wormboys song featured in Leeds Queer Film Festival trailer

I’m hugely honoured that my band’s song “mostly still” has been used in the trailer for Leeds Queer Film Festival this year!


Leeds Queer Film Festival is an amazing, affordable, non-profit community event, which every year shows feature-length films and shorts from around the world. I cannot recommend it enough!

This year’s event runs from 20-24 March, and you can find all the information you might need on their website.

DJ set list: Killer Queen @ Grrrls Night Out, Coventry, 08/03/24

Photograph of a home-made DJ booth designed to look like an ancient Celtic chariot, with the name Boudica embossed on the front.

Back in the day, I had another blog where I posted all my DJ set lists. That blog no longer exists outside of the Wayback Machine because it was hosted by the University of Warwick and universities hate to host websites for too long, it seems (see also: Leeds and Sheffield taking down the trans pregnancy project websites once that sweet, sweet UKRI money stopped coming in).

However, I still like archiving things, so for the sake of posterity, here is my headline set from last night’s amazing party for International Women’s Day at the Tin in Coventry, hosted by the awesome women at Boudica Festival.

Blondie – Atomic
The Selecter – Missing Words
Azealia Banks – 212
underscores feat. gabby start – Locals (Girls Like Us)
100 gecs – mememe
Hole – Celebrity Skin
The Cardigans – My Favourite Game
Indigo Girls – Closer To Fine
Dolly Parton – 9 to 5
Beyoncé – Texas Hold ‘Em
Le Tigre – TKO
The Ting Tings – That’s Not My Name
Miss Eaves – Thunder Thighs
St Vincent – Digital Witness
SOPHIE – Immaterial
Annie Lennox – Walking on Broken Glass
Wet Leg – Wet Dream
Mitski – Washing Machine Heart
Gloria Jones – Tainted Love
Bananarama – Venus
Belinda Carlisle – Heaven Is A Place On Earth
Courtney Barnett – Pedestrian At Best
Black Dresses – In My Mouth (request)
Wargasm – Do It So Good
Nova Twins – Antagonist
Janelle Monae – Make Me Feel
Billie Eilish – bad guy
Aretha Franklin – Think
Skunk Anansie – Weak
Kate Bush – Running Up That Hill
Evanescence – Bring Me To Life
Nightwish – Over The Hills and Far Away

I believe this was my first DJ set in almost nine years and I will admit I was pretty nervous! Even worse, most of my old equipment is buried in a box somewhere due to multiple moves over the last few years, so I really had to wing it. At the same time, I used to play a lot back in the day. Between that, a usb stick stuffed with days’ worth of music, and some hard work in preparation, it all felt very natural once I was on stage in Boudica’s amazing home-made Iceni chariot booth. I really enjoy figuring out what an audience wants to hear and then taking them on a ridiculous journey with that, and once the adrenaline kicks in it’s one hell of a trip.

I’m hugely grateful to Boudica for inviting me back to Coventry and providing such a supportive environment. It was exciting to dance to brilliant sets from new DJs before stepping up myself, reflecting Boudica’s commitment to supporting women and non-binary people in picking up new instruments and skills. Most of all, I’m thankful to everyone who turned up to party.

DJ set in Coventry for IWD – 8 March

I’m excited to announce that I will be headlining Boudica Festival‘s party for International Women’s Day on Friday 8th March!

The event will take place from 8pm to late at at The Tin in Coventry.

Here’s the blurb from Boudica:

Poster for the Grrrls Night Out event at the Tin Music and Arts, Coventry, on Friday 8th March, 8pm to late. The poster features a disco ball with waving arms, feet, and an open mouth. It states that the event will feature DJs spinning pop, rock, riot grrrl and more, plus visuals and crafts.

