The Importance of Music to Girls

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  A narrow corridor led to some stairs. To go in, we had to become members and so bought ‘Privilege Cards’. I still have mine, which I kept perhaps because it seemed like a credential – a small blue card in a plastic wallet, expiring on 31 December 1978. ‘Not valid unless signed’ it says and that is where I let myself down. The dots above the ‘i’s in my name are looped circles.

  I led the way downstairs, confident of what I was walking into. I had been to see bands after all. Only here was a room with as much atmosphere as an office. It wasn’t dark, just dingy, and the stage was somehow so unobtrusive that the band seemed to play in front of rather than above you.

  I had never seen a band play without performing before. The Vibrators just got on with it, as did the audience. There was no rapt attention, no sense of event, no light show, dry ice, cheering or applause. I loved it and was enjoying myself until I noticed that most of the other girls there were wearing bin-liners. We three were the only ones in jeans and while I was taken aback, I was not particularly agitated. I felt invisible, as if I could wander through this scene untouched because I was beneath notice. And that is what I did. I forgot about Cara and Beth, and explored the dark corners, observing how these people stood and talked and moved. They did everything everyone else did but differently with a kind of detraction. They took away expectation – being a boy or a girl or a member of a band meant nothing.

  I considered what it would take to achieve such freedom. I could lay my hands on bin-liners and hair dye, and I could save up for bondage trousers. Money and clothes were the easy part. The difficulty lay in how not to be and above all how not to be a girl. How could I subtract enough of myself to achieve that?

  Cara got bored. She had been reading Siddhartha on the train and decided to find somewhere to continue, so sat down in the corridor. Ten minutes later, she was back.

  ‘Do you like the band after all?’ I asked.

  ‘No, but I’m not staying out there. Some wanker fell out of the toilets and puked on my book.’

  * ‘Where is the pop corner of the world? For thousands of youngsters it is London’s Marquee Club. It is the melting pot of today’s hip music, where jazz, folk, and pop meet on equal terms. Where trends are born, and stars emerge. It could be compared with New York’s Apollo Theatre, but really there is nothing like it in the world. Music is the important quantity at the Marquee, and the club-goers are London’s most aware, adult teenagers. The Marquee is a home for good music.’

  The Melody Maker (Marquee Club programme, 1968)

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  Secondary worlds

  In the primary world, we all have experienced occasions when, as we say, we feel like singing. We may sometimes even attempt to sing, but if we do, we are dissatisfied with the results for two reasons. First, most of us cannot produce pleasing sounds; second, even if we are professional singers, we cannot compose a song expressly for the occasion but can only sing some song that already is in existence, which we happen to know …

  W. H. AUDEN, The World of Opera

  That same week, I saw my first opera when my father took me to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at Covent Garden. I travelled down to London and spent the afternoon with Beth, who watched in astonishment as I changed into a long floral dress. I had chosen this outfit with what was expected of me in mind. It had nothing to do with me. In any case, I was thrilled by the idea of going to the opera. When we had lived in London, my parents had gone often. Opera was what you dressed up for and what my father sat up alone late at night listening to. I knew it would give me feelings.

  Pelléas et Mélisande, though, is elusive and suggestive, a work in which Debussy made the decision to be deliberately unforthcoming. As he explained to a friend, he had discovered ‘a technique which seems to me quite extraordinary, that is to say Silence’. I didn’t want silence. I wanted to be bashed over the head with feeling.

  Until the lights dimmed, the evening didn’t disappoint: gilt and velvet, diamonds and lorgnettes, the murky boxes in which novels used to be played out. After that all I can remember is a wash of music as a bunch of kings and queens, brothers and sisters, argued and plotted and made up.

  What did I expect? A secondary world that lit up the primary: colour, drama, volume, everything high. Yet here were the singers standing around while the music piled up on top of itself and Mélisande, up in her tower, let down her interminable hair, on and on, yard after yard, as Pelléas waited below.

