The Fat Angel Sings

This amphetamine-paced double-LP served as a Ramones career retrospective, smack at their peak, and shows the Queens crew almost stumbling across hardcore around the same time California was inventing it. Over four nights in 1977 at London’s Rainbow Theatre, the punk pioneers blasted through 28 songs from their first three albums. (Thanks to their tidily short length, they squeezed in nearly all of ’em.) The final LP version came mostly from the last night, charged with an energy so electric that fans are said to have ripped seats from the floor and thrown them at the stage in enthusiasm. It’s no surprise, as the entire record pulses with American punk’s promise, a spittle-spewing Joey Ramone barely pausing between “Pinhead,” “Do You Wanna Dance?” and “Chain Saw.” He even barely pauses long enough to get out all the lyrics, the band buzzing away behind him like they’re in a machine shop. During post-production, the speed was something with which even the band itself struggled to keep up. In his book, Hey Ho, Let’s Go: The Story of the Ramones, Everett True writes that Dee Dee needed extra fuel to record bass overdubs: an extra-heavy helping of black coffee.

It was Sire Records’ head, Seymour Stein who longed for a live recording of the Ramones. “Their records were great,” he said, “but there was nothing like a live Ramones show. England was a perfect place to do it, because the British audiences loved them and the Ramones loved to play there.” This may have been true the majority of the time, but, ironically, the Ramones were not loving England at Christmas time in 1977.

Legendary producer Ed Stasium recorded The Ramones “It’s Alive” 41 years ago at the Rainbow Theatre in London – a recording that many regard as one of the best live albums ever.

There was nothing to do but hang out in the room; I think that’s when Joey wrote ‘I Wanna Be Sedated.’ It was just so boring there; they literally close everything down for, like, two weeks. It was just weird! It was freezing and it was depressing.”

This was the third trek of the U.K. for the Ramones, the first being July 1976, for two very successful shows at the Roundhouse and Dingwalls (both in London), which were played to enthusiastic crowds and introduced the band to the country. The second was a gruelling month-and-a-half tour from April -June 6, 1977, which included most of Europe and the U.K., with the Talking Heads as the opening act.

Ramones lighting director Arturo Vega stated, “By December of 1977, it was the second time we were in the U.K. in seven months, and that year turned out to be the busiest touring year ever for the Ramones.” This visit was a short jaunt of ten shows that started in Carlisle in mid December and culminated on New Year’s Eve at the Rainbow Theatre in London. “The Ramones were the hottest band in the world and everybody wanted to see them live. Everybody was there,” Arturo adds. “The show was a perfect fast-and-furious punk attack. The party after the show was over-the-top and everybody was in a festive mood, feeling this was only the beginning of the punk revolution. The Ramones were at their prime and the album that came out of that night captured a cultural phenomenon at its peak.”

The plan was to record four consecutive shows at the end of the tour, December 28th-31st: Birmingham, Stoke on Trent, Aylesbury, and The Rainbow Theatre. The facility that I utilized for the recording was the Basing Street Mobile Truck (Island Records), which had a Helios console, fantastic outboard gear, and a great reputation.

Ed travelled with the band and road manager Monte A. Melnick on the “tour” bus, which was not anything like the luxury liners that one sees today. This bus was more of a coach with large windows and rows of seats. Monte would always be busy with paperwork, figuring out every logistic of the trip. Former co-manager Danny Fields (with the late Linda Stein) informed me that at every U.K. venue the Ramones played, An Indian curry was served at soundcheck to ever-complaining band members. Monte, I’m sure, was trying to alleviate this and other hazards of the road; he was the real Fifth member an unsung hero, the glue that kept the band together.

The first three dates we recorded were in clubs. Nothing special. The Ramones, the Basing Street Mobile crew, and myself looked at these shows as a run-through for the recording of the New Year’s Eve gig. The band was performing virtually the same set every night, honing the tunes and playing tighter and tighter, As with the other shows that we’d recorded over the past three days, we arrived early at the venue to set up. This was the show, and we needed to make certain that all of the microphones were placed and functioning properly, the multi-track tape machines were aligned, and that there was no hum or radio stations being picked up by the thousands of feet of microphone cable that connected the stage to the mobile truck.