Killer Queen returns to the Tin for one night only! Killer Queen aka Ruth Pearce is a Glasgow-based trans feminist DJ, known for genre-bending rock and pop sets that bring together classic tunes and contemporary hits. Ruth has been previously spotted spinning the decks at queer clubs, protest after-parties, and activist conferences across the country, including Reclaim the Night, Women’s Aid, Queer Fest Leeds, Birmingham pride, and Nine Worlds Geekfest. In Coventry she founded and performed at the Killer Queen queer rock club from 2009-2013, and was part of the Revolt! collective which ran riot grrrl nights at the Tin from 2012-2017. These days, Ruth can usually be found found shouting in the rock trio Dispute Settlement Mechanism, playing bass in the noise pop band wormboys, and/or moonlighing as a professional scholar in the field of transgender studies.

This will be my first DJ set in several years(!) However, I’ve been constantly listening to new music, so am very excited to be once again getting behind the decks – especially in my old stomping ground of Coventry.

You can buy your tickets here.

wormboys tour – October 2023

We’re hitting the road again in late October, accompanied on all dates by the lovely Alexx Munro! You can get your advance tickets here:

20 October – Legends, Edinburgh
(with Fistymuffs)

21 October – Ushi’s, Glasgow
(support TBC)

22 October – Little Buildings, Newcastle
(with Fashion Tips)

29 October – secret location, Leeds
(with R.AGGS)

wormboys tour poster, featuring tour dates on a multicoloured background, with an inverted silhouette of a beetle plus a friendly worm or snake-like creature with two faces.

New wormboys single: “mostly still”

We put out a wormboys single last week! “mostly still” has been released in digital form by Come Play With Me Records. It’s the first new song we worked on together after I joined the band in 2019, so I’m very excited we’re sharing this recording with the world.

Cover image for the wormboys single "mostly still". The cover image features two porcelain fish, who both wear shocked expressions.

Here are some nice things people have said:

A light-hearted, endearing grunge-pop tune … the Leeds four piece deliver their self described ‘queer moody creepy noise-pop’ with joyful flair on this new offering” – Get In Her Ears

The track finds Wormboys at perhaps their most melodic, recalling the likes of Lomelda or Boy Scouts as wiry guitars meet crashing drums and clipped, lilting vocals. Lyrically, this song isn’t one of sweeping melodramas, more the tiny moments that make our skin crawl or our hearts leap, as they sing “you dance next to me, and I’ll stand mostly still”, before being engulfed in a swell of guitars. Noisy and sweet, dreamy and driving, Wormboys are a contradiction in all the best ways and a band more than ready to make their mark.” – For The Rabbits

You can listen to the song for free on our Bandcamp page, and it’s also available on streaming platforms such as Spotify.

New EP! “smalltime” by wormboys

Last month my band wormboys released a new three-track EP, titled “smalltime”. It’s the second wormboys release I play bass on, after our 2022 single “weird“. I’m so impressed by the breadth of my bandmates’ songwriting: by turns sexy, beautiful, haunting, moody, and oppressive. As a self-taught, DIY musician, I was also excited how learning and refining these songs helped push the boundaries of what I can do.


We collectively created a zine as a physical artifact to accompany the digital EP. It contains artwork, lyrics, and advice on building a guitar effects pedal. I also wrote an exclusive new essay, titled “START A BAND”.

Photo of wormboys zine placed upright on a table. In front of it is a small badge and three stickers, all depicting wormboys art.


The zine comes with a download code, stickers, and a badge (which doubles as a circuit board for anyone who fancies following the advice on building a pedal!) You can buy a copy for £5 from our bandcamp page.

Here are some nice things people have said about “smalltime”:

Now Then
“Fuzzy, wistful and authentic”

Beat In My Bones
“Everything about this EP is worthy of your time and attention- the songs are just effortlessly slick, and that lo-fi sound, and that DIY ethic attached to it really comes across.”

Gina Maya
“The three songs that form Smalltime (2023), the new EP by Wormboys, reverberate with the darkened sweat-soaked cellar sound that made their pre-release of the song Tree so attention-grabbing back in 2022.”

