Talking of recent gigs, we’ve just put up some photos from Battle of the Bands. You can see them here.

Looking ahead to the future, we have many exciting gigs coming up. Here’s the ones we have confirmed at present:

Saturday 20th April (Leamington Spa)
We’ll be playing brand new Leamington venue LAMP alongside pop-punkers Taxi Treats and blues rock band Handsome Devils Club. This looks likely to be our last gig on home turf for a little while plus we’ve got a nice long set with many, many (short) songs, so if you live locally you should totally come down to see us play. We might even play some new tunes we’ve been working on…
More details, tickets etc.
Facebook event page.

Friday 10th May (London)
We’re playing the wonderfully named National Minimum Rage at Power Lunches in Hackney. Shopping and Methodist Centre are also playing, there will be DJs from Power Queers and Cinnamon Buns, zine distros, and a screening of “She Said Boom”, a documentary about Canadian feminist punk pioneers Fifth Column.
Facebook event page.

Saturday 11th May (Birmingham)
Can’t make it to London? Well, we’ll be shuttling up to the Midlands the very next day to take part in a punk halfdayer at the Adam & Eve organised by Birmingham collective Punks Alive. There will be many awesome bands playing from 2pm onwards!
Facebook event page.

Thursday 30th May (Birmingham)
We’ll be returning to the Adam & Eve at the end of May for another gig with Punks Alive – this time supporting Swedish goth rockers Dark Valentine.
Punks Alive page.

Saturday 29th June (Brighton)
A fundraiser for Daughters Of Eve: an organisation committed to preventing female genital mutilation. It’ll take place in the Cowley Club and there will be a whole host riot grrrlesque groups also playing. More details to follow – keep an eye the live page.

…aaaand finally for now, we’d like to plug the latest issue of the Alternative Female Voices Magazine - not only because it’s great (as usual) but because our song “Balls” is on the covermount CD!

.

We played:

00:00 Anti-Social Media
01:19 Tory Scum
03:41 This Revolution is Not Complete
06:44 Balls
07:52 Kirsty’s PhD
08:48 The Facilitation of Lawful Protest
11:43 My Body

It doesn’t seem fair to label the night a disaster: there were fantastic performances from other acts, particularly headliner Devon Mayson, and we were grateful for the extremely positive response we recieved from many members of the audience. However, we feel it is important to publicly address some of the things that went wrong.

Sexist heckling

We started our set on a pretty positive note. It rapidly became unpleasant after Ruth began to read an extract from My message to those who would attend Radfem 2012 in light of the recent announcement of the transphobic Radfem 2013 conference. The room went silent during the reading…only to be broken by laughing from a corner. Apparently transphobia is hilarious.

Things rapidly went downhill from there as we were then subjected to a series of sexist taunts: “how does it feel?” “I prefer gang rape!”

We responded in anger. We told those responsible how we felt about their comments. We asked them if they were prepared to emerge from their corner booth to talk with us about it face-to-face (they weren’t, surprise surprise). We accused them of being cowards.

And then we carried on playing, deliberately aiming our venom at the sexist power structures that enable gendered abuse and violent language.

After a couple of songs we noticed that the hecklers were leaving. We levelled a barrage of abuse at them until they were out of the door, before thanking everyone else in the room and continuing with our set. Apparently they had been asked by venue staff to leave. We weren’t aware of this at the time, but were grateful for it in retrospect. Ejecting them from the venue was the right decision, particularly given that the event was themed around LGBT liberation.

We played another tune before being informed that we didn’t have long left. We quickly agreed to drop one of the remaining songs, before then being told we only had time for one more. So we agreed upon a set closer and Ruth – not realising that we hadn’t actually been on particularly long - announced to the audience that it would be our last song.

As we played a woman wearing a Coventry SU hoodie approached Kirsty and asked us to wrap it up. Kirsty – annoyed to be interrupted whilst she was playing – informed her briefly that we were going to finish the song.

In the end we played a set that was roughly 20 minutes long. We had been alloted up to 40 minutes in which to perform.

Rape culture is fucking terrible

Needless to say, both the attitude of the hecklers and the comments they made were completely out of order. We make no apology for reacting in anger.

Not Right is a political act, and informed by feminism. We believe that sexism (and transphobia) should be tackled directly and never tolerated. If bigoted behaviour is unaddressed, it will only prosper. The world will only become a better place if hateful attitudes are challenged directly.

We live in a world of unnecessary suffering that is only perpetuated through greed and fear as well as sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism, ageism etc. Addressing these inqualities and fighting for a better world is deeply important to us as a band. You can’t change the world a lot with a song, but you can take a stand.

Having made our objections clear, we made an effort both to continue playing, and to address both other members of the audience and members of staff at the venue in a friendly and polite manner both before and after we left the stage. The actions of a few unpleasant individuals should not have to spoil the night for anyone.

