by Tracey Thorn
He had the support of Sir John Reith, head of the BBC, in this plan, and the new transmitting stations were made larger than they strictly needed to be, in order to symbolise the status of broadcasting, and its significant role in national life. And so the new station at Brookmans Park measured 20,500 square feet, replacing a transmitter that had been only 725 square feet in size.
I can’t help thinking now of the presence of this building, which I knew almost nothing about, and to which I paid no attention. I felt remote and isolated and yet, there it was, so nearby, increasing radio receptivity and enhancing the possibilities of broadcasting, of connectivity. I picture myself in my bedroom, feeling solitary and disconnected, stranded on a kind of desert island bereft of culture, perhaps listening to the John Peel show, which felt like it was being beamed to me from a distant star, and yet was actually reaching my bedroom via a signal from the station just a mile up the road.
Or I might have been playing my seven-inch single of Joy Division’s ‘Transmission’.
Radio, live transmission. Radio, live transmission.
All those lyrics would have resonated so strongly with me.
Listen to the silence, let it ring on.
And we would go on as though nothing was wrong . . .
Staying in the same place . . .
I imagine the song building to its crescendo, and those final lines, ‘Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio’, repeating again and again, and perhaps I was doing just that, dancing and dancing, in the secrecy of my lonely room, while up the hill, in the silence and darkness of the field in which it stood, the transmitting station went about its quiet business, purposefully humming.
I ask myself sometimes, was it harder to be a girl than a boy in 1970s suburbia? I can only imagine it was. The conventionality, the strictness of the rules, meant you stood out far too easily if you didn’t exactly fit the mould. The only examples I saw around me were that men went up to London to work every day, while women were mothers and housewives, or did part-time jobs: typing, or serving in a shop, like my mum. There was not much sign of 1970s feminism in Brookmans Park. In a nod to changing fashion, Mum bought a midi-skirt and some tight boots, which she never wore, and there were jokes about bra-burning and Women’s Lib, but it was considered disloyal to criticise husbands, so there was not much sense of female solidarity, which might have provided comfort, or an opportunity for expressing frustration.
By the age of sixteen I was thoroughly dissatisfied with where I found myself and was embarking on a reinvention. But there was conflict involved in all of this, and a lot of secrecy, which seemed part of the very fabric of suburbia. All utopias contain the seeds of their opposite, and Brookmans Park was so picture perfect, it was unreal, like a Truman Show stage set. My teenage feelings of awkwardness and self-consciousness were amplified by the fact that any tiny deviation stood out like a sore thumb, any whisper would be heard as a scream. And I was too timid to actually scream.
I was in need of role models, but in that place at that time they were few and far between. Diary entries from 1978 show that I was starting to notice them:
14 September 1978 – ‘Did some painting in the evening. I painted a picture of Patti Smith.’
21 January 1979 – ‘ Watched The London Weekend Show. It was all about women in the music biz. Siouxsie Sioux and Rachel Sweet were on it. It was quite interesting.’
22 January – ‘ Saw a prog called Who is Poly Styrene? It was all about her and the band. Clips of them live, in the studio etc. It was a really good film.’
And in 1979, I went to a gig at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, excitedly writing: ‘First on were the Glass Torpedoes and they were really excellent. Then Swell Maps came on and I enjoyed them too. Moonlight Club is v small, good atmosphere. Saw all the Raincoats down there – they were sitting next to us!!’
Out there in the big wide world beyond my bedroom there were women getting to work who were less afraid, and who were going to help change my life and liberate me, and I would owe so much to them, as they’d open up a world of possibility. I wouldn’t realise quite how much I owed them all until much later. I would buy records by them and their bands, and see them play live, but not until a flurry of books were published around 2014 did I fully piece together their stories, and also begin to realise how much they changed things.
In 1976, aged twenty-one, Viv Albertine inherited two hundred quid from her grandmother and bought an electric guitar. Already a member of punk’s inner circle – the girlfriend of Mick Jones, the best friend of Sid Vicious – this was nonetheless an audacious act, and as she would write decades later in her book, Clothes Music Boys: ‘Who’d done it before me? There was no one I could identify with. No girls played electric guitar. Especially not ordinary girls like me.’ She was speaking for me, and so many like me.