Get In Her Ears
“The EP shows off a huge range of skill in just three short tracks, showing off both a mastery of popular styles as well as an undeniable talent for creating altogether new sounds.”

Rockambula
“Questa nuova uscita è una conferma di quanto il il quartetto inglese possieda un ventaglio sonoro piuttosto ampio da cui attingere”

Trans joy in hateful times

“We’re living in the future!”

I bounced up to an old friend to share this important insight. All around, queer bodies danced and swayed to furiously enthusiastic music. We have always sought refuge in one another, in our in our art, in utopic dancefloors and community care. But something felt different.

The collective energy of the crowd was wild, strong, cohesive. The entire room was dancing – and among us, so so many out, happy trans women and transfeminine people. On stage, a non-binary person sang explicitly about their experiences of gender to an assertive ska beat. It was a joyful moment – but the true wonder of it for me was that it was far from unique.

This was the last in a string of winter tour dates for my band wormboys, at the brilliant Queer As Punk event in Edinburgh. But I’d experienced similar in Dundee, in Glasgow, in Newcastle, in Hull, in Leeds. At every gig, trans women and non-binary people were scattered throughout the audience; at most, there were also several of us on stage through the night. It’s a world of difference from when I encountered just the occasional trans man playing gigs in the mid-2010s; let alone from when wrote a blog post titled Trans/queer rock music back in 2010, in which I desperately sought validation in questionable gender-bending tunes written by (largely) cis musicians.

While trans women (and trans people more broadly) have always been involved in DIY music, there’s a clear change taking place. We have taken our inheritance and run with it. There are more of us making our own art, telling our own stories, and celebrating one another more than ever before. We are more visible, we are more assertive, we are more respected within our scenes, and – collectively – we are having more fun.

Photo of three people from a band, rocking out in front of an audience in a darkened room
wormboys play Queer As Punk. Photo by Blanka Bandi.

The very night we enacted a better future on that dancefloor in Edinburgh, 16 year-old trans girl Brianna Ghey was stabbed to death in Warrington. Two other teenagers, a girl and a boy, have been charged with her murder.

For trans people across the UK – especially trans women and girls – this lethal attack was not unexpected. It feels like the culmination of a vicious hate campaign that permeates our media and politics. It’s also the tip of a vast iceberg of intentional violence and untimely death.

Suicide is endemic among trans youth driven to despair by the socially-sanctioned antagonism directed at them every hour of every day. I am tired of citing statistics. I have lost so many of my friends and peers. Words and numbers are insufficient for the raw anguish of my grief.

This is only compounded by the failures of bystanders who refuse to intervene, schools and employers who try to make us disappear, a National Health Service that inflicts harm upon us. England’s only child and adolescent gender clinic is due to close in a matter of weeks, with nothing ready to replace it. In an extraordinary open letter, the majority of clinical, research, and administrative staff at the clinic note an “increase in deaths related to the service” since the suspension of endocrine treatments in 2020.

Many of my friends have been threated or assaulted in broad daylight. One, for instance, had rocks thrown at her. Another was assaulted in front of the school gates. Another was raped by boys in the school playground. I frequently struggle with feelings of survivor’s guilt, having merely been publicly assaulted, stalked, harassed, and subject to threats of legal action and murder. Relatively minor matters, in the scheme of things.

Photograph of a large crowd in a narrow street in London, with occasional placards and a trans flag.
Vigil for Brianna Ghey outside the Department of Education, London. Photo by David Griffiths.

How to understand joy in the face of so much hate and despair?

This is a question I struggled with throughout our tour. The night before Brianna’s murder, 400 people rioted in Knowsley outside a hotel that houses asylum seekers, spurred on by the fascist group Patriotic Alternative. This horrific event, too, did not occur in a vacuum. Racist and anti-migrant sentiment has similarly been stirred up by cynical politicians and journalists, as asylum seekers, economic migrants, British Black and Asian people, Gypsies and Travellers are repeatedly failed or directly targeted by our authorities and institutions. Patriotic Alternative have also repeatedly targeted LGBTIQ+ communities, through their campaign against Drag Queen Story Hour.