  I thought of opera as sensation, I still think of it as such, and one reason I could not sense Pelléas was because I could not see it. Mine was the world of the close-up, of corners and cracks, tight frames and vivid abstraction. Such hyper-real visuals couldn’t be achieved by people in long frocks and helmets waving their arms on a faraway stage.

  It didn’t sound right either. Sometimes a wave of brass engulfed the singing, or in a duet one voice overrode another and I felt irritated.* I had assumed that live opera would look like a film and sound like a record. I was unaware of how conditioned I already was to experience such things in a particular way. I thought I was used to live performance but the bands I saw were electrified and mixed. They could create their own acoustics and be turned up or down at the flick of a switch; they were brought close through cameras and amplifiers. I had thought opera was artificial when all it was was a bunch of people making the noise they really made.

  At the interval, my father suggested, with great tact, that we head off early to dinner. Had we stayed till the end, I might never have gone to see an opera again.

  * I once went to a performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem with a singer, Ted Huffman, and afterwards complained of the difficulty of getting a coherent sense of the piece when the sopranos blasted the tenor off the stage. Ted reminded me that this was live acoustic music and not the digitally adjusted arrangement I was used to.

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  High mountains

  … to me,

  High mountains are a feeling …

  LORD BYRON, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III

  My sixteenth birthday was spent in the Alps, on my last Forest School Camp. We had pitched our tents just below the Sustenpass and spent our time on terrifying hikes along crumbling goat paths and shifting cliffs of scree, led by our wild-bearded camp chief, a man as tyrannical as he was hysterical. He prepared us for the hikes by forcing us to skitter down a steep bald rockface. If you hesitated, he made you do it again. He was often angry, and the person he was most angry with was a French boy called Émile.

  Émile was cool, and had blonde curls even at sixteen. He shouted back at the bearded old man, and I was smitten. We established a gentle relationship, kissing and holding hands and sleeping side by side. This was just right in the blue-and-white world of the mountains: to be pleased but not disturbed.

  We were camping under sunshine in snow and if I walked a few hundred yards away from the site, I could be alone in silence and whiteness. I would watch the mountains enlarge and accumulate, and adjust myself. I knew nothing grander than the Welsh hills and the cliffs of Cornwall. Mountains were a feature of fairytale geography, a world of heightened senses and heightened choices. They were also a trial: jagged peaks that had to be passed through by any questing knight or runaway princess. The landscape had such an epic scale that you could only measure in centuries and histories, the big pictures and big stories, and there was room for them all. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see pilgrims on donkeys, Hannibal with his elephants, Charlemagne with his army.

  I couldn’t see this mountain, though, because I was on it. My memory is of a series of parts: the dirty ice, a field of snow, a fall of scree, a frozen stream, a terrifying path. We walked to the Steingletscher, the glacier, and I was shocked by how grubby, dingy and soggy it was, how roughly put together. I had envisaged a glossy lozenge of pure blue ice.

  Round the campfire, we sang the usual songs from the FSC songbook: protest, folk and blues. Back at our tents, we sang the songs we’d left behind
with our radios and stereos. I had happily forgotten my family, boyfriend and friends but I craved music so much that I would have sung anything.

  Just above our campsite was an inn where the local shepherds drank. It had a few guest rooms and we would pool our money, buy a couple of beers between six of us and then take it in turns to sneak upstairs to use the guest bathrooms. We even managed to smuggle in towels and use their showers.

  After a few nights, the shepherds approached us. Dark, bristling and unsmiling, they lined up. I pushed my towel out of sight.

  ‘English?’ One asked.

  I nodded: Yes, English.

  Their faces cracked open and one stepped forward. ‘My bonnie lies over the ocean …’

  Another joined him: ‘My bonnie lies over the sea.’

  They all knew it: ‘My bonnie lies over the ocean. Oh bring back my bonnie to me.’

