Sometimes things just explode, in a good way. That is what it has been like discussing with Frankie Green the possibilities of setting up an archive to document the music made by women in the UK Women’s Liberation Movement.
Frankie playing drums with Jam Today at a women’s festival in Amsterdam in 1977.
After a typically casual, but well informed tip off from WLM activist stalwart Gail Chester, that Frankie was also interested in mapping the history of WLM music, I dropped her an email to see what her plans were. And so it seems, at separate ends of the country, our thoughts and desires were running in parallel lines. In the past weeks we have been getting together a project plan that we want to begin in earnest in September, more news of which will be posted here soon, but expect more of the exciting goodness you have already see here: music, biographies, oral histories, photographs and videos that tell you part of the many lost stories of women’s musical heritage.
Jam Today, 23 July, 1976 at their rehearsal space in Peckham
To tell you a little bit about Frankie:
She was a 60s activist in the anti-apartheid and anti-Vietnam war movements, the Gay Liberation Front then the Women’s Liberation Movement. She played drums in two early feminist groups: The London Women’s Rock Band (1972 – 1974) and Jam Today (1976 – 1979.) In the 80s, after working in the Sisterwrite/Bite bookshop/café collective she went on to take a BA in Cultural Studies and an MA in literature, then worked in London Lighthouse, libraries, literacy tutoring and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign before moving to Whitstable, where she lives with her partner, writer/activist Diane Langford.
Jam Today photo from Sounds article, 1976
Frankie has just published her first novel which you can order direct from dreamboat@meteorites.plus.com. Perhaps most exciting is that she is now compiling a personal history of her political experience in GLF and WLM called ‘While We’re Still Here.’ Frankly Frankie, I can’t wait to read it.
Frankie playing ukele in Whitstable, 2010
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