The Importance of Music to Girls

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  Forget me not

  Thy mouth was open but thou couldst not sing.

  GEORGE HERBERT, ‘Death’

  Something prompted me to dress up, just once, as a woman. It was May 1979, the night of Tom’s dinner party, and I had met the boy with whom I was to fall fully in love. This would surprise me as I spent my time being ironic and I didn’t know how to have feelings without ironising them too. My diary, which consisted of terse factual entries, shows that I was attempting a cultural life but also feeling grown-up enough to return to childish things like sledging, picnics and going to the zoo.

  FEBRUARY 2nd: SID VICIOUS DIED OF HEROIN OVERDOSE. DAVID’S HAIRCUT.

  FEBRUARY 18th: SLEDGING AT HEATHER HILLS

  FEBRUARY 21st: WENT TO ART EXHIBITION IN CAMDEN TOWN

  FEBRUARY 22nd: WENT TO SEE JON’S SQUAT

  FEBRUARY 23rd: TOOK JANEY TO SEE BEDROOM FARCE

  FEBRUARY 25th: WENT SWIMMING FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ONE AND A HALF YEARS

  FEBRUARY 26th: FELT REALLY SICK

  MARCH 1st: MARCUS’S PARTY. WALKED TWO AND A HALF MILES THE WRONG WAY

  MARCH 5th: PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

  MARCH 11th: THE UNDERTONES AT THE CHANCELLOR HALL

  MARCH 16th: JUST A GIGOLO IN COLCHESTER

  MARCH 21st: DENTIST – GOT BRACES

  MARCH 31st: DIANE’S NEIGHBOUR’S PARTY

  APRIL 22nd: COLCHESTER ZOO AND PICNIC

  MAY 3rd: THE LAST WALTZ. CONSERVATIVES WON

  MAY 13th: PENETRATION AT CHANCELLOR HALL

  Daniel was an art student at college in Colchester, who had gone to school with Robert. We’d talked for five minutes outside a pub. Things were whispered and I knew that Daniel knew that I was interested. The boys sneered but Tom arranged his dinner party so that we were both there and made clear his expectations. It was like being given the steps to a dance and forced into a performance. We would be part of the entertainment.

  Until this point my romantic feelings had been intense but somewhat soft at the edges. Beginnings and endings were fuzzy and incomplete. This seemed a natural way to proceed and among my friends there had been a number of alignments and reconfigurations without anyone feeling distressed. We were plastic, our feelings too, adapting and contracting without anything getting broken.

  MARCH 30th: DAVID’S

  APRIL 5th: CUT TOM’S HAIR

  APRIL 18th: BRISTOL WITH TOM

  APRIL 21st: STAYED AT DAVID’S

  APRIL 27th: DAVID COMING OVER

  APRIL 28th: TOM CAME OVER

  MAY 5th: DAVID’S FOR DINNER

  MAY 11th: TOM’S

  MAY 12th: GO TO DAVID’S

  MAY 26th: TOM’S DINNER PARTY

  Tom lived in a large dark house on the edge of a silent town on the Blackwater estuary, at the end of a train line that trundled through every other silent town on its way to and from the sea. I wore a black dress and stilettos, and believed that I was doing this ironically. It was what punk girls did. I worried about my braces (should I smile?) but decided that they were ironic. Poly Styrene had braces.

  Daniel was being ironic, too, wearing an old-fashioned pinstriped suit and those black-and-white crêpe-soled shoes we called brothel creepers. Tom served an ironic dinner of pink beef and we all sat ironically at table. We got intently drunk and Daniel ran his hand up my stockinged leg in a way that was meant to be ironic but which shocked us both. David, the first boy I’d slept with, was there somewhere around the table. We had shared a year of pleasure and affection, and had anyone asked I would have said, yes, I am in love. I had not yet experienced passion and now here it was, all at once – torment, helplessness, capture and delight. It hurt from the start. I could think of nothing ironic to say.

  After dinner, Tom gave an ironic performance as Mick Jagger and then announced that he had borrowed a house round the corner where the party would continue. It was a tiny terraced house that had been fully done up by a young couple in their thirties, with whom Tom was friends. He had said he was having a dinner party but his parents would be coming home and they had said, grown-up to grown-up, ‘Use our place, we’re away.’

