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

[WWWhatsup <joly AT punkcast.com>]

[I tried to get someone to vid the Totally Wired thing at the Roundhouse but 
failed - Simon also tells me he left his audio recorder at home :) - there's
a short report at the link below : Ana da Silva joined the pane - Viv 
Albertine
mocked the audience and smirked at Colin Newman etc, plus an earlier chat
with Quietus ed. John Doran


http://thequietus.com/articles/01163-simon-reynolds-in-conversation-talking-totally-wired

[excerpt]

JD: One of the quotes that rang clearest to me was Green Gartside
talking about taping John Peel. ("I would tape the Peel shows
on a Saturday and for want of anything else to do, I would
listen to that tape every night or day until the following
weekend. And the thing that stayed with you, I found, was the
challenging stuff. The music you found most difficult on the
Sunday by the next weekend had become your favourite.") I've
been thinking about this a lot recently and as someone who
struggles by as a music writer I literally do occasionally
have sleepless nights worrying about some aspects of the music
industry and where the whole thing is going. And the whole
cultural strip mining effects of unabated peer to peer file
sharing and the manic catalogue reissue programmes even though
the entire market is obviously saturated in music and product.
Could we ever have a movement like post punk ever again? Would
a young musician ever have the cultural space occurring that
people like Green Gartside had to sit round and think about
things like they did?

SR: "It doesn't seem like it. It seems like we've gone into
this irreversible state of - to use the word you brought up -
saturation; which is a word that applies on so many levels.
Market saturation, memory saturation, time saturation and the
way the culture and technology is going we seem to have
bizarre state of affairs where things are going so fast that
we're at a standstill. We've got so many distractions that
we're bored at the same time. But it's different to the
boredom I felt as a kid which was this yawning gulf of empty
time and you just had to fill it with something and it might
be mischief or you might drift into the dream world of music
of the few records that you could own at that time. I feel
that music now has become a paradise that's become a hell. I
have so many records mainly because I've been collecting for
years and because I've been sent things and perhaps I have
more than the average person but the thing is now anyone can
be in the situation I'm in. Any young person can immediately
drown themselves in virtually, absolutely everything. And now
there might be something that you're sneakily looking for on
the net [laughs] that you might not be able to get hold of but
virtually everything that has ever been recorded is out there.
And I don't know what kind of consciousness or creative
consciousness can survive that kind of inundation. It feels
almost like a cultural catastrophe. I mean, obviously,
sometimes it's great if I can, say, find some really obscure
BBC Radiophonic thing that barely came out at the time but is
up there on the web. But at the same time it seems to have
gone wrong somehow. It's like getting everything you wished
for as a music fan and it turning out to be a terrible
nightmare. I don't know, what do you think?"

JD: I think so, yeah. I'm really wary on one hand of coming across
like the narrator of a Hovis ad.

SR: "It were all fields round here in the post punk days!"


Joly MacFie 
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