while all members practised breath, voice and singing work. “[They] brought all that 70s European women’s confidence that I had never encountered before,” Bushe remembers of Josefowitz and de Wit. Radical outlooks and European influences found their way on to the album too, including covers of a French nursery rhyme and a track by 70s German women’s co-op rock band Flying Lesbians. There’s also an anti-war song attributed to Greenham Common women’s peace camp, a protest established in the early 80s that would play a key role in the movement for nuclear disarmament as well as women’s participation in UK activism. Of the track selection, says Halse, “the choice was always to be inclusive, supportive and broad, within our rather limited skill range.”
And Lining Time were more than just a band. Halse describes them as a “consciousness-raising” group collaborating artistically and to question beliefs and assumptions: “This is still an ongoing conversation. The personal is political.” Community-minded, they would take a cappella songs and rhythmic clapping and stomping from the project into the community, engaging groups such as travellers, visually impaired people and pregnant women through performance. “This lively singing was received well. [It was] infectious, instantly connecting to women’s and girls’ experiences,” says de Wit. “It was very dynamic and fun.”
Lining Time dissolved after that year in Plymouth. Moving to Wales, Josefowitz and de Wit continued to perform as Research and Navigation from 1983-88, to audiences such as care home residents. Beyond that, Josefowitz continued her career in the dramatic and visual arts, creating choreographic works and paintings exploring the body, self-expression and dance. Her works included cardboard marionettes of performing artists, skewed architectural sketches of stages, paintings of bodies contorted by motion and emotion and, towards the end of her life, a series of colourist abstractions eschewing bodies entirely. She died in 2014, her legacy stewarded by Les Amis de Cathy Josefowitz – the organisation that commissioned the archival release of Strike.
Halse, de Wit and Bushe all agree that society hasn’t progressed enough since Strike was recorded: Bushe ticks off issues such as violence against women and girls, pay disparity, incarceration, racism and a “pervasive cultural norm – white, male, het – restraining choices and opportunities”. Still, all three share an optimism in political art’s potential to challenge oppression. Even today, teaching drama in a specialist dyslexic school, Bushe uses music to help pupils find their voice and formulate ideas: “It unlocks their imaginations and connects with what they know.”
And all three believe in political art’s potential to challenge oppression. “You don’t have to have global solutions, but share and reveal the steps you care about or imagine,” says de Wit by way of advice to younger artists. “It may make a difference, change someone’s perceptions, expand horizons a little. Human consciousness is a fine thing.”
• Strike is out now on Hot Salvation and Shadow World