  Twenty drunken teenagers crammed into the living room. Some made their way upstairs, including my ex, David, with another girl. I felt nothing and neither did he, seeing me sit down on the floor in a corner with Daniel. The usual things happened. Someone was sick. Someone stood on the smoked-glass coffee-table and it gave way beneath him. Tom patrolled like a ringmaster, cueing and commentating: ‘Martine wants someone to help her lose her virginity. Pete’s going upstairs with Martine. Martine’s crying because they couldn’t manage it.’ I was used to all this but also mortified because I did not want this boy to think of me as part of such mess. I could not speak so I sat and smiled while he talked. Eventually he stopped talking and put his hand on my thigh. I put my hand on top of his and we kissed, but quickly in case someone noticed and we became part of the circus.

  Eventually we fell asleep. In the morning, I don’t remember us exchanging phone numbers or making any plan to meet again. I don’t remember how we began or, eighteen months later, how we ended. As we walked down the street, I picked some blue flowers I thought were forget-me-nots and stuffed them into his hand. He smiled and pushed them into his pocket. Much later, his sister told me that he had put the flowers in water and she’d asked, Who gave you those? And he had said, My girlfriend, as a tease of course but even so I was astonished. We never spoke of what was happening between us. We did not name it, or each other, and I always felt that if I said anything out loud which made an assumption about our relationship, it would turn out not to exist.

  JUNE 29th: DANIEL’S PARTY

  JULY 17th: DANIEL

  JULY 20th: DANIEL

  45

  The electric ballroom

  Three hundred and forty-two wax candles lit and heated the room. The great crystal chandelier in the middle bore no fewer than forty-eight alone. Each little candle flame was reflected a thousandfold in the burnished oval of the dancing parquet, making it appear as if the floor were lit from below.

  JOSEPH ROTH, The Tale of the 1002nd Night

  Crammed together in the club under the stands of the football ground where Eddie and the Hot Rods had played, we drank, kissed, fought and collided, but never got to know one another. We never knew who the band was either as nobody famous played there. Why would they? Instead we had Anorexia, The Urge, Modern English, Prag Vec, Essential Logic, The Pack, Special Duties, Deep Throats, Swell Maps, Waxwork Dummies … whoever it was would play for a while then fall off stage into the swirl of that dark low room. The village-hall disco was an eighteenth-century ball by comparison.

  This was our ballroom. When we wanted to see famous bands, we went to famous places: Adam and the Ants, Wire and Joy Division at the Electric Ballroom,* the Human League at the Hammersmith Palais, and again at the Lyceum.†

  The Lyceum was run-down but still splendid, although we thought nothing of its domed and garlanded glittering ceilings, its swagged curtains and plush seats or the tiny lamps that glowed between us as we sat in the circle drinking plastic glasses of beer. On stage, two of the Human League, men with synthesisers, suddenly moved out from behind their machines and sang ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’, a cappella, and I thought, This is what I want, not to stand around trying not to show anything. I wanted that loving feeling and to admit what this could be: sitting under a golden ceiling next to a boy in the dark, just a small light between us.

  We loitered on dance floors and leaned over balconies but most of the parquet, pillars, banquettes and chandeliers were gone. Instead there were striplights, spotlights, linoleum and emergency-exit signs. No romance could be played out because there were no cues to act, no signals to interpret, no choices to be made, at least not in the way they had been back in the days of formal dancing. Back then there were things that could be said and a certain way of saying them. We arrived at the ballroom without dance steps, let alone a card on which to pe
ncil in the names of boys who’d asked us to save the foxtrot or the cha-cha for them. We were in the dark.

  Punk had made its way smoothly out of the backstreet clubs and into these dance halls. Bands settled into tours and arrived regularly at our town halls, universities and cinemas. I saw the Pretenders at Essex University and the Pop Group at the University of London. The Buzzcocks and Siouxsie and the Banshees came to the Chelmsford Odeon, where we were told not to dance in the aisles by the old ladies who usually sold ice-cream.

