1993 New York, Under Acme Music Festival
Before and After - Live review of Drugstore (creative non fiction)
At under Acme Music Festival in New York, in 1993, I reviewed a few bands, one of them, a band called Drugstore, was published in the Melody Maker (and posted at the bottom of this). At the time they may have had just the one single out on their own label, Honey Records which could be why I was short of song titles. For the band, the year that followed this event included three years touring with Radiohead, Tindersticks, Jeff Buckley and The Jesus and Mary Chain, as well as playing at festivals such as Reading and Glastonbury (GordonsKene); including a debut album on Go! Discs.
In Settling Accounts With Subcultures, A Feminist Critique, academic and cultural theorist, Angela McRobbie, notes that for feminists the personal is political and says “... our autobiographies invade and inform what we write.” (1980, p. 58) But, in the review, you don’t get any digression or personal experience of my being in New York for the first time and the betrayal that almost threw me off track, but by now I have good friends and I’m working on my own five-point manifesto for writing. Consider this rectified:
The day before the show:
I can’t recall the airline, the airport or the journey. When I think back to my visit to New York my mind goes straight inside Flat A, and then Flat B. I do remember I arrived in the night.
Flat A: I see the ceiling lights reflect the orange tone and dark knots of highly glossed wooden walls and floorboards as soon as he opens the door and I take my first step inside. Furniture in primary colours, I'm sure. Sofa under the window that looks directly over to dirty buildings and more lights. New York is frightened to go to sleep.
“That’s the Chrysler building,” he says.
The buildings clustered around it let off an orange as deep as embers; as if all around it the city burned. Georgia O’Keefe should have painted the Chrysler building at night rather than the Ritz Carlton.
Then my memory brings words:
“The scrambled eggs are taking such a long time!” And the girl from Flat B gets up and hurries it along with a wooden spoon.
I recollect it didn't make me laugh at the time but now it always has that response from me.
Flat B: I’m in somebody else's kitchen in their flat, and we are making scrambled eggs in a wok pot on a beautiful grey cooker the size of a wendy house. The boy in Flat A took me up in the lift, a clean but basic form of transport with the walls, ceiling and floor in some kind of pale blue industrial lino and a clattering grill door we had to slide shut. He stayed in the lift and pointed to the door. Not Mamma’s door who owns and started the macrobiotic restaurant on the ground floor, but the other one.
For some reason, neither of us have eaten yet that day. A Rock’n’Roll morning starts around noon.
The big red flag waves at the very moment the girl from Flat B says: “The scrambled eggs are taking such a long time!” And gets up and hurries it along with a wooden spoon.
Her awkwardness and fear were visible to me. We ate. I left. Her small talk was painful. Like the cliche, I went back to the wooden closet that he called an apartment and took the bull by the horns and confronted my boyfriend asking if he was having an affair with the woman in Flat B. I can’t tell you what he said - it serves no one - but I was correct.
The next thing I remember - and it's truly the very next thing that happened - is the delicious smell of the restaurant on the ground floor when the boy went out and down a flight of stairs in that same blue lino to answer the front door.
I wait and when the door opens at my end in comes my friend, Jenny, from London. a singer-songwriter who performs and records under the moniker Agent Beartrap. She‘s beaming from head to toe. I had no idea she was coming.
"Surprise!"
She has a bottle of champagne, two glasses and an overnight bag.
"I'm so pleased to see you!" and I really am - three is not a crowd right now.
Jenny waves the glasses in the boy’s direction: “Only two, I'm afraid."
After that, I struggle to recount anything except that we are sitting at a tiny table at the back of the space with Jenny and me opposite each other, legs crammed in.
“Well?” she whispers.
I nod.
"I knew it," she says. Or maybe she said something more like, “You were right!”
There’s a musical industry festival here right now and I am going to write some reviews and make it look like someone paid for me to be here.
“Now I'm here I can be your plus one,” Jenny announces, at full volume.
The boy in Flat A glares over at us.
After the show:
My writing agenda - for more about that go to my website and browse the slides.
Voice of the woman in the band with the topic on guitars and musicianship issues, not a chat about whether she’s looking forward to clothes shopping in New York or travelling in a cheap limousine.
Singer and songwriter as the subject, in other words, the maker of meaning (Mulvey, 1976), not the object of meaning.
Women's musical reference points - at this point, a lot of women musicians and artists were invisible in the empirical archives. Founder of Rolling Stone magazine (169-2019) a rag that many up-and-coming UK music journalists were influenced by, Vann Wagner, was only recently thrown off the board of The Rock’n’Roll Hall Of Fame for the very same reasons