FEATURE:
Waking Up
IN THIS PHOTO: Elastica (Justine Frischmann, Justin Welch, Donna Matthews and Annie Holland)
The Queens Highlighting and Fighting Sexism and Misogyny During the Britpop Era
_________
I have been inspired by a new series…
IN THIS PHOTO: Garbage (led by Shirley Manson) in 1998/PHOTO CREDIT: Maryanne Bilham Photography/Redferns
on BBC Sounds that explores The Rise and Fall of Britpop. Presented by Jo Whiley and Steve Lamacq, it is a fascinating look at one of the most important yet divisive music periods. I think that there was some division when Britpop started around, let’s say, 1993 – though I don’t think there is an official date, the likes of Suede launching their debut this year cemented the term. Dividing people into groups and clans, there were those who liked Oasis or Blur. You also had Pulp, Suede, and those a little on the periphery like Menswear, Supergrass, and Cast. Big bands at the time like Radiohead never realty fitted into Britpop. It was a particular sound that still exists to this day. There is no denying the fact that it was a huge time. These amazing British artists ruling and producing the best music. Whilst there was a combination of division and unity, there seemed to be this divide between male and female artists. I am going to end with a collection of songs from some of the finest women in the Britpop era. With bands led by the likes of Shirley Manson (Garbage), Justine Frischmann (Elastica) and Louise Wener (Sleeper), there were these captivating and powerful women singing timeless and hugely inspiring songs. There was this relatively lack of exposure and acclaim. Sexism and this rise of the lad culture. In the fourth episode of the BBC Sounds episode, Louise Wener, Shirley Manson, Miki Berenyi and Justine Frischmann discuss their experiences.
Among the interviews for the show, this notion that women were seen as sex objects. Reduced to their bodies. double standards regarding women talking about sex and being open, and this cliched version of masculinity. Whilst female artists of the time were playing as well, partying as hard and making as big an impact as their male counterparts, they were still not gracing as many magazine covers, getting as much acclaim and respect, or being discussed as much in terms of their musical brilliance. Often there are poisonous attitudes when women talk about sex and love. Dismissed as sex-obsessed or dirty, men were celebrated and idolised for saying the same things. Many of the great bands with women in (or comprised of women alone) were not featuring in magazine or in interviews. When many still talk about Britpop, women are frequently kept at the outskirts. Not put at the centre like Blur and Oasis. There were so many amazing women who could not make the covers unless there was a level of sexuality and explicitness. Blur’s video for Country House – the song that went up against Oasis’ Roll With It in the big battle of Britpop in 1995 – was meant to be ironic, but it sort of highlighted how many viewed women. Seen as sex symbols and bodies, it is an unfortunate casting of women. An in-joke that not everyone got. Lad mags, as is explored in the documentary, took the industry back to darker times. Women were often expected to talk in a certain way and fit into this very regressive narrative.
The Britpop world celebrated the horrid page three and porno ‘fun’ of the time. This weird and insulting representation of working-class culture. These amazing women making music and trying to be seen were often leered at. Shirley Manson said in the documentary how society is tougher for women. There is this impossible standard. The music industry, especially during Britpop, wanted women young. If they dressed like women and were comfortable in their own skin, they faced this sexualisation and view that they were meat. Many had to dress more like men to get attention or for this sort of thing to stop. Women were often marketed as sex objects or expected to be very revealing in a very bad and toxic way. If the industry has changed slightly, I think there is still a perception that women are objects. They do not have depth or real meaning beyond their looks and bodies. This was something that existed before Britpop, but the movement enforced this very dangerous and dismissive attitude. Britpop, as the documentary concludes with, saw women pave the way for change. For new artists to come through. Some of the absolute best singles and albums from that Britpop reign – 1993 to about 1998 – came from bands like Lush, Sleeper, Garbage, Skunk Anansie, Elastica and those with phenomenal women at the helm. Even today, so many women – including Garbage’s Shirley Manson – at loggerheads with magazines about the way they are presented. There are still huge challenges. We romanticise Britpop and forget about women’s experiences. Sexism is only half of the story when it comes to women and their role in Britpop.