  We leapt to our feet: ‘Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my bonnie to me, to me …’

  I had tears in my eyes. This song meant nothing in particular to me but it was a chance to sing. Émile wasn’t David, but he was who was there. The point of it was feeling – high mountains of feeling.

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  Diastole, systole

  Repeat that, repeat …

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, Fragment 146

  When we were twelve, fourteen, sixteen and eighteen, the house acquired a constant beat. Will you turn that down! There was always music coming from somewhere and we stole music from one another as we stole clothes, cigarettes and friends. Will someone answer the door! Oh look, a centre parting! You’ll be wanting the hippy. He’s in the brown room at the top of the stairs listening to that nonsense about flying teapots. Someone answer the door! Are you her boyfriend? She’s got a boyfriend! Come in … No? You want to wait out there? I can tell you now she’s going nowhere till she gives me back my raincoat. There she is and look, my raincoat. I know it’s Dad’s, technically, but he hasn’t worn it for about thirty years and I took it first. No, Mum, I will not take fucking turns. It’s mine. She copies everything. Look at her. Why can’t we be in the living room? I’m entertaining, aren’t I? Tell him to turn his music down too! It’s coming through the walls at us – Dark Side of the fucking Moon. Blame him. Why didn’t you knock? You should knock. No, we don’t want to go to the pub with a bunch of hippies. I mean we might go, but not with you. If you don’t turn that down right now I will rip the wires out of it.

  My sister was early-morning radio, my little brother after-school television, my big brother whale song and guitar. They were to become an immunologist, an astrophysicist, and a marine biologist turned engineer, picking up on the other kind of music we grew up with. He’s had twenty-five broken bones. Osteogenesis imperfecta. As a baby, he couldn’t digest anything. Blocked pyloric sphincter. Why do you have blue eyes when I have green? Heterozygous genes. She’s resting. Supraventricular tachycardia. The heart is diastole or systole. I am ulna and radius, neurone and lymph, ileum and cerebellum. I exsanguinate.

  I told you to turn it down! I can’t believe she’s done that! Can you mend it? I’ll buy you a drink. Yes, I know that means I’ll have to go to the pub with you. Mum! We’re going to the pub. If you’re all going, you must take your little brother. He’s twelve years old! Take him.

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  A certain disorder

  Bert van de Kamp: What is your trademark?

  Martin Hannett: A certain disorder in the treble range …*

  The principal of the sixth-form college ushered my father and me into his office. He sat down behind his desk and pulled out a packet of Lucky Strike.

  ‘Do you smoke, Miss Greenlaw?’

  ‘No,’ said my father, ‘she doesn’t.’

  One of the first people I spoke to at the college was the sharp boy called Tom. He was my brother’s age and I had seen him across rooms for a year or so. He was one of those who made a concession to punk as fashion. He spiked his hair and wore a leather jacket but stuck to jeans and the Rolling Stones. Even this half-measure had a powerful effect on me. He was halfway towards the kind of boy I was realising I wanted to be with. We flirted and, probably as part of the flirtation, he borrowed an essay. He returned it as if it were something he had come across by accident and wished he’d never seen. In almost any other situation, he would have seized on this chance to humiliate but I watched him hesitate and decide to say nothing. I read his face exactly but I too said nothing. What could I say? I knew when I was writing it how bad it was. I don’t know how to think or how to talk about what I think. I haven’t learnt anything for years. I don’t listen. I can’t speak. I am watching myself happening or not happening. I watch myself and I can’t, or won’t, do anything to help.

  Things did not improve. My attendance record for my A-level year shows that I missed an entire term’s worth of classes. I read all the French and English books on the curriculum, and was still making my way through every novel and book of poems on the shelves at home, but my habit of not absorbing and so not learning was still too strong, and it became if anything stronger as I was drawn into a group which operated rather like a teenage-girl gang, through toughness, mockery and exposure.

  Sophie was a tall blonde in my English class who had a face like a Nordic goddess but wore her hair too carefully. She looked both cool and prim. Tom was pursuing her too. One day after class she introduced herself: ‘You know what? You can have him. I’m not interested.’ And neither was I. From that moment, Sophie and I were best friends.

