FEATURE:
Inside the Brilliant Riot Women
IMAGE CREDIT: BBC
Why the New BBC Series Strikes a Chord in Relation to Ongoing Ageism and Sexism in Music
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I am going to bring in a review…
IN THIS PHOTO: (Back) Lorraine Ashbourne, Amelia Bullmore (front), Rosalie Craig, Joanna Scanlan and Tamsin Greig/PHOTO CREDIT: BBC
for Sally Wainwright’s brilliant Riot Women. You can watch the series here. The plot revolves around five women (Lorraine Ashbourne as Jess Burchill, Joanna Scanlan as Beth Thornton, Tamsin Greig as Holly Gaskell, Rosalie Craig as Kitty Eckersley and Amelia Bullmore as Yvonne Vau) coming together in Hebden Bridge to create a makeshift Punk-Rock band in order to enter a local talent contest but, in writing their first original song, soon discover that they have a lot to say. The title refers to Riot Grrrl, which was an underground feminist Punk movement that began during the early-1990s. Raging against the patriarchy and their dictate, it made feminism more accessible and enthralling to younger generations. I guess, rather than Riot Women being an inversion of a way of introducing feminism to slightly older generations, it is this spin. A movement that, in fact, could and should exist today. For anyone who says that the music industry is not ageist, then you really do need to talk to women! Listen to the most popular radio stations and look at festival line-ups. How many women over the age of forty are being played or headlining festivals? It is very much a double standard. Men over thirty or forty have more opportunities and platforms than women of that age. Think about women who have children and the fact that it is so hard to juggle motherhood with performing. Maternity leave means that their careers are threatened. Also, I think there is still an emphasis on younger women. If a new band came through like we see in Sally Wainwright’s series, would they be covered and given a spotlight? There is still ageism in music. As I have written in previous features, artists such as Kylie Minogue and Lady Gaga have shared their experiences of ageism. Also, as noted, albums released this year from legends like Sophie Ellis-Bextor contain such incredible and interesting Pop. Perimenopop is one of the best of the year and can contend with albums from her younger peers. And yet, there is still more stock in artists under thirty/forty than over, regardless of quality and worth.
If Riot Women is not specifically a commentary on modern music and the sexism and ageism that persists, you can read the title as this wake-up call. The synopsis is “As they juggle demanding jobs, grown-up children, complicated parents, absent husbands, and disastrous dates and relationships, the band becomes a catalyst for change in their lives, and makes them question everything. The themes of the series include the power of friendship, music, and the resilience of women who refuse to be silenced by age or expectation”. I think age is still a barrier for women. I know artists who are in their mid-thirties and forties and say how hard it is to get gigs and spots on radio playlists. Think about a festival like Glastonbury and its main stage headliners. Only once in their history have they had a woman over the age of forty headline (that would be Marcella Detroit of Shakespears Sister. In 1992, they became the first female-fronted band to ever headline the Pyramid Stage). Even if stations other than BBC Radio 2 play women over forty, the reality is that most major stations have an age barrier. Or they are aimed at a younger demographic. For women juggling careers, childcare or who are coming into music at a slightly later time in life, the reality is that the door is very heavy and hard to get through. Though they have a lot to say and deserve as much opportunity as anyone. Riot Women, in addition to be an amazing, funny, warm and thought-provoking series, should ask questions of the music industry. Sexism and misogyny has not exactly gone away. Among artists this year who have talked about ageism include Nicole Scherzinger, who told how she faced ageism early in her career.
In this interview from Rolling Stone UK, we learn more about a series that “reignites the feminist fury of the iot grrrl movement, while also setting the stage for new contemporary voices, as alt-rock duo ARXX provide the original music”. ARXX (Hanni Pidduck and Clara Townsend) and Riot Women’s Joanna Scanlon (Beth) and Rosalie Craig (Kitty) discuss the importance of the series and how older artists, especially women, should be celebrated more. Some of the earliest words in Riot Women are from one of its leads, Beth: “Do you think women of a certain age can become invisible”. This is a question many women in the music industry ask. It is a reason that compelled me to explore the series and ongoing barriers that women in music face:
“Woven into the very fabric of what the Riot Women band learn and practise is the ethos of riot grrrl, the original early-90s underground feminist punk movement spearheaded by Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and represented by bands like Heavens to Betsy, Huggy Bear and Bratmobile.
The movement was born out of a desire to challenge society attitudes that conflated being a girl with being ‘dumb’, ‘bad’, or ‘weak’, but also to highlight the importance of show-ing up for one another, irrespective of lived experiences. When performing, Hanna, then 23, would make the rallying cry of “Girls to the front!” demanding that space be taken up by those who would traditionally be pushed to the back.