  It is one of the prettiest houses in London, and, while large enough to enable the poetical drama, even in the case of the heaviest Shaksperean play, to be effectively mounted, is not too large for the requirements of a modern audience. It may be noticed that evening dress is more commonly in vogue in the stalls and dress-circle here than at other theatres, but there is no absolute rule. It is worth notice, too, that the Lyceum, occupying a perfectly isolated position with a street on each of its four sides, offers special facilities for egress in case of alarm…

  Charles Dickens Jr, Dickens’s Dictionary of London, 1879

  Maybe the punk girls didn’t bond so much because they didn’t dance. That was left to the boys, lurching around in their bondage trousers and bouncing off one another. If girls went to the toilet to giggle and conspire, they would find some boy snorting speed or doing his make-up. I admired the girls who were aggressively sexual, but I couldn’t be like them. The queen of the local scene was called Rat and she was a girl. The spikes of her sugar-blonde hair were tipped in candy pink. She was so sweet. I remember seeing her emerge from the club walking daintily among puddles of vomit and urine, wearing a white muslin top without a mark on it. She looked as if nothing could touch her and this is what I envied most – I wanted to look untouchable.

  Punk, according to the music papers, was dead. Yet in Essex, spiky hair and plastic trousers caused fear and outrage. The local police, who must have been bored, routinely turned out in riot gear. As the teenagers spilt out of the Odeon, some looking for the parents who’d come to pick them up, the police pushed them up against walls, prodding them with batons until someone reacted and then that boy, always a boy, would be taken aside. One friend was beaten unconscious. The most terrifying experience I had was being caught up in a battle after a punk band played in a small town on the coast where local men decided to surround the hall and beat everyone up, starting with the girl on the door. The police arrived but stayed in their cars and watched as these men, some of whom had bottles and knives, set about a bunch of kids who dressed differently and dyed their hair, as if ridding the town of demons.

  We were stopped routinely but I felt immune – mostly because I was young but also because I was a girl, which was odd given that I felt additionally protected by the fact that I didn’t look like one. I would walk through town late at night and if men called after me, it was in mockery rather than pursuit. To most of them, a girl with blue hair was not a girl at all.

  Yet I needed a ballroom. I had been disarmed. I was not in a circle of girls and nor was there any way to dance with boys, so it was hard to get close to either. I needed some kind of dance and our music wasn’t helping. As I stood next to Daniel on the floor of the Palais, nodding along to the Human League, I thought of the women who would have waltzed, been waltzed, around that room. If only I knew how to let that happen. If only he knew how to ask.

  And then one day, out of nowhere, something like a waltz:

  ‘Why don’t you love me?’

  ‘That’s assuming I don’t love you.’

  I wrote it down but failed to note who said what, and that I can’t remember.

  * The Electric Ballroom had been a Masonic lodge complete with steam room and pool, and then a dancehall called The Buffalo, famous among the local Irish as a place to meet a mate. Even after it became a music venue, it was popular for Greek weddings.

  † The Lyceum had been the site of an eighteenth-century proto-gallery, out of which developed the Royal Academy. The theatre was variously a music hall, a circus and most famously Henry Irving’s home:

  46

  Spiral scratch

  plastic … is in essence the stuff of alchemy …

  ROLAND BARTHES, Mythologies

  The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone. It was the only way we could share music and it was also a way of advertising yourself. Selection, order, the lettering you used for the tracklist, how much technical detail you went into, whether or not you added artwork or offered only artwork and no tracklist at all, these choices were as codified as a Victorian bouquet.

  We also made tapes from each other’s records because records were expensive. What music we owned was limited by what we could find and what we could afford. I saved up for records, read about them, dreamt about them, waited for them to come out. When I really wanted an album or single, I wanted it properly, which meant on vinyl and in a sleeve. An LP was something of substance and vision. It was not a pocket-sized rectangle containing a small brown coil wrapped in shrunken graphics.

  We lived in each other’s bedrooms because it was there we could play music. We went to what gigs we could, and watched television and listened to the radio, waiting to hear something we loved or for something new to thrill us. Only with records and tapes could we control what we listened to and when. Outside of our bedrooms, we had to take what we could get, when it came into earshot: a song on a car radio or being played in a shop.