The Sunday prior, a large rally was held in Glasgow by anti-trans group “Let Women Speak”, who have a long history of collaboration with white supremacists and antisemites. This event, supposedly organised in support of “women’s rights”, featured numerous flags in the suffragette colours of green, white, and purple, alongside massive black banners emblazoned with the slogan: “Woman (noun): Adult Human Female”. It was attended by Holocaust deniers, anti-migrant, and anti-abortion campaigners, and was described by supporters as an “undisputed Aryan victory”.

I could say so much more: about assaults on disabled people’s rights and livelihoods, about the demonisation of the poor, about attacks on pay, pensions, and the unions that attempt to defend them (I am writing this post while on strike). About how fascist violence is excused by sexist men in the name of “defending women and girls”. About how oppressed groups are played off against one another, while the effects of all this hateful discourse and action are felt most keenly at the intersection of multiple forms of persecution, such as by migrant trans women of colour.

Ultimately though, my point is this: what we are seeing is both a consequence of historic prejudices in our society, and of rising fascism.

Minority groups, women, migrants, and working class people in the UK have always faced a shared struggle against systemic discrimination and violence. Following a period of mild reform in the 1990s and 2000s, we are now experiencing a significant upswing in bold, blatant hate speech and violence,  effectively condoned by every major political party and the majority of mainstream media publications.

This is the context of trans joy in the 2020s – and the reason why that joy is so necessary and vital.

Our tour reminded me that art is resistance, and resistance is collective. In recent days I have felt myself marinading in my own fear, a recipe for passive inaction. If we cannot experience joy, we cannot dream; if we cannot dream, we cannot hope; if we cannot hope, we cannot fight back. In the face of a world that wants so many of us dead, it is vital that we create reasons to live, and to thrive.

In Leeds, wormboys played to a rammed room in Wharf Chambers, a triumphant hometown crowd. We invited the brilliant Punjabi-Celtic-indie fusion trio Kinaara and gorgeous queer folk duo Serin to support us, building new friendships and cementing old ones. In Hull we debuted at the New Adelphi, where now-legendary acts such as Lizzo, Manic Street Preachers, Pulp, Skunk Anansie, and PJ Harvey played before they were famous. We shared the stage with Sandbox Mode – a solo hip-hop artist making deeply honest and funny songs about mundanity and despair – and Baby Flowers, an exciting young grunge group playing their second ever gig. This was the least well-attended, most male-dominated, and least obviously queer gig on our tour. And yet: the mood was vibrant, I noted at least one other trans woman in the audience, and Baby Flowers’ bassist was showing off a well-placed trans rights sticker.

In Newcastle, we found ourselves in the Little Buildings, a venue which has miraculously survived Covid-19 despite being founded just the pandemic began. The event was hosted by new dance party Queer Love. We played alongside the incredible hardcore group Disciplinary with their two bass guitars, and also the feminist dance-punk phenomenon of Fashion Tips. The whole night was amazing, but Fashion Tips were particularly exciting for me. Frontwoman (and Queer Love organiser) Esmé Louise Newman has a long history of involvement in groundbreaking queer feminist punk, metal and no-wave groups, including Penance Stare and Etai Keshiki. The new band were just as brilliant, with aggressive guitars and vocals underpinned by a powerful rhythm section, heralding a new era of revolutionary dancefloor divination.

Next to Glasgow, where I organised a well-attended gig at The 13th Note in less than a week, after our original promoter pulled out at the last minute. We booked the astoundingly powerful riot grrrl group Brat Coven to play with us, along with HAVR, purveyors of gorgeous post-punk soundscapes. The latter band are fronted by Carrie Marshall, author of Carrie Kills A Man, who noted to cheers that she was a different gender the last time she played the venue. This was an event with plenty of trans women present, beaten only by brilliant gig in the same venue the very next night, which I went to see my soulful dyke folk pal Pictureskew play inbetween our own shows. That event might well be the first of its kind I’ve been to where there were at least as many trans women in attendance as anyone else. It was beautiful.