With that guitar she joined Ari Up, Tessa Pollitt and Palmolive in The Slits. Eschewing the generic garage-band sound of their punk contemporaries, they incorporated reggae and soul into their sound – Viv says she wanted her guitar to sound like the chops on Dionne Warwick records – and invented post-punk before anyone else had even tired of punk. With their back-combed hair, dreads, tutus, ripped tights and Doc Martens, they were the most anarchic and badly behaved band on the White Riot tour with the Clash, Buzzcocks and Subway Sect, and it was they who were thrown out of hotels, for making a racket and pissing in people’s shoes in the corridors.
In her book, she conveyed brilliantly the sheer rebellious glee of being in a band when you don’t really know what you’re doing, the childish pleasure of the onstage fuck-you attitude they embodied. Not knowing that the chant ‘One-two-three-four’ is supposed to set the speed of the song, she’d simply assumed that it was ‘a warning to the band that you’re starting and it’s to be shouted as fast as possible, the quicker, the more exciting.’ I understood that so clearly. I remembered being a teenage music fan, and being as excited by music and its possibilities as the boys were, but still somehow feeling shut out. The boys seemed to know, or to invent, so many of its rules, so many of its values. There were apparent facts and bits of knowledge that we didn’t understand, or perhaps were deliberately kept from knowing. Sometimes, being a girl in a band, or a female music fan, you felt like you’d missed a meeting, like they’d turned up an hour before you and stuck a ‘No Girls’ sign on the door.
When I formed a band I thought of The Slits as our scary big sisters, but they were inspirational nonetheless. All of us were trapped in such an awkward spot, and at that time, rock was such a hard place. Not long after Viv Albertine, Chrissie Hynde also wrote a memoir, Reckless, and controversy swirled around her apparent blaming of herself for a sexual assault she suffered as a teen. The whole sad story reminded me again what it used to mean to be a rock fan and a rebel in the 1960s and 1970s. Chrissie told her tale in a style of swaggering bravado, eulogising her male rock heroes – ‘I wanted to be them, not do them’ – and the biker gangs she idolised – ‘I loved the bikes and I loved the way they talked about honour and loyalty and brotherhood’, but then had to squirm through a line of questioning that accused her of having the wrong attitude to her rape. Hang on, she objected, I never used the word rape. And it’s true, she never did, instead describing the actual assault in a tone that implied she regarded it more as some kind of awful initiation. Getting what she calls her ‘comeuppance’, she said it was her fault for failing the code, for being too mouthy. All she wanted, it seems, was to be respected by the bad guys, to be admitted to their ranks.
This, understandably, didn’t go down well, and she was accused of victim blaming. But her plight seemed to me very much the plight of a female rock fan of her age. Born in 1951, she had no female role models. To be a woman meant to have no place in the rock scene she adored, and so, she wrote, ‘I thought sex was, like becoming “a woman”, something to put off for as long as possible.’ Desperate to be one of the guys, she accepted their rules – no complaining, no whining,
taking it like a man. Hence her macho stance of refusing to blame anyone but herself.
But in those few years at the end of the ’70s, Viv, along with Patti and Ari, and Siouxsie and Poly and Chrissie, made more progress for women in music than we could have imagined. I think about how different things were for the generations who followed. By the time Carrie Brownstein came to form her band Sleater-Kinney, springing from the Olympia, Washington, punk and indie scene of the early ’90s, so much had changed. Chrissie Hynde had acted as an individual, an outrider. She grew up going to see The Stones, The Who and Led Zeppelin, and as for women at that time, she said, ‘you could count them on one hand’. But Carrie Brownstein was born in 1974, her first gig was Madonna, and by the mid-’90s she had the whole Riot Grrrl scene to call on – ‘a network of people finding their voices’ – and both the participants and the subject matter had changed – in her book Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, she wrote: ‘Girls wrote and sang about sexism and sexual assault, about shitty bosses and boyfriends.’ Feminism and gender politics had reasserted themselves, and this time the girls in music weren’t playing second fiddle.
