Big Joanie w/Breakup Haircut, No Home & The Nitty Gritty DJ Dapper D
Bad Vibrations is delighted to welcome London's Big Joanie to MOTH CLUB on Thursday 23rd January 2020 with support from Breakup Haircut, No Home & The Nitty Gritty DJ Dapper D.
Made up of Stephanie Phillips, Chardine Taylor-Stone and Estella Adeyeri, the trio have been described as 'The Ronettes filtered through 80s DIY and 90s riot grrrl, with a sprinkling of dashikis'. 2018 saw them release their debut album Sistahs with the new label imprint ‘The Daydream Library Series’ run by Thurston Moore, Eva Prinz and Abby Banks. It’s a bold record about friendships, melancholy memories, and hope for the future and was released with wide acclaim.
Outside of the band all three members have strong community ties, from helping run the festival for punks of colour Decolonise Fest, coaching new talent at Girls Rock London, or launching the ‘Stop Rainbow Racism’ campaign which works to stop racist performances in LGBT venues. Black feminism is at the heart of Big Joanie’s music and actions, and with the release of Sistahs the band hope to spread their message even further.
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"That was really fun to put out, and it’s a great record. It’s a little self serving of me to talk about something that I put out, but that’s the record I’ve been listening to a lot lately."
- Thurston Moore
"The accomplished debut from the DIY UK post-punk trio is simmering with possibility and pure conviction."
- Pitchfork
Gal-Dem interview Big Joanie
Here’s an excerpt…
It must be quite inspiring with the amount of touring you’ve been doing, the number of people you’ve gotten to play with or meet… have you been offered any particularly helpful advice?
Chardine: I think most of the stuff you learn is from watching people, seeing how they are on stage. From playing with Downtown Boys, we learned about fixing a set and making the whole thing a performance, even during changeovers. Even though we’re in a punk band, when you start playing with some of the bigger acts you see that they really do take it seriously. Things like looking after your body, making sure you warm-up and don’t just go out there and just start screaming. We saw this with Beth Ditto and Gossip – it’s so much more than singing really powerfully for 90 minutes each day, you see how people look after themselves and manage to make sure that their performances are good for their audiences.
Do you think social media has been helpful in terms of spreading political messages and discussion, or do you think it’s created more problems than it’s worth?
Chardine: I think there was a tipping point around 2013. I met a lot of people online who are still mates, but there was always the space that was offline – a black feminist meeting group was the place that you went, and it feels like that’s now gone. I don’t even know where the black feminist meet-up groups are now that aren’t just panel discussions? Those are about you looking up to someone rather than engaging and being part of the conversation, and it’s often conversation which is truly useful. Meet-up groups remind us that everyone is equal and taught me about the struggles of South Asian women, how they differ and how they are similar to my own. It’s really beneficial to learn about the struggles of other people of colour.
Steph: I guess it’s good in that, if the others had never seen my posts online about wanting band members or been reading my blog, we may never have come together. But because of the way that social media works, a lot of conversation isn’t as natural – someone puts out a statement and people will either agree or refute it. It creates a different dynamic, and the black feminist conversation has become panels where you agree or disagree silently from the audience with what’s being said rather than engaging and developing your own thoughts. It’s a shame, as it doesn’t help activism move into real spaces and beyond a hashtag.
I think lots of people feel like they would like to take that activism out into the ‘real world’, but aren’t really sure that they have the power. From your perspective, where do you think is the best place to start in terms of learning how to use your voice?
Steph: The notion of needing to create a platform for something so often comes before you’ve actually developed what it is you want to say in the first place. So what happens is that people with underdeveloped politics end up doing a lot of talking without enough knowledge. Just because you have the confidence to speak, doesn’t mean you’re ready to do so. Sometimes a person who has the least confidence is the right person. Start with developing your understanding of yourself, your communities and getting people together in real spaces. Sometimes just having a meet-up and learning about other people is enough – we don’t really know about our neighbours anymore. We talk about them and acknowledge they’re there, but what can we do to help them? That’s really essential and something I’ve been thinking about for the last year, about how to make that happen and use things like Decolonise Fest [the DIY Punk event that the band are involved in organising] to engage with that.
Chardine: Definitely, consciousness-raising groups were and will always be so essential. If you look historically to the Combahee River Collective, that was a kind of consciousness-raising group that allowed people to find the connections around their experiences. That’s where the activism comes from – a collective, rather than lots and lots of individuals trying to create a voice about an issue. A good modern example would be OWAAD – Organisation of Women of Asian/African Descent: one of their first direct actions was a sit-in at Heathrow Airport in protest of the mistreatment and body searches of women who were coming from Pakistan and Bangladesh.
I’d like to see more stuff around structural issues, rather than the representational stuff. It’s important that people are out there doing the whole ‘my experience as a black woman’ thing, but you can’t just keep doing those things as an individual. Me talking on a panel about black feminism will maybe make one or two people think about things, but without all the other stuff that I do, it doesn’t mean anything. There’s a lot more going on that just the talking – some of the people I know frighten me with how much them put themselves on the line: the lawyers and activists that are there day in and day out at detention centres, writing letters of advocacy. You never hear about them on social media, they’re not doing it for 50,000 followers. Those are the people doing the work.
Steph: People need to focus on the work rather than the glory because the work will see you through. People will be able to recognise when you’ve made a difference and you’ll know it too – it will mean a lot more than getting a book deal or a viral tweet.
Chardine: It does make you think. Every feminist wave has its legacy. There was the campaign for the right to vote, or things around abortion in the seventies, things that we have structurally in legislation and the law. With this generation, what is our legacy going to be? That’s something we need to think about, because if it’s just a couple of deals for books that will probably go out of print in 10 years time, then there is more we need to do.