There was so much misogyny too. I am going to reference a few articles that discuss how women were perceived during a high time where men were celebrated and seen as music heroes. Far Out Magazine wrote late last year about the misogyny that was rife and somewhat undiscussed during the Britpop period. If we have happy memories of the brilliant music and uplift of that time, we do tend to sweep away or forget how women were viewed. Things like the Country House video definitely didn’t help things:
“Another respected figure from the time is Sleeper frontwoman Louise Wener, whose hits such as ‘Inbetweener’ and ‘Sale of the Century’ are hailed as Britpop highlights. Despite these hits, Wener faced ample sexism, and it’s something she hasn’t forgotten. “The music press was so leaden and serious back then,” Wener told Long Live Vinyl. “It was hard to get any humour across. There was a basic sexism, too; this fake shock of, ‘Oh, it’s a woman at the helm! Writing the songs!’ Because of that, the men in the band had to be diminished in some way.”
Much of this manifested itself in the term “Sleeperbloke”. Originally used to describe Wener’s bandmates, guitarist Jon Stewart, drummer Andy MacLure and bassist Diid Osman, it soon became a way of depicting the apparently forgettable men in a female-fronted band. Later in the interview, MacLure said of the term: “Only female-fronted bands had Sleeperblokes in the ’90s. It was a terrible, misogynistic way of operating.”
One moment in Britpop that has long been the subject of intense criticism is the video of Blur’s 1995 single ‘Country House’. Although the single is most famous for being the band’s offering in the fierce media spectacle ‘The Battle of Britpop’, against Oasis hit ‘Roll With It’, the misogyny contained within is more significant.
The accompanying music video of ‘Country House’ was directed by artist du jour Damien Hirst and depicts the song’s narrative of a man – played by Keith Allen – who escapes the rat race of the city for a big house in the country. However, it also features models Sara Stockbridge, Vanessa Upton, and Page 3 girl Jo Guest in an objectifying way. The women involved are used as sexual objects and nothing else.
Blur guitarist, Graham Coxon, has been particularly critical of the video, labelling it “demeaning to the girls” who appear in it. In his 2022 memoir, Verse, Chorus, Monster!, he wrote: “It made me angry because here I was, finally in a band, and the experience seemed to be getting cheapened by Page 3-type imagery, a revival of sexism and football hooliganis”.
Of the objectifying, he added: “I was clashing heavily with the Britpop thing and didn’t feel the need to refer to women’s body parts in a rude way.”
This begs the question, why wasn’t Britpop more heavily protested against at the time? Despite all the promises of the liberal 1990s, outdated social mores were yet to change, and #MeToo was still a long way away. Ultimately, Radiohead put it perfectly – Britpop was “backwards-looking”.
Before coming back to a more serious side of the debate, Caitlin Moran wrote a feature for Stylist imagining what it would have been like if Britpop was dominated by women. Instead of wall-to-wall men, it would have been a very different world. One, I think, vastly more interesting! I have selected a section of her funny, honest and often thought-provoking feature that caught my eye:
“Rejoice in a female Supergrass – so young they’re still almost children, wildly hairy, pedalling away on their Chopper bikes in the video to Alright. Stoner lady- monkeys with one of the greatest drummers, Dani, Keith Moon-ing (sorry, Kate Moon-ing) so hard and wild behind her kit, she ends most gigs just in her bra, beaming, exhilarated, at the crowd.
The odd, appealing innocence of Caught By The Fuzz – which is essentially the origin story of Ilana and Abbi from Broad City, in which some young women try to buy some marijuana, but it all goes wrong in the most amusing way possible.
If a band as hairy as Lady Supergrass had existed when I was a teenage girl, there’s every chance the female moustache would have become a fashionable look. I could have saved myself 20 years of waxing. We would all have lady moustaches now.
As for Jarvine Cocker – that gangly, sexy nerd of Pulp, kung fu kicking in their charity shop suit – well, overnight, it became OK for everyone to wear glasses. I would never have bought contact lenses if I had seen Jarvine Cocker sing Common People at Glastonbury in 1995 – glasses steaming up and howling, “I wanna live with common people like yoooooou!” jumping in the air like a praying-mantis. And I wasn’t the only one.
A week later, the cities of Britain were filled with elegantly shabby types in suits and glasses, talking about class war, carrying bottles of cherry brandy around in their battered satchels, and busting their demented dance moves at parties, while boys swooned at their geeky insouciance.
