The Women Who Wrote Rock
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2016
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kate Mossman tells the story of the long-overlooked female pop and rock writers of the 1960s.
As a music journalist herself, when Kate entered the profession she found herself surrounded by men - men who had very definite ideas about how it should be done... writing for monthly magazines that were aimed at men and covering artist who were mainly men. The whole industry of writing about 'serious' popular music seemed to have been established in the late 1960s and the mid-1970s with the writer-characters of Rolling Stone and our own New Musical Express.
But there was a time before all this - a time when the newly invented teenagers were finding their feet... and a new kind of journalism was emerging to chronicle the rapidly changing time. A journalism spearheaded by women.
There was Nancy Lewis, who wrote for Fabulous and the NME; June Harris, who wrote for Disc, then went to New York and contributed to Rave (as well as marring legendary rock agent and promoter Frank Barsalona); Maureen O'Grady who began her career as a music journalist at Boyfriend and progressed onto Rave, where she also joined Dawn James. And the doyennes of them all was the Evening Standard's Maureen Cleave, to whom John Lennon claimed that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus.
Kate Mossman meets them and celebrates the tone of their writing that was so fascinatingly different from rock journalism as we came to know it, and yet captured all the confusion, excitement and social changes of the time.
Producer: Paul Kobrak
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Seriously. I'm Femme Martin. Now perhaps I'm biased, but in my eyes |
| 0:12.0 | women writers have produced some of the most important work of our time against the odds. |
| 0:17.0 | Writers like Tony Morrison, Zora Neil Hurston, and Chimamander in Gosey and Diche clear a path that the rest of us can write our own way down and through. |
| 0:28.0 | The contributions of women to the written word cover all arenas, |
| 0:32.0 | from my world of spoken word and literature to music journalism. |
| 0:36.0 | While singers like Janis Joplin took to the stage, there were women taken to the page to write |
| 0:41.8 | about the music that changed the face of popular culture in the 60s and beyond. |
| 0:47.0 | Let's join Kate Mossman as she tells the long overlooked story of the women who wrote rock. |
| 0:54.4 | I started my working life in rock magazines and as a woman in her 20s I found myself to be a rather |
| 1:00.5 | rare breed. |
| 1:03.1 | I was surrounded by men who'd spent their whole lives |
| 1:05.4 | in the business of rock writing, |
| 1:07.3 | and they had very definite ideas about how it should be done, |
| 1:10.2 | producing monthly titles aimed at men. |
| 1:13.0 | Men preferred to read about music I was led to believe, |
| 1:16.0 | and men preferred to write about it too. |
| 1:19.0 | The whole business, the very infrastructure I was working in, |
| 1:22.0 | appeared to have been established at one point in the 1970s with the famous writer characters of the enemy |
| 1:29.2 | Like Nick Kent Charles Schramurray, Paul Morley, and Tony Parsons. |
| 1:35.0 | But there is an alternative history, a time before the rules were set in stone, |
| 1:40.0 | and it goes back rather further than you'd think to the moment when pop itself exploded. |
| 1:47.3 | This is just to show you where it sort of started. |
... |
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