Then to Dundee, where Rad Apples and Make That A Take put anarchist theory into practice by actively working to provide a safer punk venue and events for women, queer people, and migrants, through simultaneously building a welcoming space and promoting a zero-tolerance attitude towards discrimination and abuse. There I had two totally new life experiences. First, I witnessed somebody crowdsurfing in a shopping trolley during a storming set from banjo punks Alldeepends. Then, we were subject to the well-organised chaos of the “crowd surfing machine” by jubilant anarcho-folk headliners Boom Boom Racoon (a variant on the sat-on-the-floor rowing boat dance associated with songs such as “Oops Upside Your Head” and “Rock The Boat”, but with audience members encouraged to take turns in crowdsurfing along the boat).

Through the tour, I’d been carrying a trans flag to drape over my bass amp, and have often said something about trans liberation from stage inbetween songs. wormboys are a political band, but not in the same way as more in-your-face punk groups I’ve previously fronted. I’ve reveled in the ability to just be a musician and make that – rather than my status as a trans woman – the focal point of my involvement, leaving most of the talking to dual vocalists duo Sop and Harry. In the current political environment, that has increasingly felt untenable. It seems important to speak out, make myself visible, be obviously a trans woman making music.

But at Rad Apples I didn’t need to. There was already a trans flag up. There were plenty of other trans people there. There were placards in the bar opposing Section 35. I could just be.

And so to Edinburgh, where I found myself living in the future during a joyous set from opening act Bufandas. A future in which we experience the true paradox of trans visibility, in that we are both uniquely vulnerable, and uniquely strong. No longer hiding in the shadows, we are easier targets for those who hate us, but also have so much more potential to build power together.

Brianna Ghey’s killers may be convicted and jailed, but that will do nothing to stop the violence we face across these islands, and across the wider world. We have learned that we cannot trust the police to save us, or the courts, or politicians, or journalists, or managers, or human resources departments. But we don’t need any of these people or organisations. We owe it to Brianna to continue the grassroots work she did to improve other people’s lives, because another world is possible.

The headliners at Queer as Punk in Edinburgh were the fiercely feminist disco punk group The Red Stains. Their set included several explicit statements of support for trans people and especially trans women and girls, reflecting the attitude of most women active within actual feminist movements. This was an important reminder that anti-trans movements do not speak for all women, and never will.

My experience of sharing a stage with so many amazing musicians, from so many backgrounds, featured many such reminders. I was reminded of the sheer depth and range of human creativity. I was reminded of how much we can be inspired by our differences as well as shared experience. I was reminded of how far we have come, as well as how far we have to go. 

There are so many of us. Today, we mourn. Tomorrow, we fight. Soon, we will win.

The Soul of Sexism

What The Commitments taught me about playing music

Like most women musicians, I’ve experienced a fair amount of sexism while playing in a band.

It can be insidious. Bands with women in often find they are more likely to put on stage earlier in the night, and paid less than other bands, regardless of skill, experience or size of following.

Other times, it’s entirely explicit. Like when men have shouted GET YOUR TITS OUT while I’m setting up on stage, or RAPE while we’re playing.

Sometimes, I downplay the impact of sexism in music, to focus on the positives. But it always gets to me – that sense that live music is for men and boys, that sense that it’s not for women and girls, that sense that we’re not really welcome – unless we are willing to be objectified and treated less seriously as performers.

I saw The Commitments musical with colleagues during its December 2022 run in Glasgow. After a difficult semester, I looked forward to being at the theatre with new friends from work, and enjoying a night of brilliant soul classics.

The Commitments is about a group of young (white) Irish people who form a soul covers band in the late 1980s. The musical depicts disparate personalities coming together, arguing a lot, playing a handful of gigs, and then going their separate ways. Most of the songs are performed by the cast on stage, although the production also used either off-stage musicians or a backing track.

