music

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DJ setlist and review: There Will Be Blood! @ Stereo, Glasgow

I’m currently in the middle of a busy fortnight for work-related travel (more on that soon!) But last night, I managed to make the most of a brief return to Glasgow.

The occasion was There Will Be Blood! a fundraiser at Stereo for the brilliant group Trans Healthcare Access Glasgow. They are helping to provide free laboratory testing for bloods. This is really important for trans people on HRT who are increasingly denied monitoring by GPs. If you couldn’t make it but would still like to donate, you can do so here.

The organisers put together a fantastic lineup and there was a great turnout – especially for a Monday night. It was exciting to see so much talent from within our community, and loads of people come out to support both the cause and a pretty eclectic collection of artists. And exciting for me to be a part of it, performing a DJ set as ROGD.

In which I am going for it. Photo by Onni Gust.


The night kicked off with a luscious set from singer-songwriter and drag artist Sersi. He’s probably the first person I’ve ever seen sport a Britney mic at a DIY gig, which was very cool but sadly couldn’t quite capture the sheer dynamic range of his vocals on the night. At the same time, it enabled him to completely own the stage for a series of ballads that were by turns beautiful and strange. Sersi was ably supported by a pal with a laptop, and Johanna Kirkpatrick (of trad folk bands Chanterelle and Madderam) looking dead dykey on acoustic guitar.

Next to take the stage were Deep Filff. I hadn’t had a chance to look them up before the gig so had zero idea what to expect, although they did arrive with an absolutely enormous inflatable swan. Deep Filff turned out to be a two piece, with Nadia Fiffsky playing bass and belting out epic sun-baked vocals, while Jenny Tingle methodically destroyed the drumkit. As purveyors of some of the dirtiest psychedelic grunge-punk riffs I think I’ve ever heard, they were extremely well-named. It was engrossing, hypnotic stuff. Eventually the swan came out and bounced around the audience, most likely representing a serious hazard to some of the important-looking wires and glitterball hanging from the ceiling.

Local heroes comfort never fail to disappoint, and this evening they truly tore up the stage as the final live act of the evening. The sibling duo have a truly unique sound, with Natalie’s staccato vocals punctuating a skitterish soundscape of totally artificial electronic sounds, underpinned by Sean’s assertive drumming. It was impossible not to dance. My favourite moments came whenever the band’s weird, abrasive noise would suddenly gave way to a transcendentally beautiful synth melody for a minute or two, before we all dived collectively back into the tumult.

Finally, following a quick raffle, I was up! The gig was due to end at a remarkably civilised 10pm, so I had a tight half hour DJ set.

I’ve thought a lot since returning to DJing that the landscape of queer and feminist music and activism has completely changed. Back in the day, I used to do quite a few “Women’s Voices” DJ sets, especially for feminist events such as Reclaim The Night afterparties, and the woman-only Women’s Aid and NUS Women’s Conference discos. The idea was that every song played (sometimes for sets of up to four or five hours) had a woman on lead vocals, and ideally women also playing instruments. Finn Mackay always used to refer to me as “feministDJRuthPearce” (all in one breath!) which was never failed to be delightful.

Unfortunately, many of the people who were only too happy to join the dancefloor for those events are now either actively backing trans-exclusionary politics and the grossest forms of transmisogyny, or otherwise failing to speak out again them. (Junior equalities minister Liv Bailey, I’m looking at you – remember when you hoped I’d DJ your wedding one day?!) It’s odd to reflect on just how normal it was for trans women to be involved in woman-only politics spaces in the UK, given the extremity of the post-2017 moral panic.

Anyway, I digress.

Another thing that has happened over the last decade is the enormous influx of excellent trans artists to both underground and mainstream music scenes. We live in an age where I listened to jasmine.4.t for the first time because my mum told me she’d done a good interview with Craig Charles on BBC 6 Music(!) So, while I’d like to do more Women’s Voices DJ sets in the future, for the first time it felt realistic to put together a Trans Voices set, with a mixture of tunes fronted by trans women and men, and/or non-binary, genderqueer, or genderfluid people, that I could reasonably expect a large number of people in the audience to be familiar with.

So, here’s what I played:

Shopping – The Hype
My Chemical Romance – Teenagers
100 gecs – mememe
SOPHIE – Immaterial
underscores – Locals (Girls Like Us) [with gabby start]
Kae Tempest – Move
Ada Rook – BURY YOURSELF
Janelle Monáe – Make Me Feel
jasmine.4.t – Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation
G.L.O.S.S. – Outlaw Stomp
Against Me! – True Trans Soul Rebel

Obviously I could have kept going a lot longer, but I’ve got to say, it was one heck of a half hour. I have such enormous love for everyone who joined me to dance their arse off on a Monday night. And if you’d like me to DJ your event – I’m officially back behind the decks, so do get in touch!