One of the riot grrrl manifesto points feels especially relevant to Riot Women: “non-hierarchical ways of being and making music, friends, and scenes based on communication + understanding, instead of competition + good/bad categorisations”. It’s a point Scanlan touches on when discussing anger and punk, and what seems to be the biggest teaching of Riot Women, that “musical skill was secondary to expression”.
Her character’s early scene in the music shop delivers another punk reference. “You thought The Clash were angry,” says Beth. The action then cuts to Kitty, a woman Beth is yet to meet, who will become the band’s lead singer. Pent-up and intoxicated, Kitty jumps atop a former lover’s car and smashes it with a stolen sledgehammer. As she does so, she casts a strikingly similar silhouette to Paul Simonon on The Clash’s infamous London Calling album cover, an image that became immortalised as an iconic symbol of the rebellious punk rock spirit.
Continuing with the theme of rage, Scanlan tells me, “The idea of being feminine does not usually embrace the idea of anger. I think that’s really a central tenet of the drama.” The actor, who remembers punk from the first time around, recalls it as a pure force of working-class anger at what the world meant and the limitations there were for everyone. “I think what Sally’s trying to talk about is there’s got to be an outlet for the resentment and the feelings of fury and rage about what modern society does to all of us. But the accumulation of it when you get older is quite strong. And I think these women are all at the point of just having had enough.”
From the off, it’s clear that Wainwright doesn’t intend to rely solely on the nostalgia of punk and riot grrrl sonics to ensure the success of the new series, which she has described as being scarily exciting. “Anything with Sally at the helm of it is always going to be a cultural moment,” says Craig.
Aside from early references to Hole, Bikini Kill, Skunk Anansie and Garbage, Riot Women gives flowers to new, strong female voices in music, including those of Billie Ei-lish and The Last Dinner Party, not to mention the involvement of Brighton two-piece ARXX, who have written the show’s original music.
The Riot Women soon discover that music is a way to reclaim their autonomy. “They’re the wife, they’re the mother, and actually having something just for you or having some-thing that you’re not defined by… [They’re] trying to create a new shape, really,” says Craig. She references the sneering reactions these women face from their immediate families as they discuss their intentions to join a band at their age, yet it’s noted early on in the series that they would have been afforded the luxury to start much sooner had they been male. What they discover is how much fun it is to play music with other people.
Scanlan elaborates, highlighting the ultimate “pinch point” between conforming to mounting standards for women, who are expected to look after everybody else but are also thinking, ‘Hang on, how long have I got left and what else do I want to do with my limited time?’
What DIY teaches on a broader level beyond the physical act of making music is a means of regaining control and architecting an environment in your own vision. It’s all the more necessary for underrepresented groups, with ARXX describing the DIY space as pivotal to giving voice to those that aren’t usually allowed to be heard, even more so at a time when Government policy is coming into place to “squash” minority voices.
“You need these spaces to realise that you can say what you need to say,” Pidduck elaborates. “You can feel what you need to feel, and you can have that community and you can just make it happen.” Riot grrrl used these DIY ethics to bypass traditional, mainstream media and cultural gatekeepers in order to generate art, music and literature that spoke to them, that they felt represented by, and to make it easier to see, hear and share each other’s work.
As far as ARXX’s involvement is concerned, the duo have certainly won fans in both leads, with Craig praising what they’re saying as young people in the world as “amazing”, and Scanlan likening picking her favourite ARXX original in the show to the idea of “choosing between her children”. For the band, their love of the show is in the enriching message it sends, and how it tells a story which can be accessed by everyone because you don’t realise how political it is.
“Riot grrrl has not disappeared, it’s just evolved,” says Pidduck. “But for people thinking that that was something that happened and doesn’t happen anymore, go to a gig, hun.” With that in mind, can we expect to see Riot Women live in the future? Craig is keen, and her eight-year-old daughter even more so. “I’ve still got the guitar that Kitty has in the show, and she’s having a go,” Craig recalls with a grin. “I just thought, ‘Well, that’s great if you’ve come to see me at work and it’s inspired you to pick up an electric guitar.’”
And the incentive for older women, trans and non-binary people? “We have many more stories to tell. If anything, older artists should be celebrated more,” ARXX conclude. “I hope the show gives a little bit of that energy”.