The Commitments lived up to its billing as a jukebox musical. The band (on stage and off) were great. It was exciting to hear a series of well-known tunes re-arranged for the show, and performed with gusto. The architecture of the stage set was gorgeous, variously depicting a Dublin neighbourhood, small family houses, pubs, and bingo halls. The plot and characters were paper thin at best, but this didn’t detract from the overall experience – or wouldn’t have done, if it weren’t for the treatment of the handful of women on stage.

There were three women in the band. They were portrayed as backing singers, although often they actually performed lead vocals. They were collectively referred to as the “Commit-tits”.

Most of the male characters benefited from some basic level of characterisation: e.g. the drunk “prick” of a lead singer with a great voice, the older guy who claimed to have played in various famous bands, the manager with a grand vision. By contrast, only one woman had a character trait; she was the “hot one”. Literally every male character in the band made various objectifying comments about her. The other two women were implicitly pitted against her, and one another; the randy older guy had sex with all three, eventually resulting in a brief fight where they jealously pulled each another’s hair.

During the first half of the musical, the band members changed into stage wear, which they remained in for most of the rest of the play. The eight male performers wore smart white shirts, black suits and ties. The three women wore sexy black mini dresses.

Their characters were objectified in every sense, existing seemingly only as objects of desire and the butt of every misogynist joke. Meanwhile, I was surrounded in the theatre by the joy and laughter of an audience who enthusiastically clapped and sang along with the (genuinely excellent) music. The cognitive dissonance was wild.

Through the second half of the play, I felt increasingly physically sick.

Once the night was over, I reflect on why I experienced such a visceral reaction to the sexism of The Commitments. None of the musical’s misogyny was extraordinary or spectacular. On the contrary, it was low-key, continual, and passed off as normal: just like the everyday sexism women experience in our everyday lives. This makes it hard to identify as a problem, and hard to address in practice.

When I spoke about my feelings on social media, several people who had seen the 1991 movie told me that I misunderstood The Commitments. They told me this was a story of white working class experience in 1980s Dublin, that the characters’ behaviour was reflective of attitudes at the time, that the characters were represented honestly within a social realist narrative.

My issue is, however, is not with a film I haven’t watched. What I saw in the theatre was not social realism, but a jukebox musical where the story worked to loosely link one song to another. The setting was broad; the characters were one note at best.

The narrative of the play had nothing to say about the constant sexism to which women were subject. It was simply present in the actions and words of every male character. In this way, it was normalised, and legitimised.

The very structure of the play itself perpetuated sexist stereotypes about the roles of men and women within storytelling, within society, and within music. The male characters expressed desires and interests, organised events, played musical instruments, and provided commentary on one another’s decisions. The women sang nicely, looked pretty, and were a device for the characters development among the men who leered at them. That is what women are for. That is what women do.

The everyday sexism of The Commitments also reflected a wider failure of the musical to grapple with the political issues it hinted at. An apparently all-white cast performed music historically written and performed by Black women and men, for an overwhelmingly white audience. The musical’s only nod to this were some vague references to worker’s rights and the assertion by one character that “the Irish are the Blacks of Europe, and Dubliners are the Blacks of Ireland”. While I imagine the play was attempting to comment on class solidarity and the historical contingency of whiteness, the clumsy claim of comparative oppression treated the existence of actual Black Irish people as an impossibility (an assumption made all the more bizarre by a later brief reference to the Thin Lizzy version of “Whisky in the Jar”).

I felt sick watching The Commitments because I saw myself – the expectations placed on me as a woman, the possibilities available to me as a woman, the everyday impact of everyday sexism on me as a woman – in the experiences of those women on stage.

I felt sick watching The Commitments because I saw how my non-white friends are so often treated, especially women of colour – their creative endeavours diminished or appropriated, their experiences of racism ignored and erased.

