Julie - Giving the Libation
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Rockbitch - Worcester, July 9th 2002 |
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| Ending or Rebirth | |||
| So the odyssey is complete. But I would not have had it end like this. | |||
| This last ever UK show is half over and part of me is shouting "betrayal". What might have been an act of homage, a visitation of respect, for some perhaps a rite of love, seems to have become just another Channel Five sex show. This band has always taken pride in creating an ambience, has exerted artistic control over every aspect of what they do, but tonight on this tiny stage the dominant image is not Julie's, not Babe's, but that of the outsize Betacam on the shoulder of the man from Channel Five. Every time the strap-on goes in - and there is a lot of sex tonight - each time the labia are spread, so the camera looms large and close between us and them. Those who've cancelled plans at the last minute to get here from across the country, those to whom some strange prompting of the battered heart has spoken to command their sweating and buffeted presence here, must now make way for the faceless and disinterested who've always stayed at home, who've ignored or reviled this band until it was too late. | |||
| The pain seems the greater because the metaphysical truth played out here speaks of more than mere aesthetic loss. A Rockbitch stage has always seemed a place apart, a sanctuary, both theatre and shrine, setting for the external rituals of sex and music - the metaphor - but source also of the power of mutual love - which is no metaphor - that flashes in these women's eyes and validates their constant wordless interaction. Tonight their sanctuary - usurpt towne, to another due - has been wasted, the women enthralled to their own defilement. | |||
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Julie - Giving the Libation |
| Already tonight I've given up on my own photographs. Too much the puritan to pander to this media-fest, too uncompromising to follow these girls into what looks like an abandonment of integrity, simply no longer confident I see a truth beneath the dross, I retire to the back of this not very large crowd to sulk, to nurse my grievance, to wish I'd not come. It occurs to me, ungraciously, to muse on whether the girls have timed this farewell for Channel Five's benefit, and to hope that the pay-off was really worth this. | |
| So I head for the door - but I pause; for the moment at least, from the back, I continue to watch, to listen. I concede sullenly that Julie's voice tonight soars stronger, more freely than perhaps I've ever heard it. And above the intervening silhouetted heads, I notice that she has moved across to her right, she's singing Breathe directly to Nikki, serenading her - not for the first time tonight she seems to direct a special affection to Nikki - and I see that her face is radiant with a rare glow. And I see too, with a sudden quickening, that her cheeks are soaked with her tears. | |
| And I look along the stage and notice Jo, composed tonight and unusually subdued, and in her face too, drawn and tense, I see evidence of tears not long suppressed. | |
| And shadows start to move beneath the surface, emotions - veteris vestigia flammae - traces of the old flame - flicker; I seem to hear the ice crack. Doubts creep back as they have before, to assail my facile certainties. And recent memories stir. | |
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| A few weeks ago these girls played to a cavernous and almost empty club in Burton-on-Trent and I saw them that night turn down half the offered fee. After that show I found Luci sitting alone, somewhat dejected, on the stage among the half-packed equipment; but she summoned willingly for me - as she would for anyone - that limpid and unforced smile; "I'm OK", she said, "just tired, and I'm driving the first stretch back tonight". I knew then, and beneath my anger I know still, that this band has made no pact with Mephistopheles. She's had her hair done since that gig, svelte now and layered very short at the back, but can I doubt that Luci remains tonight, woman and artist, what she was then, or that this is the same band that has so often sent me out into the velvet night with lifted spirit and lighter heart,
... back from Lyonnesse with magic in my eyes? | |
| And if my heart remains heavy tonight, if tonight I can't deny the pain of rejection, my jealousy in the fear that they've found a new and richer lover in the prying lens, yet I know that to question their integrity is to be fastidious to a point that does me no credit. For I cannot deny the truth that if there is betrayal then it's they who have suffered, they and not we who have the right to be aggrieved. | |
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| There's not been much tonight, apart from the cameras, to make it apparent that this is really the end. Babe made a brief speech near the start, Julie has just said a brief "Thank-you". And tonight the last words and the only explicit bitterness come not from the girls but from Tony; he comes on-stage from the mixing desk after the last song and begins a fairly gracious speech, thanking fans and friends for their support; but he's interrupted a couple of times by vacuous heckling - nothing much out of the normal, Babe would have smiled it away. But Tony breaks off: "I'm glad, in a way, we've had these smart-ass comments tonight. It just shows why we're giving up". And without another word the band are off.. Only the lesbian orgy backstage is left - to which Babe has invited all the women here tonight - and with a final jab of suspicion I wonder how much Channel Five has paid them to stage that. | |
| Ill-at-ease, confused, I have no heart to wait as I usually do for the girls to reappear; instead I go back to my hotel and take the first train out in the morning. | |
| But one odd image of grace, at least, will remain with me from earlier tonight. About 8 o'clock I'm in my hotel room, just a few hundred yards from the bar where the band are playing. I'm thinking about heading out, and some impulse takes me to the window - maybe I'm just checking to see whether it's raining. Indeed the pavements glisten with a faint sheen - but on the other side of the road, just passing, foreshortened by the perspective from my third-floor window but instantly recognisable, I see the whole band strung out along 50 yards like an extended family group. Though I can't see their faces, there's a gaiety, a jauntiness in their poise, a dance in their walk; a car hoots - whether in recognition or just in response to this glimpse of charm - and heads toss, Kali waves back. In this rejection of pretension, this confidence in the truth of self, is something naive and direct and childlike, something which is emblematic of this band and wholly characteristic. I shall remember these girls for many things, but not least will it be for their uncompromising conviction that if living is for struggle it's also for pleasure, and that neither one has meaning without the other. | |