Now look, I don’t wish you to get me wrong. I loved the Britpop we actually had. Man, you could live the life of a Number One pop star by simply getting up, going out, having a fag, putting it out, seeing your friends, seeing the sights and feeling aaaaaalright.
A parallel world
But we can admit, now: when Damien Hirst is eventually commissioned to make a Britpop sculpture, it will be a 60ft high pile of cocks and balls, with, like, four tits stapled to the side.
As someone who was there at the time, it often felt like that bit in Game Of Thrones’ Battle of the Bastards, where Jon Snow is slowly being crushed under a pile of hundreds of hairy men-soldiers. But, in this case, all the men are in vintage Adidas tops, shouting, “Oi oi, mate! Nice one!” at each other.
That’s why it’s fascinating – something new and diverting for the eye! – to see, just for a second, what it would have been like in a parallel world. A world of women.
To imagine – as the great Johanna Lennon might have put it – there’s no Stephen. It’s easy if you try.
Just imagine what Titpop’s finest might have looked like…”.
Articles such as this explain how memories and books have been released that highlight how imbalanced and toxic Britpop was for women. Many of thew major players of the time – including Lush’s Miki Berenyi - have spoken honestly and candidly about their experiences. Women were written out of Britpop. There are horrifying testimonies from women in bands at the time. I want to finish by looking at a couple more articles. To be fair, there are essays, books and many more examples where the misogyny and sexism of Britpop is explored. The Quietus’ feature from 2013 took an extract from Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender by Rhian E Jones. The extract was about Britpop culture - via Shampoo and Kenickie – and social class and gender:
“Kenickie's brassy, breezy self-expression was also presumed to signify an 'easy' sexuality, making them the objects of an unstable mixture of lust and disgust:
We were asked if we were in anyway like Viz's Fat Slags, 'only thinner', and these were the journalists who liked us! The interviewers seemed bemused by our hostility to their question - 'So what you're asking us, then, is, are we slags?' replied Lauren [Laverne, vocalist/guitarist] coolly. The asking of such a question demonstrates the reduction of all their assumptions about our perceived class, gender and regional roots to the grotesque parody of North East women in the Fat Slags comic strip. This ignored our own statements about our identity in our music.
This lack of understanding by a middle-class media of how such a comparison might be received highlights the frequent intersection of sexism and classism, whereby all women who are perceived as working-class are implicitly 'chavs', and all 'chavs' are explicitly easy. Kenickie's female frontline, like Shampoo, had an earthy, cartoon-glam aesthetic, half Old Hollywood starlets, half explosion in Claire's Accessories. Their particular brand of glamour was, as Susan Sontag wrote of Camp, 'a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it'. Their towering heels, aggressively revealing outfits and lashings of makeup were worn on their own terms; a Pink Ladies-inspired protective covering rather than a puppeteered provocation. Tangled up with the roots of this look was the history of glamour as a means for 'ordinary' girls to dress 'above their station' through artifice, lavish and luxurious but popularly accessible, which did not require the backing of 'good breeding'. In its more recent forms, this kind of glamour has become identified with either 'vulgar' appropriation or defiant class drag, in both cases serving to emphasise rather than disguise the class of its wearer. Carol Dyhouse's history of the term, however, traces how glamour's possibilities for transcending class and gender barriers generated predictable anxiety, cloaked in snobbery and appeals to national loyalty: at the height of 'glamour' as emulative and ambitious artifice and excess, a signifier of the upwardly-mobile and autonomous woman 'on the make', British Vogue encouraged its female readership to forsake this brash, democratic and over-the-top aesthetic in favour of a 'natural English look'”.
I’ll end with an article by The Guardian from last year. Lush’s Miki Berenyi’s Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me from Success is an essential memoir that, among other things, sees her discuss her time in music when Britpop was celebrating men and not embracing edgy and alternative women who were doing things their own way and looking to be heard and respected:
“James does in fact offer Lush the chance to plug Lovelife in Loaded, but only if Emma and I strip down to bikinis. It takes me a moment to realise he’s serious. And why shouldn’t he be? Plenty of others have no issue with baring the flesh, so why shouldn’t he assume that I’m up for it, too?
Emma and I do a photo shoot for Dazed and Confused and are presented with a rack of clothes selected by a stylist. The photographer picks me out a black top and a leather mini. It’s only when I put them on that it becomes apparent that the skirt is the width of a football scarf and barely covers my arse. As we walk through the magazine’s busy offices, I tie my jumper around my waist to cover my rear and make sure I walk bolt upright, lest the skirt ride up any further.