Back home – sweaty and happy!

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Gig: inclusive football fundraiser in Leeds!

Next Friday I’ll be popping down to Leeds to play this amazing gig in The Attic with wormboys.

You can buy tickets here.

Friday 16 January 2026. We can kick it - a fundraiser for trans-inclusive football in Leeds. Live music, performances, DJ sets from Fig By Four, Faded Alchemy, Sophie and the Silhouettes, wormboys, Lick Quid Gold DJs, Shariz DJ, Ballz Deep, Plasma Anderson, Sunflower Thieves. Unwaged £5, face £10, solidarity £15. 7pm until late at The Attic, Leeds.

In the wake of the Football Association effectively banning trans women from playing even at an amateur level, it’s been heartening to see a lot of serious community organising happening around inclusive football. A lot of this has been led by women who have already been frustrated for years with the institutional sexism of the FA, and their effective control over many local pitches.

This gig will be raising money for those fighting back against a corporate, exclusionary approach to football, and working to build something much better in its place.

Plus, it’s a stonking line-up. If you’re local, come and see us all play!

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Upcoming gigs in London and Leeds

New year, new gigs! We have two headline shows coming up for wormboys. Come and see us if you can!

Thursday 23rd January
The Cavendish Arms, London
With the legendary Schande, plus exciting new supergroup Tomboy Grandpa.

£9 advance.
Tickets available here!

Gig poster, with information in green text on a yellow background. Information as shared in post.

~

Wednesday 2nd April
Wharf Chambers, Leeds
With Tiger Island and Etheriel, plus live projections from Kit Watson.

£6 advance, £8 on the door, no one turned away for lack of funds.
Tickets available here!

Gig poster, with blobby red shapes drawn on white rectangles against a beige background. Poster text reads as follows. Wormboys, Tiger Island, Etheriel. Art by Kit Watson. 2nd April 2025. £6 online, £8 on the door. Wharf Chambers. Wharf Chambers is a member's club. You must be a member or a guest to go. It's £2 to join at wharfchambers.org.

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New band – wormboys!

Over the past couple of years or so, this website has been host to a series of Increasingly Serious Academic Posts. So it’s time to interrupt this trend to share some exciting personal news – I’ve joined a new band! I am now playing bass in super cool Leeds-based fuzzy noise-pop group wormboys.

Line drawing of the band wormboys

 

I’m using the word “new” in a relative sense here. wormboys have been around a few years now – I first met my future bandmates when they shared a lineup with my other band Dispute Settlement Mechanism back in 2018. And I’ve actually been playing with them since the summer – but better late than never when announcing these things, huh?

 

Anyway, you should totally come and see us play sometime! We play pretty regularly, and our next confirmed gig is at Gullivers, Manchester on 29th March, supporting Muncie Girls.

You can follow wormboys on Bandcamp, Instagram, and Facebook. We also have a super-cool EP out, called eartime (recorded before I joined the band) and will be back in the studio again soon.

 

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A space for our voices

A couple of blog entries posted on the same day earlier this week have been making me think about the power and importance of “trans space”.

CN Lester wrote about Andrew Hodges’ biography of Alan Turing. They picked out a passage that beautifully illustrates the sheer emptiness, isolation and alienation that can come with growing up queer:

“The deprivation was not one of laws but of the spirit – a denial of identity. Heterosexual love, desire and marriage were hardly free from problems and anguish, but had all the novels and songs ever written to express them. The homosexual equivalents were relegated – if mentioned at all – to the comic, the criminal, the pathological, or the disgusting. To protect the self from these descriptions was hard enough, when they were embedded in the very words, the only words, that language offered. To keep the self a complete and consistent whole, rather than split into a facade of conformity, and a secret inner truth, was a miracle. To be able to develop the self, to increase its inner connections and to communicate with others – that was next to impossible.”

Like CN, this resonates with me as I reflect upon my own experiences as a trans teen. It was hard to find any representations of trans people, let alone any that weren’t deeply problematic. It was even harder to come by writings, art and stories by trans people, in which trans lives were rendered intelligible, human, possible. I felt like a freak, I felt like I was broken, ill, wrong. And I suffered largely in private. Needless to say, this wasn’t particularly good for my mental health.