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| And now I'm far away, in an airy, pastel room beside the sea. It's mid-morning, I'm alone with a rangy Australian waitress in figure-hugging black who brings me coffee; she has a reticent smile and that hint of hesitancy in her elongated vowels which seems to make of the simplest phrase a considered and judicious response. Light fills the room. In the gentle Atlantic swell through the window I see, not 100 yards offshore, the black back of a dolphin break the surface, then another, then perhaps a dozen, making languid passage eastwards. Distance lends perspective, and rescued from the tyranny of my emotions by the insistent song of starlings in the eaves outside, and the softer murmur of the surf beyond, I muse on the nature of what Rockbitch have achieved and of what they have given up. | |
| This ending, or this rebirth, has been long prefigured. When I first thought about this band, nearly a year ago, I wrote: "..see them before it's too late.." On a practical level, perhaps, I sensed merely that the economics didn't stack up. Here was a large band playing tiny venues, often to less than capacity audiences; worse, contractual or logistical problems had left the band without a recent CD or video, and apparently without rights to market the old ones. On a romantic level I may have felt that here was simply something too fragile and too beautiful to last in an oppressive world. |
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| But there were other, more subtle, less tractable issues to be addressed. I sensed that here was a mountain that simply might not be scalable, the dilemma might be irresoluble, the paradoxes too acute. For it was only at secret gigs serviced by little more than word of mouth that the band could secure the freedom from officialdom and interference that they craved - and if it's true that the less publicity the better the show, and that the smaller the audience the more powerful the effect, yet that paradigm won't pay the bills. And, further, those who may be drawn to the band by its promise of pan-sexual promiscuity do not necessarily sit well with those who respond to the powerful lesbian and feminist political structure on which it builds; indeed, there may be a natural antipathy between the two, an antipathy which I sense at times exists within the band, as it is reflected in my own responses. For in the end, perhaps, explicit sex on stage is a form of bravado - sex without arousal, after all, is an act for show, a gesture, essentially mimetic - and only the front row, and only a portion of that, can actually see what happens. One video may, indeed, reach further than a thousand nights of touring, one television show further than a thousand videos, and so we understand the dilemma.. But.. but.. | |
| And my ear catches the lilt of the waitress murmuring something gently behind me; Eva Cassidy floats into the soft silences. I look up. The dolphins in the bay have moved now far to my right, tiny flashes of light cascade as the sun catches the spray from the black fins. And after a moment they are gone; the sea closes behind them untroubled, leaves no trace of their having passed. |
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| So will I never see the girls again? Already their passage through my life begins to seem phantasmal. And if I found in Donne's extended metaphor a sardonic application to the complicity of these girls in their own rape during that recent night's dark voyage, then today that bitterness has been washed away and with gratitude I know that the metaphor applies no less to my own subjugation, to my own tacit and answered call to them that they should breake, blowe, burn and make me new. And shapes shift as I brood, new associations form, and I'm suddenly aware that within my grasp is a further, a deeper, truth. For I suspect now that in the eyes of these women - at Coventry, at Bristol, at Breda and elsewhere - what I've seen is no less than that same struggle at which the sonnet hints, the struggle to abandon self to a purity of aspiration. And here in this quiet room, where the sunlight beats back from the water and dances on the white-washed wall, I recognise at last - and feel myself now to approach the core of the mystery - that it is that same willed and sought surrender to a form of spiritual chastity - with its promise and its risks, its earnest of creation, of renewal, or it may be of destruction - that I've been watching in these faces, night after night, limned against the dark, all the while I've singed my own wings fluttering hapless against the incandescence. |
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| And now the candle has gone out. | |
| It's not given to many individuals to affect the world, perhaps rarely is it allowed that they change even a single mind. But what they can do is reinforce and strengthen, by creed and by example, and so perhaps hold entropy at bay, buttress the resources of the heart. In their hold over me for half a year and more, in these meagre words of mine, are constituted proof enough of that efficacy. And they have left images here and there hanging in the miasma for me to snatch and keep, talisman and touchstone; I can do no more than offer back some of them here, testimony of a sort that for a time magic really did hold sway, that it all did really happen. | |
| And, withal, were they just a bunch of half-dressed girls with guitars? | |
Nikki - at The Rigger, Newcastle | |
All the photos on this page were taken during the Sex Death and Magik tour earlier this year, with the permission of the band. Some pictures of the Worcester show are now available at the Rockbitch Gallery. |
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| Copyright: Makaris, July 2002 Corrections, reflections and alternative views would be welcomed by email. |
| Back to the Home | Page |
| Rockbitch at Bristol, UK | September 2001 |
| Rockbitch at Leamington Spa, UK | October 2001 |
| Rockbitch at Breda, Nederland | October 2001 |
| Rockbitch at Kingston, London, UK | November 2001 |
| Rockbitch at Coventry, UK | December 2001 |
| Rockbitch return to Bristol, UK | January 2002 |
| Rockbitch Gallery | August 2002 |
