The Null Device

It's Different For Girls

Louise Wener, frontwoman of Britpop band Sleeper turned popular novelist, has written a memoir of her time in the Britpop scene/hype machine. If this review (by the ever-credible Jude Rogers, in the perennially right-on New Statesman) is anything to go by, it sounds like an interesting read:
After many years of Wener playing in different bands to general indifference, her four-piece Sleeper - named after the Woody Allen film - finally get signed by a major label in 1993. She is unforgiving about the conservative bias of the independent music scene, and holds the media in particular contempt. In the band's first interview with the New Musical Express, she is infuriated by a self-professed "revolutionary Trotskyite revisionist Leninist" who directs all his questions to her male bandmates, and later dismisses her as a "mad, ranty pop bird on the loose".
Wener also dismantles the myth that the likes of Blur were intelligent pop revolutionaries. She describes their rudeness, their ruthless ambition and their "easy, bohemian, moneyed odour". And then there are the groupies. Wener leaves nothing out. The bassist Alex James tells a young woman, "You're ugly, but I'm going to fuck you anyway," while their tour manager is despatched to select attractive girls from the audience and give them after-show tickets, known as "Blur-job passes".

There are 1 comments on "It's Different For Girls":

Posted by: Greg Wed Jul 14 23:56:57 2010

A similar, longer, rock-band reality-jolt can be found in 'The Love You Make' by Peter Brown, one of the Beatles' managers. I read this in the early 90s and was shocked. I grew up thinking the Beatles were monk-like altruists who meditated all day and wanted world peace. The reality, in their touring days at least, was to sex what WW2 concentration camps were to death: mechanized and highly-organized methods for placing Beatle DNA inside as many of the world's young girls as was humanly possible. There were staff members assigned to organize orderly queues of recipients within hotels, as the group traveled about the globe. Amazing book.