 When Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy arrived for sound check, they looked around in amazement, a big wow written all over their faces. According to Monte, they had never played in such a large hall before. This was a beautiful theatre with a capacity of approximately 3,000 and a foyer with a dang fountain in it! At this juncture, the group had played only small clubs and theatres; this evening, the Rainbow would be filled with several thousand Ramones fans.

The night’s set list would consist of songs from their first three albums, arguably the best LPs of their career; in other words, it was basically a greatest-hits set list. Which was fitting, considering that the Ramones’ original incarnation (with Tommy on drums) was about to play the most important show of its existence— the culmination of being on the road and honing their craft since the group’s inception in March of 1974. “This show was a big deal,” Tommy says. “We were at our peak. We were still young, and with all those years of playing together, we were in top form. It was the last show of the tour and it was New Year’s Eve.”

The Rezillos and Generation X (featuring a young Billy Idol) were the Ramones’ opening acts. “I was also mixing for Generation X, and they sucked!” my pal Frank Gallagher says. “Although, my mix was great. But the one thing I do recall about the Ramones’ gig was that I had seen the band in America and in Europe, and the fact is that the English audiences were way more receptive and into them than anybody in America was at that time.”

In the truck, I could hear the chant, “Hey-Ho-Lets-Go!” between the songs and sets of the opening acts. As the last chords of The Rezillos’ final song faded into the ether, the crowd sensed that the Ramones were about to perform and the chant grew louder, from just the front few rows to the entire theatre rallying in unison.

In the cold London night outside of the truck, you could practically feel the electricity in the air as the Ramones were about to claim their throne.

The chant developed into a tremendous roar as the band arrived onstage. Johnny strummed an E-chord, Dee Dee tested the limits of his microphone with a healthy German “Eins,” and Tommy did some final adjustments on his drum kit. And then, heeeeeere came Joey . . . “Hey, we’re the Ramones. This one’s called ‘Rockaway Beach.’” Dee Dee belted out the infamous . . . “ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR!”.

The Ramones’ machine was in top gear, driving on full velocity until a short pause after the second song, “Teenage Lobotomy,” when Joey declared, “Well, it’s good to be back in England, and it’s good to see all ya again. Take it Dee Dee!”

“ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR!”

And they busted into their anthem “Blitzkrieg Bop.” The punters were basking in the glory of their heroes. After “Blitzkrieg,” Joey mentioned that he didn’t feel well after ingesting some Chicken Vindaloo.

The gig concluded after 53 minutes, 48 seconds of simply the best punk rock there ever was or ever will be. It was New Year’s ’77-78 and the Ramones had played an unparalleled show, which, fortunately, had been recorded for all to enjoy for centuries to come.

On a technical note, I would like to say that, back in the summer of ’78, Tommy and I spent quite a while with the mixing, paying microscopic attention to this recording’s sound and balance. The mixing took place at the great Mediasound in New York City, at the same time that we were working on “Road To Ruin”. For reasons unknown, the LP was never released on vinyl in the United States, and the U.K. and European versions continue to be desirable collector’s items to this day. Those LPs and the subsequent 1995 CD release were made from second-generation copies, and never has there been a release from the master tapes.

Ed Stasium

words from pleasekillme.com

Cindytalk is the mercurial, expressionist outlet of Scottish artist Cinder. An evolution of her early 1980’s Edinburgh-based punk band The Freeze, she launched the project upon moving to London, inspired by the crossroads of exploratory UK post-punk and early European industrial. Her work thrives on chance and transformation, collaging elements of noise, balladry, soundtrack, catharsis, and improvisation. After a series of celebrated albums for the Midnight Music label as well as collaborations with This Mortal Coil and Cocteau Twins, Cinder migrated to the United States, becoming involved with various underground techno collectives around the Midwest and West Coast. Subsequent relocations to Hong Kong and Japan further expanded Cindytalk’s horizons, resulting in a fruitful partnership with Viennese experimental institution Editions Mego, for whom she released five full-lengths of swooning, granular atmosphere. 2021 finds her as engaged as ever, at the precipice of long-awaited back catalogue reissues alongside multiple new works, guided by her lasting love of discovery and deviation: “new pathways always being uncovered.”

The lead single “A Song of Changes”, celebrating the official reissue of Cindytalk’s fourth album: the ethereal post-punk masterpiece “Wappinschaw“, out July 30th, along with their beautiful minimal ambient album “The Wind is Strong..”