  Records meant even more to me than the books I cherished, but I was careless with both. They were to be used rather than looked after and so the books got creased, torn and stained, the records scratched. A scratch on a record is not something you can get used to. You know exactly where it will come and if the stylus will stick. This was annoying but, to me, records were an admixture of music and vinyl: I expected to hear both.

  With my old box gramophone I could stack up singles, which would drop one after the other onto the deck. Disco was all about singles whereas rock was the album, the double album, the concept album, the triple concept album and not songs but ‘tracks’. Punk brought back the single but played with every aspect of it. There were double A sides instead the traditional A and B sides, and EPs rather than LPs. Singles were as important as LPs, if not more so, and were given cover artwork. They had traditionally come in plain white or discreetly logo-ed sleeves but in 1977 came Devo’s ‘Satisfaction’ featuring the band trussed up in rubber blankets, wearing operating masks, and from Virgin the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’ covered in splintered glass and newsprint. Coloured vinyl was introduced but fell flat as its refusal of light hurt the eyes.

  The record shop was no more than a corridor squeezed into the high street. The manager, Terry, was a mild man in his thirties who knew so much about music that he didn’t need to talk about it. His secondhand section was full of the bands we were just discovering and connecting to what was happening now and so the organisation of his tiny shop reflected the way in which music adds up and how it moves in cycles. The disco and prog rock relegated to the bottom shelf of the second-hand section would one day be rediscovered just as I was then following the Sex Pistols back to the New York Dolls and the Velvet Underground, and there they were on Terry’s shelves.

  I bought two Velvet Underground LPs as soon as I found them and was accosted in the pub a week later by Gary, a boy with new crusted piercings, hair still a bit too long to stand up, a leather jacket, some chains but cowboy boots and jeans.

  ‘You bought my Velvets!’ he said, outraged.

  ‘You sold them.’

  ‘Yeah. But. They’re mine.’

  Selling records to Terry was like pawning a wedding ring or your grandfather’s medals. It raised cash but the things still belonged to you. You expected them back. Even now when I play those Velvet Underground LPs, I feel as if I ought to ask Gary’s permission first.

  After class I would go to the shop to see what was new and just to hang around, smoking and listening, flicking thr
ough the records and enjoying the atmosphere they contrived. There were always several people in the shop, discussing music. The talk was expert, competitive, savage and infatuated.

  Often I was the only girl but I had yet to think that that had any implications. I knew there were those for whom music was soundtrack and those of us for whom it was, well, music, but didn’t notice that most of those who took it seriously were boys. Sophie and Julia each had a few records but they didn’t get upset or excited about bands. I was thrilled by discovery, crushed by disappointment and mortified by any misplaced enthusiasm I had shown. I declared my allegiance, took a position, and always had a view, not noticing that girls were bemused and boys found me boring. Was a girl not supposed to feel so strongly, let alone want so much to possess and know something for her own sake?

  Tom was caught too firmly in the Rolling Stones and Robert seemed more interested in the clothes. Daniel was connoisseurial. We lay on his bed listening to Ornette Coleman or Pere Ubu as he discoursed on Joseph Beuys. Everything about us was difficult – we made sure of it.

  Living in a village eight miles out of town, with no friends within walking distance, I spent a lot of time alone. I was negotiating love. I read on through the books on the shelves and listened to music with total engagement. I might have the radio on when in the bath or doing homework but listening to records required concentration. I listened and, not able to manage my own feelings, had instead the feelings of the songs.

  Too old for pop posters, I pored over record covers looking perhaps for someone to be. There was a girl in a rustly bustly dress on the cover of Adam and the Ants’ Dirk Wears White Sox whom I admired because she was evidently walking away fast and, I knew, would be dressed like that ironically. There was some fuck-you nudity: Patti Smith standing topless with her back to the camera, confronting her all-male band, or the Slits on the cover of Cut, wearing loincloths and covered in mud. This wasn’t sexy, it was magnificent. All those songs about hurting and waiting and pleading, all those singers who mimed heartbreak and seduction, who glittered and melted, had confirmed for me the difficulty of being a girl. I could not take my clothes off like Patti Smith or the Slits, but I wished I could. Their version of girldom was, like their music, all about confidence, and it worked.