  Tom stayed friends with us both and we formed a gang with Robert, a boy with the kind of skinny misfit looks which punk made desirable, and another girl, Julia, who, like Sophie, was so beautiful and feminine I had not thought her interesting.

  I decided it was time to draw the line and began by finishing with David, who had just shaved off one side of his hair. I then went to get my hair cut off. Sophie, Julia and I skipped class, bought a bottle of wine and went to the hairdressing salon upstairs in the clothes shop, Miss Selfridge. This was a girly shop – its logo was a lipstick kiss – but the hairdresser was excited by the idea of doing her first punk cut. She turned up the music and let us pass the bottle of wine back and forth and reduced my long shaggy layers to a spiky crop. I walked back through town feeling lighter. A boy called out ‘Punk!’ and I was thrilled. The pleasure was more than that of being different. The boy had meant to be insulting and another time might have shouted ‘Slag’ or ‘Cow’. But ‘Punk’ had nothing to do with being a girl. It neutralised, rejected and released me.

  I made myself strange because I felt strange and now I had something to belong to for which my isolation and oddness were credentials. Suddenly the lanky boy with spots and bad teeth was sought after; the fat girl was a goddess in bin-liner and chains. For years I had hated being so pale; now I made myself paler. In that little Essex world, there were so many taboos that it took little effort to break them: buy clothes from a jumble sale, men’s clothes – pin-stripes, cricketing whites, vests, ties, belts and braces.

  I was reversing out of being a girl, perhaps in the hope of regaining the freedom of my tomboy childhood. I stole my father’s Fifties coats and suits, a school blazer from my younger brother and my ex-boyfriend’s leather jacket. It was as if I were borrowing a little bit of masculinity from each.

  We travelled down to London to buy synthetic, metallic, graphic tat on the King’s Road, and to peer through the windows of Vivienne Westwood’s shop Sex. In the spirit of appropriation, adaptation and do-it-yourself, I was constantly on the look-out for something that could be cut up, ripped apart, dyed, bleached and pinned back together. I didn’t want to add up. I didn’t want to form an argument or make a point. I had a weakness for the then fashionable term ‘eclectic’, but the outfits I put together were just plain odd: Thirties men’s flannels with a brick-red cropped Chanel jacket and a Victorian silk shirt with a lace collar and cuffs that was so fine I shivered putting it on; skintight plastic trousers bought from Chelsea Marke
t, with my great-uncle’s World War One leather flying coat – so enveloping and brown that it was like walking around inside a cow. Then there would be chains, scarves, badges, gloves, and lurid, shapeless garments knitted out of synthetic mohair on the biggest knitting needles I could find.

  As I grew even more guarded, the colours I wore became more subdued until most of the time I just wore black. I had already dyed my hair black, which did not suit me, and then bleached out streaks which I tinted aubergine or peacock blue with Krazy Kolor. Whatever clothes I had that weren’t black, I dyed. This alchemical process involved bringing gallons of water to boil in the cauldron (my mother’s enamel preserving pan) and then adding the dye by piercing a tin and releasing its concentrated acrid powder. As I added salt and stirred in the clothes, a bitter cloud of steam filled the room and it did seem as if I were performing a spell that would dissolve me and my world into shadow.

  Perhaps I wanted to be shadow. Certainly I did not want to be known but then I barely knew myself. I was still a child in that I operated instinctively and while I could be horribly talkative, on certain matters I was mute. I was discovering the pleasure of belonging to a different kind of gang in which name, appearance, sexuality and personality were so confusingly and overtly constructed that we were all strangers. Identity was worn rather than embodied. We were keeping ourselves apart and it was a respite from becoming, and having to be, clear.

  * First published in Muziekkrant Oor, September 1981, in the Netherlands. Interview by Bert van de Kamp. Translated by Hans Huisman.

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