Across decades of activity Cinder’s body of work has forever followed its own elusive muse but nowhere is this restless spirit more apparent and ambitious than the 4th Cindytalk LP, Wappinschaw. Conceived as “a call to arms” inspired by Scotland and its struggle for independence, the title refers to an archaic Scottish battle inspection during which clan chieftains surveyed their group’s weapons to ensure they were combat ready. A mindset of reflective preparation threads throughout the record, manifested in forms both naked and noisy, ancient and anguished.

Opening with an aching solo vocal rendition of the British folk standard “The First Time Ever (I Saw Your Face),” the album then surges into the Cindytalk classic, “A Song Of Changes,” sparkling and spiralling in strange waves of sorrow and joy. From there the mood fragments, tracing asymmetrical paths of feverish dirge, pensive spirituals, noir abstraction, spoken word (landmark Glaswegian writer Alasdair Gray guests on “Wheesht”), bagpipe drone, and apocalyptic post-punk. Given its aggressive eclecticism, it’s not surprising that Cinder describes the creation of Wappinschaw as a “precarious” process, composed from “scraps” with abruptly shifting personnel – a situation only compounded by the impending dissolution of their label at the time, Midnight Music.

Despite, or perhaps because of, these factors, the collection stands as a testament to Cinder’s belief that “so-called experimental can only remain so if you keep challenging yourself.” This is singular and challenging music, texturally jagged and emotionally conflicted, swimming through shivering darkness into fragile pockets of light. At the time of its recording, Cinder was attempting to leave London after many years in the city, dreaming of an ancestral return. But as much as “ideas of homecoming were percolating,” there remained unfinished business, old ghosts to exorcise, culminating in Wappinschaw’s heady, harrowing voyage: “An invocation of spirits of resistance – as much a declaration of war as a declaration of love.”

The 3rd album “The Wind Is Strong…” by Cindytalk began life as the soundtrack to an experimental film by English director Ivan Unnwin entitled Eclipse (The Amateur Enthusiast’s Guide To Virus Deployment), and was originally slated for release via Factory Records‘ video division, Ikon. Inspired heavily by Alan Splet’s eerily disembodied sound design in David Lynch’s Eraserhead, the collection’s 15 pieces seethe between field recordings, wistful piano vignettes, and lurking metallic haze – a hybrid palette Cinder characterized at the time as “ambi-dustrial.” Unfortunately Ikon collapsed on the eve of the project’s completion so the film was never distributed, but the Midnight Music imprint repackaged Cindytalk’s score as an LP in 1990.

The lead single “On Snowmoor”, celebrating the official reissue of Cindytalk’s third album: the beautiful minimal masterpiece The Wind is Strong…, out July 30th, along with their third album of ethereal post-punk Wappinschaw.

Four years following “The Wind Is Strong…”, Cinder’s body of work followed its own elusive muse but nowhere is this restless spirit more apparent and ambitious than the 4th Cindytalk LP, Wappinschaw.

Yep Roc Records has unearthed a piece of history from Berkeley, California’s power-pop heroes The Rubinoos.  On November 3rd, 1976, co-founders Jon Rubin (vocals) and Tommy Dunbar (guitar) entered CBS Studios in San Francisco with drummer Donn Spindt and bassist Royse Ader to get a feel for the studio prior to the recording of their first album.  Now, that session is being released on June 25th as “The CBS Tapes”.

Although they hadn’t yet recorded their debut record for Berkeley indie label Beserkley Records, The Rubinoos had already been performing for more than six years.  Dunbar and Rubin started the group to play a school dance when they were both just thirteen; Spindt joined the band in 1971 and Ader followed in 1974.  Tommy’s brother Robbie was affiliated with Beserkley as a member of popular Bay Area band Earth Quake, the label’s first signee.  Through Robbie, The Rubinoos were introduced to the label.  The Rubinoos’ cover of Canadian pop group The DeFranco Family’s “Gorilla” appeared on the 1975 Beserkley Chartbusters compilation .