This kind of sexist bullshit is becoming commonplace and reframed as “edgy”. I’m recommended a hot new photographer who is hailed as a visionary genius for shooting underage models in white underwear having a pillow fight on a bed. The snapper’s brilliant creative idea is to have Emma and me pose in a toilet cubicle. We position ourselves in our usual stance, but now he’s telling me to stick one leg against the door or push my hip out and stretch an arm up the wall. Any shift in my posture has the microskirt riding up, so I cautiously comply only as far as dignity will allow. When he indicates that he wants me to bend over the toilet, legs splayed and look back at him over my shoulder, I realise that this whole set-up is an elaborate ploy. The magazine isn’t interested in Lush, they just want some wank fodder for their readers. I firmly tell him no and we finish the shoot. The piece ends up relegated to an eighth of a page with about 40 words of text.
At one of the Soho House soirees, while I order drinks, a drunk comedian slurs at me to either suck his cock or fuck off. As I stand chatting to friends, Alex from Blur is sprawled on the floor making “phwoarr” noises and sinks his teeth into my arse. The Carry-On Sid James impersonations are a common theme. I fall into conversation with Keith Allen and try to ignore him sweeping his eyes around my body, twitching with overheating gestures and tugging at his collar to show he’s letting off steam. Another comedian sharing a cab ride suggests he come in for a bunk-up, despite having spent the entire night excitedly chatting about his imminent fatherhood. Liam Gallagher shuffles around me, wondering aloud when I’ll be ready to fuck him in the toilets.
This isn’t flirting, it’s constant, relentless sexualisation. And there’s a nasty edge to it, implying that it’s me, not them, who is asking for it.
IN THIS PHOTO: Lush in 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: Gie Knaeps/Getty Images
I recall Suzanne Vega once pointing out that Madonna may be breaking boundaries, but every teenage girl who dresses like her is still treated like a slut. I’m experiencing a similar uncomfortable side effect with the supposed androgyny of Britpop. While Justine from Elastica and Sonia from Echobelly and Louise from Sleeper, wearing suits or jeans and T-shirts, get treated as one of the boys, my long hair and short dresses are now a signal that I’m gagging for it. I’ve been doing what I do for years and now I’m being reframed as happy to be objectified.
I’ve been reading feminist texts since college, however unfashionable that might be right now – and to be fair, Chris always found it a bit tiresome. My education, both at North London Poly and from the politicised bands I’ve followed, has taught me to see through the “harmless fun” to the misogyny that drives it. I’m not militant about it. I don’t crucify people for crossing a line, I just recognise there is one. And I need to know someone well enough to accept that they’re “just joking”; I’m not going to swallow it as an excuse from a bloke I’ve just met.
I tag along to the NME Brats awards and the only women to take the stage all night are some semi-clad dancing girls and Candida Doyle, keyboard player in Pulp. Of the 17 categories, with 10 entries each, there are just seven women included and four of those are in the solo artist category: Madonna, Björk, PJ Harvey and Alanis Morissette (Paul Weller wins). The claim that Britpop celebrates sassy women in bands is a veneer. I saw it before with riot grrrl, where (in the UK, at least) the press consisted mainly of pitting women against each other. It spawned a host of “women in rock” debates that to my shame, I got dragged into, badmouthing Kylie Minogue when it was the men comparing every other female musician disparagingly to her sexy pop”.
I do love a lot about Britpop. At its best, it saw some sensational artists go head-to-head. There was this sense of celebration and hope. This is something hard to imagine today. We do not often look at the darker and more regressive side of Britpop: one where women were sexualised and overlooked. This misogyny and inequality is explored in an episode of the brilliant The Rise and Fall of Britpop on BBC Sounds. I would urge everyone to listen to the series! To end, I wanted to combine together the amazing women of Britpop. Those pioneers and hugely influential figures whose music will endure for decades! If they were not given their dues and respect in the 1990s, I think that there has been a correction and fonder retrospective attitude. It is clear that these amazing women gave such much to the music scene at pivotal and celebrated time in British culture. More importantly, they opened doors and have influenced a whole wave of female artists coming through. For that alone, they should be offered…
ETERNAL respect, gratitude and thanks.