‘What’s it like to be a girl in a band?’ So sang Kim Gordon on Sonic Youth’s 2009 song Sacred Trickster and this question is more or less at the heart of three new books about women in music.
The most compelling of all three is The Liverbirds, a memoir of the 1960s Liverpool band. The story is told to music writer and biographer Lucy O’Brien by the band’s two surviving members, Mary McGlory and Sylvia Saunders. The book begins as a straightforward collection of reminiscences about life in post-war Liverpool but quickly becomes one of the best types of rock memoirs with first-person accounts of encounters with global superstars such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks, as well as chilling brushes with the likes of Jimmy Savile and Gary Glitter.
When the band first start out and are brought backstage by the Cavern club manager and introduced to The Beatles, John Lennon tells them “girls don’t play guitars”. But they quickly progress to being offered management deals by Beatles manager Brian Epstein and Kinks’ manager Larry Page. The Liverbirds were in search of bigger adventures, however, and opted instead to travel to Hamburg to be part of Manfred Weissleder’s Star-Club, which played host to the biggest acts in the world at the time.
They were witnessing musical history every other day and there are delightful scenes describing moments like when they first heard The Kinks play You Really Got Me in their studio and how they got that specific distorted guitar sound. After five years and two hit albums, The Liverbirds were forced to call it quits when pregnancy and tragedy came into their young lives.
Their later lives are almost as interesting as their early lives in the band. McGlory’s husband Frank Dostal co-wrote the 1977 Baccara hit Yes Sir, I Can Boogie, which gave them a comfortable living, while Saunders and her husband moved to Spain to run bars there. But for lead singer Pamela Birch and guitarist Valerie Gell, life after the band was at times difficult and sad.
The descriptions in the book are wonderfully vivid; whether it’s of impoverished Liverpool, the red-light district of Hamburg or the pub scene in Benidorm, every detail perfectly evokes the moment. The book ultimately reads as a social document of northern Britain’s transition from post-war 1950s to the Swinging Sixties, but it’s also a more personal document about growing up as a girl in that era, and following your dreams in a male-dominated industry.
Like the best memoirs, The Liverbirds has drama, humour, tragedy, sex, drugs, rock‘n’roll and it even settles a few old scores as the band takes issue with Keith Richards for describing The Liverbirds as ‘slags’ in a Rolling Stones biography.
It’s hard not to wonder what might have happened had they signed up with Epstein or Page, but as McGlory writes: “It happened as we wanted it to happen, and we wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
[ Feminism, the arts, and madness in everyday lifeOpens in new window ]
RTE Morning Ireland presenter Rachael English covers similar terrain in her very enjoyable seventh novel, Whatever Happened to Birdy Troy. Birdy was a member of the 1980s all-female rock group The Diamonds. When they scored a management deal with Dublin manager Kieran Mitchell, they moved to London, got a record deal and had a number one hit with their debut single. Just as they were poised for superstardom they promptly disappeared.
Forty years later in Dublin, Stacy Nash is trying to find out what became of the band. She runs a podcast that tracks down long-forgotten stars of the past and tells their stories. Meanwhile, Kieran Mitchell is now one of the most successful music managers in the world, while The Diamonds are still nowhere to be found. The book switches between Stacy’s present-day sleuthing and the band’s own story in the 1980s and English’s recreation of this particular era of Dublin life is a sensory and nostalgic delight. At its heart, it’s a moving story about the vulnerability of youth, the importance of friendship and the abuse of power.
Rock royalty Kristin Hersh’s The Future Of Songwriting is an extended essay that is part of a new series from Melville House inviting artists to explore future visions in their area of expertise. Hersh started out in the 1980s as the teenage frontwoman of Rhode Island band Throwing Muses (along with her stepsister Tanya Donnelly who was a founding member of The Breeders and Belly).
Hersh went on to play with rock trio 50 Foot Wave and also as a solo artist. She has already published three memoirs and this essay takes the form of a loosely structured conversation between her and a comedian friend (this friend represents an amalgam of friends for the purposes of streamlining conversations). Hersh’s thesis is that music, and creativity, have been corrupted by capitalism and her central question is what would it mean to be an artist without the goal of selling a product.
‘We are all born with the ability to write a song, to pluck our own apple. We lose this concept when corporations tell us that expert culture runs this sphere like any other; that only those dressed up as musicians, attracting attention and making money (professional means making money) have the ability to write our soundtrack.’
That gives you a flavour of the tone but for the most part it’s an easy-going amble through her disdain for the corporatisation of art which is probably of niche interest, but if you’re a musician or an artist trying to come to terms with not making a living from your art, this might offer a fresh perspective and some hope.
So what’s it like to be a girl in a band? According to these books, there are many pros and cons but for the most part what these books offered this reader (and former girl-band member) was a sense of inspiration from what can happen if you have the courage to grab on to the kite-tail of your dream and follow it wherever it may fly. As McGlory from The Liverbirds puts it: “We were young girls having the courage to make a go of something … Once we did The Liverbirds it made everything possible and gave us the confidence to do more.”
