A

Rockbitch - Bristol, September 2001

I was now in the old quarter of the town. At once the experience of the evening came back to me, the mysterious Gothic doorway, the mysterious tablet above it and the illuminated letters dancing in mockery. How did the writing run? "Entrance not for everybody". "For madmen only" ... I scrutinised the old wall opposite in the secret hope that the magic might begin again; the writing invite me, the madman; the little doorway give me admittance.

There perhaps lay my desire, and there perhaps would my music be played.

"Steppenwolf", Hermann Hesse.

Down by the harbour, the wide, wet, pitted street; a beautiful woman in a backless black dress sits in the only lighted doorway; the white van with the French license-plates is parked in the alley alongside. This venue is down among the warehouses - warehouses being reclaimed at last from the depredations of wartime bombs and the greater ravages of peacetime traffic - in what is still a desolate and lonely part of Bristol. Although doors open at 8 the band isn't on till 9.45 - so Kali tells me as I recognise her coming out (and I think she, sweet soul, recognises me) - and there's scarcely anyone about, madman or sane, in the street outside. Inside, with an hour to go, there aren't many more; but there's no support act - so that's good news at least. The performing space occupies almost the whole of the ground floor of this Victorian building; an elegant space, but not a large one, a bar down the whole length of the room opposite the door, and the stage thrusting out from one of the shorter walls. A few drinks later, and now perhaps 200 people are here, though the place isn't unpleasantly crowded; a fair number of women, then right on time, appearing almost by magic, the band slips out from behind the bar, takes two steps past me across the auditorium, and climbs up onto the side of the stage.
I love these women. I'd caught up with them for the first time, in Swindon, only a few days before. The back room of the pub where they performed that night is, even by comparison with this venue, a tiny place; there couldn't have been more than fifty people present then, and scarcely room for more. The stage area itself was hardly large enough for the eight of them (plus camera-girl) to stand, let alone move. Yet their musical performance for us, that tiny audience, and their sexual charge, was as committed as if we'd been ten times that number.
Yes, of course, there's the sex; but as I see them now a second time (or strictly a third time, since I caught just the first few minutes from a distance of their set at the much bigger Concorde 2 in Brighton), I start to hear more than perhaps I did before when my virgin eyes were seduced - there's a clarity of line, a driving rigour, a sharpness to the interaction of the voices, a precision to the playing, that tells you there's more here than you were expecting. Bringing two new women into the group whose focus is the ritual and the aesthetic (and a third to run the video camera) has the benefit, perhaps, of releasing the musicians to the music.
And it's on the music that Jo and Amanda concentrate (drums and bass); neither of them takes any significant part in the ritual, and both stay fully clothed. Julie is an intense and brooding presence at the front of the stage, bare-breasted and in a long dress; Nikki on keyboard and vocals is in a black g-string, trimmed pubic hair peeping out, until later she's stripped naked for the rituals of the skull and the rape; Luci stands almost motionless and trance-like on guitar in a tiny dress, cut away to expose her breasts and, occasionally, her pussy. Babe wears nothing but a swathe across her hips, something between a belt and a skirt; she plays the last 15 minutes completely naked after bringing the band back for the final sequence including the libation ritual.
There are two dancers, one black girl, and one white. Erzulie is tall, taut and high-breasted, Kali shorter, shaved and a brilliant blonde. Both are naked all evening, though often with some offsetting ritual accessories. Both girls masturbate a lot - tonight they do more fingering than they did at Swindon, some penetration, and some fucking with a strap-on - and they lick a lot of pussy. At one point in the show, each girl makes her way along the front of the stage snogging with a fair degree of technique most of those within reach. The front row is mostly men, of course; tonight, though, I'm standing to the side of the stage and the space here isn't packed; a couple of young girls are coming and going beside me, a little drunk, both aware of responding to something in the atmosphere and at the same time both made oddly shy by that knowledge. One of the girls had her boobs out earlier; her nipples are pierced; the camera-girl has been paying her a bit of attention. Erzulie and I kiss for a time, but she soon bores of me and beckons to this girl; she responds and they bring their faces close, the one naked on the stage, on all fours, stretched, her back tensed like a drawn bow, lithe, the other standing, their faces level, their eyes locked; they flirt for a moment, part hesitant, part mocking, then they kiss, now on the mouth, now on the neck, the face, the shoulders, now wholly serious, entirely sensuous; when they finally release they're both smiling, one is trembling, and it's clear that there's been a real exchange. Erzulie persuades her to go on stage for the next song with perhaps half a dozen other girls invited up by the rest of the band; they get close and intimate, and Erzulie clearly wants to go down on her, but her body language says she's not ready for that, and the moment passes.. Maybe to get the blood pounding the band needs a stronger lesbian presence than there is here tonight, or was at Swindon.