As a bassist and singer, I saw the norms that have led to male musicians shouting stuff at me and my bandmates when we are playing, demanding to examine my fingers for calluses, and assuming that I am at a gig accompanying a man. I saw the hidden structures that made it hard for me and many of my friends to pick up an instrument in the first place. I saw how and why it is constantly so difficult for women and people of colour to simply turn up and play music in so many settings.

I felt sick watching The Commitments because I was witnessing the operation of power.

The stage musical version of The Commitments debuted in 2013: the same year myself and a couple of friends were organising Revolt, a feminist club night in Coventry which prioritised women and trans performers. We did this in reaction to male dominated line-ups, which perhaps had a token woman singing or (at a certain kind of indie rock show) playing bass guitar. We knew that having numerous women from a range of backgrounds on stage does something important. It undermines the assumption that women musicians can or should only play second fiddle to men, and builds a sense of possibility for women in the audience: that music is for us.

We can be more; we will be more; we are more. Creating space for many types of people on stage changes people’s worlds.

In doing so it threatens white male power, which can sometimes feel threatening for white men.

That is why certain promoters and musicians and audience members make life difficult for others in music, through intentional bigotry or unthinking bias. For women, it doesn’t matter how good we are, how we dress, or how we behave on stage. We are so often an alien presence in a space supposedly for men, not obeying the unspoken rules: shut up, don’t speak out, and don’t take up a male musician’s space on stage unless you’re prepared to be compliant and sexually available.

What does matter is context. I reflected on this, wondering why the clothing the women wore in The Commitments bothered me so much. I’ve worn very similar outfits on stage myself. Men have shouted RAPE at me when I’ve done so. But they’ve also shouted GET YOUR TITS OUT at me when I was wearing jeans, trainers, and a loose black band t-shirt. It’s not about what we’re wearing – it’s never about what we’re wearing. It’s about how male desire, male prejudice, and male power is projected onto us.

I realised my problem with The Commitments was that the women characters’ sexuality doesn’t belong to them. Within the context of the plot, they were only ever given the opportunity to be attractive for the men around them, not for themselves. Sex without power.

The Commitments musical wants women in the audience to enjoy the music while sucking up the sexism and ignoring the depth of anti-racist histories. By contrast, at Revolt we sought to build power for women – all women – on and off stage. We sought to bring into being a world in which we can dress how we want, and dance, and sing, and listen, and play, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do to diminish us for having and creating a great time. It wasn’t perfect, but it was ours.

I love a good feminist space, but separatism won’t save us. If we want women musicians to prosper, we need an actual commitment to promoting respect in every context.

The biggest onus is on event organisers, writers, and musicians – especially those in a position of relative power. There is no excuse for endless all-male and all-white line-ups at events, for casual sexism or racism in lyrics, in event promotion, or in the lines of a jukebox musical. How many people involved in putting on The Commitments looked at the script or the choreography and thought, “hang on a moment”, but didn’t speak out? How many white men (or women) who put on gigs or tour in bands even bother to think about whether or not there are women or people of colour on stage?

Simply having women or people of colour in the room is also not enough. We deserve to be present without having to worry about discrimination or abuse. Campaigns such as Good Night Out and the Healthy Music Audiences project have loads of resources available oncreating safer spaces for musicians and audience members alike.

Ultimately, everyone can play a part in changing the world – that’s how cultural change happens. You can support minoritized musicians by taking us seriously and helping us to build power. Attend our shows, listen to our music, share it with other people, and have a great time. That, really, is what it’s all about. 

New single: “something pretty” by wormboys

Yesterday we released the latest wormboys single, and the first song from our forthcoming EP (coming soon etc). It’s a stomping disco-punk tune which celebrates the healing power of queer hedonism!

You can stream something pretty from all major platforms, or listen for free (and/or buy a digital copy) from the wormboys Bandcamp page.

Plus! We made a lyric video from old cartoon clips – assembling them into a silly story about aliens, dancing, and uh, friendship.