At CBS, the quartet was greeted by engineer Glen Kolotkin (Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix) who brought his experience in capturing the band’s sound in the studio.  In the press release, Jon Rubin remembers that the session was a “‘set up and get comfortable in the studio’ kind of affair.” Dunbar recalls that the situation was “something like, ‘okay, the tape is going to run, just go ahead and play anything you want’.”  And they did.  The previously unreleased 11 tracks on The CBS Tapes run the gamut of R&B (King Curtis’ “Memphis Soul Stew,” The Meters’ “Cissy Strut”), pop (The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar”), and rock-and-roll (The Beatles’ “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”). 

The Rubinoos tapped the DeFranco Family songbook again for “Heartbeat, It’s a Love Beat” and tore into the surf classic “Walk Don’t Run,” best known via The Ventures’ seminal 1960 recording.  They also paid tribute to Bay Area pal Jonathan Richman with The Modern Lovers’ “Government Center” (which they had previously performed with Richman) and played three original songs: “All Excited,” “I Want Her So Bad,” and “Nooshna Kavolta.”

The press release makes clear what The CBS Tapes is, and isn’t: “This isn’t a lo-fi sloppy rehearsal tape, a stripped-down demo, or a polished finished product. Done without second takes and overdubs, the band’s loose, unencumbered live performances exude a joyful energy that embodies the band’s spirit.”  Before long, The Rubinoos would return to CBS Studios to begin sessions in earnest for their 1977 self-titled LP featuring ten unique tracks including the cover of Tommy James and The Shondells’ evergreen “I Think We’re Alone Now” that would earn them a moderate chart hit.

Today, The Rubinoos remain active with their two founding members as well as Donn Spindt (who returned in 1999 after a 14-year hiatus) and Al Chan (bassist since 1980).  The CBS Tapes promises to be an illuminating look at the band’s roots. 

It’s due June 25th from Yep Roc Records in CD, LP, and digital formats.

Hannah Georgas has a seemingly endless capacity for crafting textured pop songs. Since her debut, the Toronto-based musician has won numerous awards and racked up multiple nominations, including four JUNO nods, for everything from Best New Artist to Songwriter of the Year. 

In early September, Hannah Georgas released her new album “All That Emotion“. It was preceded by several singles, but today she’s back with something else: A reimagining of album cut “Pray It Away,” now transformed into a duet with Matt Berninger.

The collaboration makes sense. Georgas toured as part of the National’s expanded line-up on the I Am Easy To Find tour. Aaron Dessner produced All That Emotion, and Berninger was always hopefully going to be involved given the friendship he and Georgas struck up on the road. Here’s what Georgas had to say about it:

In a lot of ways, All That Emotion is a personal record, but “Pray It Away” ended up being very collaborative. I co-wrote the song with my producer Aaron Dessner, who sent me an instrumental during the time I was writing and demoing.

A close friend of mine inspired the lyrics. She told me over dinner one night that a family member didn’t want to attend her wedding because she was marrying a woman. I wrote the song the next day using the chord progression from Aaron’s demo. It was upsetting to see my friend go through what she was dealing with at a time where she should have been celebrating.

While Aaron and I were recording this song together, he mentioned it could be really great to ask Matt Berninger to sing on it. Ironically, it wasn’t until the pandemic hit when we were actually able to follow through with this idea, together. It’s so lovely it all worked out and we were able to make it happen in the end.

Releases June 18th, 2021

Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real returned on Friday with a new track “Leave ‘Em Behind”, It’s the second single off the band’s upcoming album. “A Few Stars Apart”, The Dave Cobb-produced album is due out on June 11th via Fantasy Records.

In “Leave ‘Em Behind”, Nelson sings of letting go of trauma and severing toxic relationships in the interest of self-preservation. A profoundly progressive song packaged in an accessible alt-country style, “Leave ‘Em Behind” is a paradigm of the rising generation of country revivalist artists. Alongside fellow songwriters like Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires, Sturgill Simpson, and many others, the spawn of country icon Willie Nelson is working to bring the genre into the modern era and destigmatize “country” from being a dirty word in the contemporary musical zeitgeist.

Already one of “54 Most Anticipated Albums of 2021,” A Few Stars Apart is a testament to finding a human connection: between close family and friends, as well as one’s own heart. Produced by Grammy Award winning producer Dave Cobb, the album was inspired by the stillness Nelson found while riding out the beginning of the pandemic with his family in Texas and was recorded with the full band live on eight-track tape over three weeks at Nashville’s historic RCA Studio A. The eleven songs reveal what it means to come home again, to be still, and to find community—and yourself.

