The hoary old legends of rock journalism are seldom those who deserve a place in history. If pioneers such as Ellen Willis and Caroline Coon got half the glory of verbose stylists like Nick Kent and Lester Bangs, modern music criticism would be in healthier shape. Vivien Goldman lives among these overlooked heroes of the inkies era. From the mid-70s, she became Bob Marley’s first UK publicist, critic, musician, music video director and musical writer among other gigs (including occasional writing for the Guardian). Her work for NME, Melody Maker and Sounds in the 1970s and 80s offered sparkling and righteous reportage from a figure who lived cheek-to-cheek with London’s punk and reggae stars and never strayed from her ethos.
This book should restore Goldman’s place in the rock-crit firmament just as she sets out to give punk’s women their long-denied dues. It only takes a glance at the covers of heritage rock mags and bookshop music sections to see how punk – a supposedly egalitarian, no-heroes movement – has made second-class citizens of its most vital agitators: women. “Revenge,” Goldman writes, “means getting the same access as your male peers.” Revenge of the She-Punks is by no means a screed against the genre’s leading men – indeed, one of Goldman’s many tenets is that punk made by women is not merely the response to male punk, but subject to its own unique motivations and organising principles.
In a piece she wrote for Melody Maker about the Raincoats, the radical band signed to Rough Trade, she wondered whether one definition of this new “women’s music” lay in the group’s rejection of lead singers or players: “a conscious change from the top-dog/underdog pattern set up by the patriarchal structure”. Forty years on, Goldman applies the band’s approach to her history of feminist punk, not following chronology or star names, but dividing the book into four chapters – on identity, money, love and protest – explored through playlists of individual songs on those themes and interviews with their creators.
She selects those tracks from movements, decades and continents removed from London’s year zero: in Protest, she places post-riot grrrl icons Sleater-Kinney on a level playing field with censored Indian teen-girl band Pragaash (briefly active, then subject to a fatwa in 2013) and radical Colombian sister group Fértil Miseria, who since 1990 have used their performances to collect food and provisions for women and children disenfranchised by violence. This democratising technique defies the idea of feminist punk as a monolith – especially a white, western one – and suggests the infinite and equally legitimate ways in which other writers could tell its story.
As Goldman writes, those who declare punk to be dead are often “disgruntled punks on a pension”. At 64, she is not among them. Revenge of the She-Punks is remarkably alert to matters of class, race and geographic privileges and norms, elegant with that perspective and free from judgment. In the chapter on love, Goldman covers Grace Jones’s frustration that, as a physically imposing black woman, men could never understand her as soft or sensual; Neneh Cherry’s vision of family as integral to her conception of love; British band the Mo-dettes’ admirably third-wave feminist thinking in a second-wave era (“being female is not something to apologise for or cover up”), alongside Chinese rocker Gia Wang’s internalised misogyny and pro-Trump, pro-abortion stance. “We’re all entitled to a point of view, especially in punk, even if Wang’s responses were this book’s most surprising, even shocking, given her artistic choices,” Goldman writes.
Stories you know, about Blondie and original riot grrrls Bikini Kill, live alongside obscure but vital vignettes into other cultures’ trailblazers, such as Spain’s Las Vulpes. In 1983 they performed their song Me Gusta Ser una Zorra (I Like Being a Bitch) on national TV, causing the country’s equivalent of British outrage at the Sex Pistols trashing their interview with Bill Grundy in 1976, and becoming “unwitting pawns in the political battle between the incoming socialists and the old Franco guard”. The only complaint about the fantastic Revenge of the She-Punks is how tantalising and brief these insights are – almost every act cited could warrant their own book (and a Goldman anthology wouldn’t go amiss).
Anyone hungry for further reading is well served by Dayglo, the first book about Poly Styrene, the mixed-race star of brilliant first-wave London punks X-Ray Spex. Assembled by her daughter, Celeste Bell, and writer Zoë Howe, this hefty visual oral history details her childhood as an outcast in Hastings, her radical songwriting with its eye on the commodification of human relationships, her trials with bipolar disorder and long immersion in the Hare Krishnas. (There’s surprising insight from Jonathan Ross, whose first gig was X-Ray Spex.) A band reunion and one final solo album appeared before her death in 2011, aged 53, from breast cancer. True to punk’s no-heroes mantra, it doesn’t shy away from her cruelties – jealously firing saxophonist Lora Logic, neglecting Bell – but Styrene emerges more human for it.
• Revenge of the She-Punks by Vivien Goldman is published by University of Texas Press (£13.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
• Dayglo: The Poly Styrene Story by Celeste Bell and Zoë Howe is published by Omnibus (£25)
