Manchester and New York

Tomorrow me and Gina are going to Manchester to show the Stories from the She-Punks film; we will each be playing a song afterwards too and the event will be hosted by John Robb, of The Membranes.
Here is the link- it's on early at 6 p.m. so you have plenty of time to go out to wherever you were going afterwards: https://homemcr.org/film/stories-from-she-punks/

On Sunday, I'm flying to New York for a few days. The author Simon Reynolds and the academic Asif Siddiqi have teamed up to put on a day's seminar, with a group of academics who were asked to choose our favourite tracks to write a chapter on, and we are being flown over there and accommodated too. What luxury!
I finally got the chapter draft on Oh Bondage! Up Yours finished yesterday. But everything about Poly's life makes me want to cry at the moment. Going through the terrible press cuttings: oh how vicious you were, you reviewers! So many of them are cosy Guardian-type writers now, yet they hounded that lovely young person like a pack of hunters with baying hounds until they destroyed her band, and almost destroyed her too. I truly believe that they felt she had to be punished for not being weak; they wanted to break her spirit. No wonder we all like her so much now!
That was 1970s society for you: 'Get up, shut up! Girl you have no rights!' (sung to the Bob Marley tune).

I've really enjoyed reading Zoe Howe and Celeste Bell's book on Poly (Celeste is her daughter) because it manages to celebrate her without leaving out the dark bits. at the book launch I was much taken by what Celeste said about Poly loving fluorescent colours as an antidote to all the darkness she saw all around her. Punk was all very well, turning everything inside out as it did, but the hidden insides of everything was horrible: all that violence, racism and deviation laid out on display alongside the dying embers of British industrialisation. No wonder we all though the end of the world was nigh.

Now I'm restless! Will I forget how to play guitar before next Saturday? I get off the return flight at 7 a.m. then play a set at this gig in Northwich in the afternoon. This has been year of mad doings, and this is probably the maddest. But look at the bands on the bill! I guess I start drinking coffee at 8 a.m. and then just power though it all. I can't bear to miss any of it!