“Leave ’em Behind” is off of Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real’s new album, “A Few Stars Apart”,

The Manic Street Preachers will release a new album called The Ultra Vivid Lament, in the autumn.

Their 14th studio long-player is described as “a record that gazes in isolation across a cluttered room, fogged by often painful memories, to focus on an open window framing a gleaming vista of land melting into sea and endless sky”.

The band are offering signed product from their store, although there’s an indies-only black vinyl LP that comes with an exclusive seven-inch of Orwellian, with a remix on the B-side that isn’t available on the Manics site. The SDE shop has a limited quantity. Amazon also have an exclusive yellow vinyl edition.

The Ultra Vivid Lament is the 14th studio album from Manic Street Preachers. It is both reflection and reaction – a record that gazes in isolation across a cluttered room, fogged by often painful memories, to focus on an open window framing a gleaming vista of land melting into sea and endless sky.

Musically The Ultra Vivid Lament is inspired by a formative years record box (ABBA, post-Eno Roxy, the Bunnymen, Fables-era REM, Lodger) though the end result could only be the unique union of James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire and Sean Moore, collectively one of the UK’s most consistently brilliant rock’n’roll bands for over three decades.

The Ultra Vivid Lament will be released on 3rd September 2021.

It’s now forty years ago this month, one of the best but often forgotten albums of the 1980s was released: “Playing With a Different Sex” by Birmingham band The Au Pairs. The cover, an Eve Arnold photo showing female militia fighters heading into battle, is a good visual harbinger of the album’s friction-filled songs. Jane Munro’s monster basslines, Pete Hammond’s tight drum rhythms, and the jagged riffs of Lesley Woods and Paul Foad combine to form a tense backdrop for the myriad moods of Woods’ androgynous voice, singing songs that confront conformity and demand equality. “There was just so much to be angry about,” Woods says. “We were four young people,” Foad adds, “who were pissed off with the political situation of the time.”

Au Pairs formed in Birmingham in 1978. Stewart Lee’s recent documentary King Rocker showcases the scene in the city at the time, with Birmingham’s first punk band the Prefects (later The Nightingales) playing venues like the legendary Barbarella’s, a venue they immortalised in the song of the same name as a place “where the beer tastes of prune juice” and “they sell tickets for the exits”. The band was led by Lesley Woods, who was once described as “one of the most striking women in British rock” The Au Pairs, who formed from their city’s Rock Against Racism action group, would often team up with local bands to play gigs for the anti-racist organisation.  They produced two studio albums and three singles. Their songs were said to have “contempt for the cliches of contemporary sexual politics” and their music has been compared to that of the Gang Of Four plus the Young Marble Giants, and the Mekons, who came out of Leeds University’s Fine Art department. Like Au Pairs, these groups were stridently left wing, and tried to pull punk away from its three-chord origins to something more experimental. Woods attended Birmingham University, meeting drama students who introduced her to jazz, then went on to Keele, where she was exposed to books like Love of Worker Bees, Russian feminist Alexandra Kollontai’s 1923 story collection about the possibility of a “new Eros under communism”, and other radical left wing and feminist ideas. “That gave me a language to express a lot of the anger that as a young person and as a child I felt about things but wasn’t able to articulate,” she says.

Then punk exploded, and it was incredibly important. “In a new town like Stevenage” – where Woods grew up – “you don’t really see much of anything except what goes on around your family and in the local vicinity of your council estate,” she says. “There was nothing to do and the only options were to get married, have kids, get a job, and then die.” Punk opened a window on to another life, giving her generation the opportunity to “go off and see something really real and raw and exciting”.

The sexual nature of Woods’ lyrics on “Playing With a Different Sex” may have shocked people 40 years ago, but they are still intensely relevant. “We’re So Cool” talks about open relationships (“I don’t mind if you want to bring somebody home”) but also the power games that never quite go away (“Your affection is ultimately mine”); “Come Again” sees a quest for mutual orgasm becoming a kind of military manoeuvre (“You brought in new rules / which you obey”); and “Dear John” tackles male sexual fantasies (“Do I recline like the seats in your head?”). Woods was one of the first female singers to be open about her sexuality. “There wasn’t much space in society, at least at that time, for independent, progressive, single women whose sexualities are fluid,” she says, though things have improved. “Nowadays there are more sexual identities, which is liberating for society.”