I love watching these women on stage together; the aesthetic of lesbian sex is powerful, perhaps irresistibly so. But in that aesthetic lies a difficulty; images of glossy perfection like these - beautiful lips on an erect nipple, fingers caressing skin which has no blemish, toned thighs, a tongue nudging between labia which glow with the sheen of a hint of sweat - these are images of desire, not images that challenge; actually, they're not far removed from the images of titillating lesbianism that have become a commonplace, from the tabloids, to Geri and Madonna, to the Playboy channel. Indeed, they're not that far removed from 300 years of the western aesthetic of female beauty. My introduction to Rockbitch came through the pissing scene from Bitchcraft on an internet clip; these, I thought then, were women who had real style, and a different agenda. Subsequently I saw the whole video; if any doubts arose, they centred on the fact that this lesbian band appeared to address their appeal exclusively to male concupiscence; I had no doubts about the raw power or the bravery of their physical exposure. Today, there is a change, perhaps one of style alone, more likely one of agenda too. There's much in this that's gain; there's immeasurably more maturity, musically and theatrically; and I detect, too, a more profound shift from the expression of desire as exclusively a need for gratification to its expression as a form of shared giving, a shift that might allow for an approach to the oddly unexplored, almost unacknowledged, nature of orgasm as a purpose of sex. But there is distinctive loss as well.
Rockbitch today is ritual as well as music. Ritual derives power from its form, its aesthetic, even more than from its intrinsic meaning; words and images have a power which is independent of their semantic. Intoxicated, distracted, by the trappings, you may find you ignore the message. Ritual is metaphor, metaphor distances, and with distance comes safety. Babe talks on stage about the power of the cunt, Julie has a memorable quote on the website about women whose "appearance resembl[ed] the frantic rage of the Furies" - "It's a start" she says, with laconic irony. But perhaps there's a lack of earthiness in the stage show that undermines those messages; cunt has blood - with nine women on stage one, at least, will surely be having her period tonight. Cunt has piss. Most obviously, cunt has the juice of sexual arousal; yet, though there's a lot of oral sex here tonight, it's contact for display, not contact to arouse.
There may be good reasons for this, as there may be good reasons why Jo and Amanda both choose to make no sexual contact at all when each member of the band in turn goes down on Babe's spread pussy in the final ritual. Julie whispers something tonight that I don't quite catch about it being a "bad week", she murmured something in Swindon the other night about being "cancelled in Wales"; they are, I guess, still hassled by censorship implied or explicit. "No pissing on the carpet" I can understand; "You can fuck her but you can't make her wet", though, doesn't make so much sense. And surely there's nobody in the front row counting the fingers. Perhaps as an audience we're too restrained tonight; perhaps with the right atmosphere passion takes over..
Everything about these women is admirable, adorable; they have poetry in the soul, integrity, intelligence, style, something close to physical perfection, they're ironically self-aware, objects indeed of desire. So why are they slogging round the south of England on an expensive tour, playing almost unannounced, semi-underground, in tiny venues like this, where the takings can't even cover the petrol? Are there really only fifty people in Swindon who love women, their bodies, their sexuality? [On reflection, yes, that's probably true of Swindon.. Forget Swindon ..] Is it their actual performance, or just their reputation, that stops them filling, or choosing to book, large venues? I hope it's just because they enjoy it this way ..
Whatever the reason, I wonder how such a business model is sustainable. Because, at the same time, the world is changing and the power of sex to shock is diminishing. Even in Britain, real and explicit sex on video is now legally available - though Bitchcraft perhaps isn't; and though the market for that more challenging form of lesbian fetish for which Rockbitch had become known is - inexplicably, as I would say - not huge, and heavily discriminated against, the internet has made such tapes and images easily available to those who want them. Will the band one day come to prefer self-censored girly-show to life on the edge?
Anyway, ninety minutes of non-stop, hard-driven music, no time-wasting, no chatter. Just a few words of manifesto from Babe now and again; for ninety minutes I've been standing close enough to see every pore on her body, every downy hair on her lovely thighs - so close that the pretty flirt beside me managed at least once to lick her arse and put the biggest smile of the evening on her face. And now they're finished, back across behind the bar, and away, to honour (I imagine) backstage the golden condoms - both tonight given to men (you bad girls...).
And me - I'm back out into the darkness, the cobbled streets, the bridges over the black canals, a warm, still night. "Entrance not for everybody"; but for those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing we like. While they keep the faith, I'll carry on the pilgrimage down these mean streets. Wherever it takes me.
So how, exactly, do you get to Middenmeer?

A
Copyright: Makaris, September 2001

Corrections, reflections and alternative views would be welcomed by email.

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Rockbitch at Leamington Spa, UK October 2001
Rockbitch at Breda, NederlandOctober 2001
Rockbitch at Kingston, London, UKNovember 2001
Rockbitch at Coventry, UKDecember 2001
Rockbitch return to Bristol, UKJanuary 2002
The final show at Worcester, UKJuly 2002
The Rockbitch Gallery August 2002
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