I remember going to a Riot Grrrl gig in London in the early ’90s, where the bands were Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill, and the audience was women only, unlike the days of punk, when there may have been women onstage but men usually ruled the room. At other gigs, Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill would yell from the stage – ‘All girls to the front. I’m not kidding. All girls to the front. All boys be cool for once in your lives. Go back. Back!’ and she’d wave the guys out of the mosh-pit and towards the back of the club, finally laying claim to a literal space for women to inhabit. It would feel like the culmination of a years-long rebuttal of the rules of rock and roll.
So it’s easy to forget that once upon a time the only available identity was male. Even Patti Smith, our heroine and champion for so long now, wrote about seeing Keith Richard and wanting to BE him. In the words of that great feminist saying, quoted by Caitlin Moran – ‘I cannot be what I cannot see’, but there was a generation of women who took that fact and turned it on its head. They wanted to be just like the guys – and sometimes that came at painful expense to themselves – but in doing so they opened up the options for female identity. And those of us who followed – we could be something new, because we could see them.
All of these women were out there. All this would happen. All this would come. But for now I was still waiting and hoping. Listening for signals. Scanning the horizon, squinting into the far distance, hoping for something new.
1979
A red Collins pocket diary, one page per day. Inside is a tube map, an Intercity rail map, a list of bank holidays, weights and measures, sunrise and sunset times, a metric conversion table and three pages of first aid.
‘Bone, broken or dislocated – Send for doctor at once and do not touch or attempt to move limb. Poisoning – If someone is thought to have swallowed poison, telephone a doctor for advice, even if no effects have appeared. Burns and scalds – if clothing is on fire smother flame and rip off smouldering clothing.’
Inside the diary, I was still recording things that didn’t happen.
2 January 1979 – ‘Went up to London with Deb. We walked right up and down Oxford St and I only bought a pair of socks. Then we went over to Knightsbridge and went to Harrods. Debbie didn’t buy anything either.’
I was still listing everything I saw on the telly, which now included The Bionic Woman, Robin’s Nest, The Kenny Everett Video Show and Agony.
1 April – I saw ‘ Part 1 of King, series of 3 programmes about Martin Luther King, really good.’
2 April – ‘ Saw part 2 of King.’
3 April – ‘ Watched last part of King. He got shot tonight and died. Really sad. The programme was brilliant though.’
I wonder if I knew he was going to get shot? I’m honestly not sure I did.
I was reading Coma, The Eyes of Laura Mars and Valley of the Dolls.
17 February – I was dancing at a party to ‘some good records – ‘Heart of Glass’, ‘Shame’, ‘Rhythm Stick’, ‘White Punks On Dope’, ‘Jean Genie’, ‘Mighty Real’.’
And the year began with snow again, adding to all our usual transport difficulties. On January the 9th I was trying to get to St Albans with Huw to a gig. First we planned to go on the train, but there was a train strike – ‘ We’ve gotta go on the bus cos he’s got no petrol’ – so we ended up getting a bus to South Mymms, then another bus to St Albans, coming home via a bus BACK to South Mymms and then a three-mile walk through ice and snow to Huw’s house, from where I finally got a lift home.
Suburban transport was such a big deal. My sister learned to drive as soon as she could, but my teens would pass without me ever wanting to, although I would then be persuaded in my late twenties, when after two or three (tellingly, I have forgotten) driving tests I would be deemed competent, aware that only I knew the truth, which was that I had no idea what I was doing. Erratic, indecisive and directionless, I drove with all the skill and consistency of a drunk on the dodgems. During my year behind the wheel I kept pointing this out to people, only to be met with wry chuckles, murmurs of ‘Pfft, don’t be so modest, ANYONE can drive’ and assertions that any kinks in my technique would soon be ironed out with practice. So I kept practising, feeling that I must be mistaken in believing that I was an accident waiting to happen. Until the moment when the accident stopped waiting, and happened, and I drove into someone.
