The Sound & The Feeling

22nd October 2010

Text with 15 notes

The Sound & The Feeling

(Notes on why sometimes, we just need to listen to a woman)

1.

Let me tell you about the first time I saw Little Fish live.

I should start by saying that I know them, I’ve shared beers with them, and this is not a story about how I stumbled into a room and discovered a brilliant new band. This is, however, a story about how sometimes it takes a woman with a guitar to make music mean something again.

We were in Wales. It was late May, it was warm, and the dew stuck to our cheeks as we shuffled into this tiny venue. We’d been driving for hours and now we were sucking down cider like hungry babes. I was frowning and furrowing my brows. It was late; I was tired. I’m not very good at letting myself relax. Even several pints into an evening I’m uptight and obsessive.

But we pushed our way to the very front of the room anyhow, because these were our friends, and we wanted to support them. Singer and guitarist Juju said hello; drummer Nez sat quietly behind her. Hammond player Ben hunched over his instrument. There was a hush. And then this sound happened, and my smile was a reflex, not a choice. I was buoyed by what I heard and I didn’t care anymore that I was overdressed or that I had a lot of work to get done in the morning. There was just the sound and the feeling it gave me and nothing else.

The magic of that night can, to a certain extent, be attributed to its unexpectedness. There we were - band, audience - all sweating and swaying together. And I realized that I had long ago forgotten how to enjoy music, and suddenly tonight, half-drunk, weary, in a Welsh village, I had remembered.

At 14 I fell in love for the first time. He was in a band and we shared an obsession with music. He was the only boy who had ever shown me any positive attention, and we spent three blissful months making out in the library during lunch before, on the last day of school, he dumped me.

All summer long I brooded. My best friend and I adopted a uniform; we dyed our hair, wore steel-toed Doc Martens and fashioned necklaces out of links of chains, painted our fingernails black, ripped our fishnet stockings, bought plastic studded belts and slung them around our tiny waists like a beauty queen’s sash.

We went to gigs, dropped off and then picked up a few hours later by our baffled parents. Each time I heard an angry lyric I pretended that it was an expression of my own sentiments; I liked to think that every song had been written for me, to use against him. Music, I had discovered, is not just about what you hear; it is also about what you feel.

At home I listened to women, too, but when we went to live acts it was always to see men. Pale-faced sweaty men who jackhammered their way through each song. They were precise but never very inspiring. Some of them were real heartthrobs; we were bored of the clean-faced, drug-addled boys of our private school (all popped collars and Abercrombie & Fitch tracksuit bottoms). We liked the swollen piercings, the greasy hair and thin limbs, the idea that not every male specimen was a pot-smoking Lacrosse star with an expensive car and a tortured relationship with his parents.

So yes, we enjoyed our male singers. But I started to feel that there was something clinical and sterile about their performances. I didn’t know it, but I think what I actually wanted was a woman to stand up there and shout and strut. Because I was a woman who had been scorned, and though I had no particular voice of my own, I wanted somebody out there to say what I felt in just the way that I felt it, which was messy, and not traditionally feminine but not masculine, either. Just human.

A friend of mine has a theory that women make poor drummers because they don’t have the same rigid sense of rhythm that men do. And maybe that’s right; maybe the trick, the difficulty, is all in the rhythm after all.

As summer ended I found that the thing which had initially given me comfort had become something that felt safe, which is exactly the opposite of what rock should be. Let’s face it. I didn’t want a steady beat and a scrawny 20-something boy whining about the hot girl who had snubbed him. I wanted a different rhythm and a different song.

I don’t usually go in for militant feminism. I always thought that the purest and nicest form of it was just live your life, so I’ve mostly tried to do that. I can vote and earn enough money to support myself. All I need is to be happy and I can be happy the way things are, mostly, most of the time.

But I think I’ve figured out that thing about Little Fish - the thing, the thing that’s really hard to describe even when you’ve seen it - is that there’s a woman standing there with a guitar and a voice that gives you chills. And that feels good.

Juju herself is tiny - svelte, handsome, understated. And then you see her perform, and it’s like a much prettier version of what happens to Bruce Banner when he becomes The Hulk. A total transformation, a metamorphosis. I’m convinced the earth actually starts spinning faster.

In the end it’s not that it matters, particularly, that she’s a woman. It’s that it matters how many performers are not. The other day we went to a screening of a film about the Oxford music scene. Oxford is a small city that’s produced some big acts. Little Fish is also a product of this environment. And yet in two hours of footage (covering a span of thirty years), we saw just two woman-fronted Oxford bands.

I don’t know why this is and I don’t even think I particularly care. I just know that Little Fish never sounds safe to me. They sound unhinged, in a good way. When I watch them perform I feel something, and it isn’t just lust for a sexy frontman or pain as an overenthusiastic fan jumps up and down on my foot.

It’s about the energy. When you see Little Fish perform it’s like watching an element come into being, like being present at the birth of the universe, seeing the stars rearrange themselves, the planets scatter and shift.

If only 14-year-old me had any idea that this sort of thing was out there.

— Miranda Ward

Tagged: women in rock Miranda Ward writing Little Fish music