Coventry SU’s response

It seems that the staff of Coventry Students’ Union and several members of Coventry LGBT+ did not agree with our assessment of the situation. As the night draw to a close, it was made quite clear to us that our set had been cut because of our response to the sexist heckling. We were informed that we should have let venue staff deal with the problem without attempting to confront it ourselves.

We have a number of issues with this position.

Firstly, if we hadn’t powerfully highlighted what was happening, it was unlikely that the hecklers would have been ejected from the venue. It certainly didn’t seem like anyone was paying a huge amount of attention at first.

Secondly, by implying that our response was inappropriate, there is an implication that we were also misbehaving. The venue staff’s approach – to blame all those involved in a situation, kick one group out and give the other group a warning - is in many ways understandable. It absolves them of ‘picking sides’ in any confrontation that may occur in the venue.

However, we feel this approach fails to acknowledge either the nature of the incident that actually took place, or the seriousness of that incident. In suggesting that we were at fault for responding with legitimate anger, we feel that Coventry SU implicitly tolerated the violent language used against us.

Finally, failing to communicate properly with a band is quite rude; cutting their set short before attempting to persuade a band to leave the stage whilst they’re playing their last song is exceptionally so.

We are not members of Coventry Students’ Union, or Coventry LGBT+. We do not know who was responsible for the various decisions taken. But those individuals were representing their respective organisations, and this reflects poorly upon both.

Thanks to the lovely people

We don’t want to end on a negative note. In many ways, last night’s gig was a great success. We feel we played a pretty decent set under the circumstances, and it was clear that a large proportion of the audience enjoyed it.

We don’t have a problem with Coventry students, let alone LGBT students at Coventry. In fact, we were grateful for the overwhelmingly positive reception we recieved from many people in the room. We’d like to thank those people – you were awesome. Thank you for watching us playing, dancing to our songs, reading our zines. We hope to see you at a gig again soon!

Massive love, and down with sexism.

Not Right

From the (recent) past to (near) future…we‘re now booked for four events in the coming months:

On Tuesday 5th February we’ll be playing in the Copper Rooms for the annual University of Warwick Battle of the Bands. This will be the second year we enter, and once again we’ll be going all-out for our 15-minute performance. Last year we caused a bit of a stir after unexpectedly getting into the semi-final – this year, who knows?

Thursday 21st February: from the University of Warwick to Coventry University – we’re down to play at Love Music Hate Homophobia at Hush nightclub. More details to follow!

Saturday 16th March will see the return of Revolt! A proper line-up announcement for Coventry’s DIY riot grrrl ruckus should follow soon.

…and on Friday 10th May we’ll be returning to London for a gig with National Minimum Rage in Hackney’s Power Lunches!

Full details (and updates, when we have them!) can be found on our live page.

All other details remain broadly the same (it should kick off around 7pm – we should be on first – it’s at the Zephyr Lounge). However, Snowy fans should note that our drummer will also be performing later in the night with one of his other bands – two-tone revivalists Old Raskals. That’s double servings of Snowy for a mere three pounds…

Whilst we’re at it with this update, you might be interested in seeing the pictures from Revolt we’ve finally got around to uploading!

The first will take place on Saturday 26th January in the Zephyr Lounge, Leamington Spa. We’re opening a punk night that will also feature performances from We Are A Communist, Deathsex Bloodbath and Parataxis.

We’re also going to be playing Revolt! again at Taylor John’s House in Coventry on Saturday 16th March – the first event was huge amounts of fun with some amazing bands, DJs and distros, and this second night promises to be at least as good again!

More details on these events will follow soon, and we’re also planning to enter the University of Warwick Battle of the Bands for a second year running – more on that when we have it!

We’ll be playing alongside atomic surf-rock group We Are A Communist, pop-rockers Jordan and the Sketcheads and, uh, Warwick Glee. There will also be some kind of performance or dance lesson type thing from Warwick Salsa, and DJs from Rocksoc. Who needs genre consistency?

Tickets will be on sale soon here.

Revolt was full of awesome. The other acts were fantastic, the night had a great vibe and everything just went perfectly to plan (…which was weird, because I’ve been involved in a lot of nights and things never go perfectly to plan). There was feminism everywhere. I hear that our set went well but it was actually pretty difficult to tell from on-stage. I mostly remember some amusing false starts and trying to sing through a face full of hair.

There have been some pretty cool reviews in the wake of Revolt: you can read a couple of them at Cath Elms’ blog and the Atta Girl page.

We’ve also received a first review for Punk Is Not, courtesy of the Streetlamp blog. They compare us favourably to early 80s punk group !Action Pact! which is pretty damn flattering.

Finally (for now!) I’d like to draw your attention to some additions we’ve been making to this website. If you click on “sound and vision” you’ll find a whole host of photos, videos (including most of our set from Notts Pride), lyrics and the like. We’ve also finally got around to scanning our second and third zines, which you can find (predictably) under the “zines” tab. We’ll be periodically updating with new photos, new lyrics and the like as people take more pictures of us and we write more songs.