I have forgotten many things about my driving. I can’t even recall whether my instructor was a man or a woman, which speaks to me of some fairly efficient and deliberate memory cleansing. One of the security questions my bank likes to ask me is, ‘What was your first car?’, and as it was my ONLY car you’d think the answer would spring to mind quickly. In fact I have blotted that out too, and the information hides quivering somewhere behind a mental sofa. But the one thing I do remember, from The Year of Driving Dangerously, is the crashing. You’re probably picturing me tootling along at forty on the motorway, or being overtaken by milk floats on residential roads – a nuisance to all but a danger to nobody. I’ll set you straight on that one. Nervous drivers don’t drive too slow, they drive too fast. Like those who drink too quickly at the start of a party to calm the jitters, I would put my foot down in order to get the whole thing over with. Combined with an inability to judge distance or speed, and a desperate desire not to be a bore at junctions and roundabouts, my fear made me a menace, and when I finally crashed it was the sheer inevitability of it that wounded me. Luckily the accident was not fatal, or even injurious, but it was final, an absolute bitter end.
When Debbie had learned to drive at seventeen, we immediately became very reliant on her little second-hand Fiat.
16 January – ‘Bad news, Deb’s car has broken down – how will we get about this weekend aaarrgghh.’
23 January – ‘It snowed really hard all night and most of today. Coach turned up about 9. Finally started our exam at 10. They sent us all home at 1 cos the weather was getting so bad. Also there was loads of traffic cos all the trains are on strike.’
Boredom continued to be the theme of my narrative, bringing out in me a mean, judgemental streak.
26 January –‘Went to the Two Brewers. We saw P and J there. They were their usual boring selves. P came out with his usual comments – How’s life? How’s school? Bought any records lately?’
12 March – ‘Saw P who has slicked his hair down and gone NORMAL. So have N and J etc. God, what’s come over them all? BOORING.’
This mean streak extended into a startling lack of sympathy shown towards anyone who owned up to difficult or complicated feelings. For instance, this casual entry in January about a friend of a friend, ‘He’s really depressed cos his dad’s died and he’s tried to commit suicide 3 times’, and this one concerning two separate friends, ‘S has chucked A. He’s gone really weird lately and has started talking about suicide. I hope he’s gonna be alright.
B is still away. Me and A keep taking the piss out of all her depression lark. She’s really beginning to annoy us.’ I’d mentioned B’s depression before, and was rigid and harsh in my dismissal of her, ‘I phoned B. She had a nice holiday but is still depressed. Stupid girl. She sounds like something off a Cathy and Claire problem page.’ And in March, ‘B was away today cos she went to the psychiatrist (POSEUR).’ I can only conclude now that these things frightened me, that talking about feelings was verboten, and that she was breaking the code by opening up, seeking help. Brave and progressive of her considering the prevailing mood of the time, the way we took the piss out of everything, and the peculiar medical information we all absorbed – on another occasion I wrote, ‘B was away. She came out in a rash and when she went to the doctor he told her she’s allergic to beefburgers.’
I had clearly come to the conclusion that B was just showing off, as that was what I had been taught. I can’t help but contrast this attitude of mine, and the general tone of secrecy and silence surrounding such issues as depression, suicide, mental health, with the current move towards openness. As I write this, members of the Royal Family (Princes William and Harry) are on TV talking about their mental health struggles and supporting others to seek help. At the same time, I get an email from my son’s school, alerting parents to a couple of matters which ‘have arisen that cause us a degree of concern’. And these are, firstly, the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, which seems to suggest that suicide is a reasonable response to certain pressures, and secondly a new social-media challenge called the ‘Blue Whale Challenge’, which sets kids tasks, and includes them carving the shape of a blue whale on their hand, the final one being suicide. The letter attaches links to two helpful articles about both these issues, and ends by saying ‘As you would imagine we will be discussing these issues at school in the days ahead but you will understand our need to share this information with you so that you are as informed as you can be as well.’
