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Subject: Typical Girls: Women in Punk/Post-Punk/Underground Music (Circa 1975-1980s)

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  • From: Larry Bob Roberts <larrybob AT gmail.com>
  • To: typicalgirls AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [TypicalGirls] book: Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music
  • Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2009 13:50:08 -0700

I just read the book "Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music" by
Mavis Bayton. I googled the archives of the list and saw only one
in-passing mention of the book. I think it would definitely be of
interest to members of this list.

The author is a sociologist who was a member of an all-women band The
Mistakes, who were based in Oxford, England starting in 1978.
Apparently Simon Frith was her PhD tutor. She started with a study of
women musicians in bands in the early 80s. However, after her thesis
was completed, she was not able to publish a book immediately. So she
undertook another round of research and interviews in the mid-90s, at
the time of Riot Grrrl. Therefore she had two groups of women to
compare.

She notes in the introduction that the book is intentionally written
in an accessible manner - it is not dry and doesn't suffer from
critical theory language problems.

Due to the way the research was conducted, some of the musicians from
the earlier cohort (i.e. the era this mailing list focuses on) are
referred to by pseudonyms. There are some "name" musicians she
interviewed for the book, like Judy Parsons of the Belle Stars (who
was also in The Mistakes), Debbie Smith, Skin, Natasha Atlas, Amelia
Fletcher, Candida Doyle, Emma Anderson of Lush, Gail Greenwood of
Belly, Manda Rin of Bis, Vi Subversa, and Vicki Aspinall. There are
also interviewees who were in more locally-based bands.

Unfortunately the book was only ever published in hardcover from an
academic press, so is expensive to own, but I checked it out from the
SF Public Library and it should be available from many libraries or
via interlibrary loan.

By the way, I really like the social network book site Goodreads - I
have received some good tips from it, and also it's been getting me to
read more books.
I made a women in music shelf among my books there - it's at
http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/49987?shelf=women-in-music

Larry-bob



  • [TypicalGirls] book: Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music, Larry Bob Roberts, 03/08/2009

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