Foad says that “as well as the personal politics of relationships, the Thatcher years gave us plenty of material to comment on,” remembering “hundreds of wild gigs where National Front skinheads would turn up to disrupt the shows”.

“Playing With a Different Sex’s” song “Armagh“, with its sarcastic chorus line “we don’t torture, we’re a civilised nation”, addressed 1980 protests by female political prisoners in Northern Ireland. “We played the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test, who told us we couldn’t play “Armagh” because it was too politically sensitive,” Foad says. “The show went out live, so we played it anyway, only to be told we would never work for the BBC again.”

Woods’ anger at the constraints of her time, the freedom she found in punk, and the ambiguity of where it all might end up, come together in the album’s closing song. “It’s Obvious”, the band’s unofficial anthem, both envisions and asserts a future in which gender roles just don’t matter so much, and both sexes have access to equal time, equal resources, and equal leisure. “You’re equal but different,” the song proclaims. “It’s obvious.”

The second LP from 1982, “Sense and Sensuality” showed a greater influence of jazz soul, funk and disco in the band’s sound, but was less well received couldn’t match the urgency of the first, despite stand-out tracks like “Sex Without Stress” and the brass and saxophones of fellow post-punkers Pigbag adding to the jazzy feel. There was no time to develop the material before going into the studio, and relationships were fraught. “I lost my voice and went a little crazy because of that,” Woods says, and sleeve notes written for the 2006 anthology “Stepping Out of Line” detail the “ragged mood” they fell into back then, with bassist Munro leaving two months later, and the band breaking up for good the following year. “It was sad really,” Woods says. “I sometimes wonder if we’d taken six months out and taken a breather and then got back and re-evaluated the situation …”

Following the departure of Jane Munro in 1983, the band recruited Nick O’Connor who also played piano and synthesizers. At this time the group were further augmented by Jayne Morris (percussion and backing vocals), Graeme Hamilton (trumpet) and Cara Tivey on additional keyboards. The band were scheduled to record a third album with famed producer Steve Lillywhite in 1983 but broke up. Woods has intimated that that the hostility and violence she and other women faced playing music was a factor in the group’s demise: “There comes a point where you can’t go on any more at that level,” things had come to a head. “It was just a big mess,” Woods says. “I didn’t like the sound that was being made, and I didn’t like the fact that I had no control over it.”

Drummer Pete Hammond shares his own memories of the end. “By [that] time we exploded into pieces we were exhausted,” he says. “In the final year we had played over 200 gigs and our management didn’t notice how stretched we were. We fell apart because the intensity of our journey was immense – we did hundreds of gigs to support our beliefs and barely sustained our existence. It took its toll.”

Three of the Au Pairs still live in Birmingham. Foad is a full-time jazz musician who also teaches, Hammond plays in the bands Steve Ajao Blues Giants, and Munro is retired, having worked for 30 years as a complementary therapist. “Potentially we had more to give,” Hammond continues, “but what we left behind is still listened to today and that is very humbling.”

The three, however, have had a long-running dispute with Woods over the rights to the songs, and their royalties. “I am trying to get back the rights to the feminist songs I wrote,” Woods says, arguing that she was the lyricist and the songs originate in her experiences: “These are songs that came out of me, they’re part of me”.

Foad, Hammond and Munro claim that they co-wrote the songs as a quartet, and that a decision was made by the band, when they formed, to share credits and royalties. In a joint statement, they said: “One of the founding principles of the Au Pairs was equality, and that extended to the members of the band – each one of us uniquely important. We are saddened by Lesley’s desire to take our rights away from us … We were all equally committed politically, still are and always will be.”

Woods now works as a barrister specialising in immigration law, but she is also taking a course with Music Production for Women where she’s learning to use Ableton software, and feels she’s regained some of the autonomy she lost with Au Pairs. Perhaps if she’d taken the course 20 or 30 years ago, she says, her life might have been completely different.

“Women need to control their own music,” she says, and I ask her if she has any advice for young women starting a band today. “Stick to your guns,” she replies.