This is why I feel that it’s so important to have trans people who are out, and trans people who produce art. It’s why I agree so strongly with Kat Gupta’s post about the trans tent at Nottinghamshire Pride. Kat writes:

There was something magical about being in a tent and being able to listen and watch people who articulated some of my fears and anxieties and desires. There were trans* people speaking and singing and playing about trans* experiences, and cis performers adapting and selecting their work to speak to us. Not us trying to eke out a trans* interpretation of a song or a poem, but them finding the points where we could understand each other. It was people exploring gender and all that came with it; negotiating the NHS, the harsh realities of genital surgery, the misery and joy we find in our bodies. […] In this tent we were able to do something special, and create a space that was visible and proud and joyful and intersectional and defiant.

In my previous post I waxed lyrical about how wonderful various acts were, and how much fun I had playing there myself as part of a band. Kat captures the totality of this experience, and the importance of having a space in which we can come together to share our stories and develop the self, avoiding the fate of Alan Turing.

Crowd outside the trans tent at Nottinghamshire Pride. Photo by Eriw Erif

Members of my family occasionally ask why I bother organising or contributing so much to queer or trans spaces. After all, isn’t there a larger audience for events with more of a broad appeal? Plus, since the goal is to achieve equality, surely it doesn’t help to just segregate ourselves?

I think these perspectives completely miss the point. Spaces centred around straight and cis people are everywhere. These spaces are automatically about straight/cis art, straight/cis voices. Queer spaces are relatively rare, and trans spaces rarer still. It means a lot to go to one of these rare, beautiful spaces knowing that your story will be told. This is why I wrote with so much enthusiasm about Poltical: A Gender last year,  and a similar vibe can be found in CN’s post about the Trans* Education and Determination conference (TRED). It would be wonderful if such spaces were less rare.

Moreover, many trans organisers and performers are very aware of the dangers that come with shutting ourselves off from the world. This is why spaces such as the trans tent, Political: A Gender and TRED are very deliberately open to all, and it’s why we are so often open to contributions from cis allies. It’s why trans issues are just one part of the lyrics I write for my band, and it’s why I’m always keen for us to play “straight” venues as often as possible.

So let’s continue to expand the possibilities of trans space and trans art. The trans tent alone featured poetry both epic and personal, acoustic music, hip-hop, opera, burlesque and punk. There’s so much that we can share! It doesn’t matter whether you’re an artist or a consumer of art, an organiser or an attendee, trans or cis. Come and join us in celebration. There’s so much we can build together.

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In praise of trans culture

This post was originally written on Friday 2nd September.

It’s 10:20am. I’m sitting on a train in Marylebone station, marvelling at my memories of the previous evening.

I attended (and contributed a DJ set to) Political: A Gender last night at London’s legendary Royal Vauxhall Tavern. The event was organised by trans/queer promoters The Cutlery Drawer as a one-off fundraiser for trans charity Gendered Intelligence. It featured music, poetry, comedy and cabaret performances from a staggering eleven acts – or thirteen, if you count myself and sound/lighting technician Jo – over seven hours.

One of the most inspiring aspects of this night was the fact that it was, essentially, a celebration of trans art. I choose the word “celebration” quite deliberately: there was a recognition of the pain we experience and the challenges we face, but the overall event was built around an ethos of joy. The whole atmosphere was immensely positive, with the audience receptive to a wide variety of styles and stories, and each performer giving their all. The night seemed something of an arty twin to the Trans* Education and Determination teach-in earlier this year, as many of us came together in a grand articulation of (trans)gendered embodiment.

This was no separatist event though. Our cis friends were very much invited to the party, and could be found both on-stage (in a minority of the acts) and throughout the audience. This celebration of trans culture was open to all, as our music and our comedy and our poems and our stories are relevant to all. Political: A Gender was predominantly about trans lives and trans experiences, but this meant that it was also about hope, love, loss, friendship, feminism, disability, race, resistance, menstruation, velociraptors and moles. I don’t think I met a single person who wasn’t enjoying themselves immensely.

It’s not often that we come together as a community on this scale. There are an increasing number of wonderful conferences, club nights and mini-festivals organised by hard-working and caring people, but they are still few and far between. There are even less events centred around our culture, our art, and this is a real pity. In art, we recognise the reality, the validity and the importance of our experiences. In art, trans lives are not merely worth surviving, but are worth enjoying. In art, trans people do not merely earn tolerance, but instead deserve celebration.

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such joy as a member of the trans community as I did last night. I certainly hope it won’t be the last time I attend such an event. We must continue to create and to celebrate, and must never forget that we all have so much to offer to one another and to the world.