You only need to look at recent releases from music icons like Kylie Minogue to realise some of the richest and best work comes later in their career! How they have the same verve, energy, worth and skill as younger contemporaries. Their greater experience and longer careers should be seen as a positive and not a drawback. I do think that sixth-wave feminism will formulate soon and, among its objectives, will be positivity, kindness, greater rights for women; tackling sexual assault and misogyny and also highlighting the voices and stories of older women. I am going to wrap things up soon. I do want to bring in this glowing review from The Guardian regarding the extraordinary Riot Women:
“First, we meet Beth (Joanna Scanlan), who has decided that the only answer to this question is to take her own life. A note is written to her beloved but thoughtless son, Tom (Jonny Green), and propped on the piano and she is getting prepared – when the phone rings. It’s her brother, Martin, selfish to the point of viciousness, calling to berate her for putting their mother in a home that will eat up the inheritance he was looking forward to instead of continuing to care for her by herself. Beth roars back at him, but not cathartically enough to turn her from her chosen path. She only stops trying to see her plan through when her friend Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne) rings. “D’you want to be in a rock band?”
And we’re off. The call has gone out to their friend Holly (Tamsin Greig) too. She has just ended 30 years in the police force by arresting a drunk and disorderly woman – further disoriented by a hot flush – in a supermarket and giving her a bed for the night as she has no home to go to. The next morning, Holly recognises the magnificently obstreperous felon as Kitty (Rosalie Craig), daughter of local gangster Keith. She will be even less delighted in episode two when Beth discovers Kitty doing karaoke in a bar and brings her along to the first band rehearsal as their new and soon indispensable singer. Though Holly has also invited her joyless sister, Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore), to play guitar so they are roughly equal on the potentially bad decision-makinge.
Add in a thick sprinkling of unrewarding children, parents at various stages of dementia, weak men, bad men, bosses who cannot or will not address the suffering of employees whose problems run deeper than hurt feelings, mounting physical problems in the face of medical indifference, a baby given up for adoption in the 90s and now looking for his birth mother and you have a rich and moreish stew that is offered up in generous portions. And it is, of course, in Wainwright’s customary manner, perfectly seasoned with humour, from the lightest (“Rocco was a tree in assembly. Before and after an explosion. It was heartbreaking”) to the darkest. Kitty was expelled from the posh school she was sent away to at 13 after her mother died and her father couldn’t stand the sight of her. “It was an education in all sorts of way. Apart from … education.”
Like all Wainwright’s best work (and work by the likes of Debbie Horsfield and Kay Mellor before her), Riot Women covers a lot of ground without getting bogged down or leaving the viewer feeling shortchanged. As the band fights to get into a fit state to play at the local fundraiser in six weeks’ time, Beth learns to stand her ground and fight against the invisibility that did so much to make her miserable. She bonds with Kitty partly through admiration of her talent and their shared interest in writing original material for the Riot Women (“Old Bags’ Department” was considered as a band name but ultimately vetoed) but also because she needs to mother, and Kitty, whatever she thinks, needs mothering.
It is a drama that, like Happy Valley, looks at the multitudinous roles women manage, the caring responsibilities that accumulate and how they evolve over a lifetime. Children leave home but never stop taking. Mothers become children and take some more. What do you do if you are caught between the two, alone, and no one is around to give you anything? You turn to your equally depleted friends, dig deeper and give what you can to each other. You become a self-supporting circle, which itself becomes a link in the chain that can keep an entire society going. There will be merry hell to pay when that breaks, of course, but TV with this sort of pedigree and cast will buy us a little more time”.
I do think that the brilliant writing and performances through Riot Women will extend beyond the screen. As The Stylist write about Sally Wainwright’s series: “Wainwright has created a call to arms for women of all ages to make sure they prioritise themselves – and not in a woo-woo, have a bath kind of way – but by making space in their lives for the things they love. And if that’s screaming about hot flushes with more anger than The Clash with your best mates, then we’re all for it”. I hope that there is a movement in music that addresses issues that have remained for decades. How women especially not only are held back and face discrimination and sexism constantly. How, so much of the time, they are the ones fighting for equality and raising issues. The combination of anger, friendship and humour through Riot Women, I feel, could lead to something in the music industry. If women over, say, forty are seen as invisible to many, the truth is that they are not. The industry needs to realise this! Not only by accepting ageism is rife and tackling it. Also, to value their stories and experiences. How some of the best music is being made by women over forty – though, to be fair, many women over thirty face ageism! – and this needs to be valued and rewarded. The brilliant Riot Women has and will create tremors and conversation points that the music industry needs to take note of. Testament to Sally Wainwright’s vision and incredible writing. Given all of that, perhaps the greatest and most pressing question is…
WHERE do we go from here?