1. I imagine most of you will have seen, at least in passing, the lineup announcement for this year’s
Reading and Leeds Festival. Much like last year,the yellow page has somewhat failed to live up to
my expectations – you couldn’t pay me to watch Bring Me The Horizon – but there’s a bigger reason
why I won’t be decamping to Richfield Avenue this August.
If you follow the right things on social media, you might have seen another, rather more minimal
version of the lineup, one where only nine artists appear. Nine. The version I’m talking about is that
where all the bands that don’t include women have been removed: and the result is frankly upsetting.
One of the biggest festivals in the UK season puts out its announcement, where there will be a single
woman – Marmozets’ Becca Macintyre – on the main stage during the entire weekend. A celebration
of the biggest things in alternative music, and they can only muster nine bands including women
across six stages. With only one of the paltry few billed as a headliner – Azealia Banks – the rest seem
like a token gesture.
It’s 2015 and women in music are being displayed as a minority. Would it have killed them to
consider a few more diverse bands: replace the white-boy folk of Mumford and Sons with Tegan and
Sara,say, or bring in La Roux instead of one of the other generic synth bands? Even as I write that,
I’m questioning my terms: when on earth did the female gender become a question of token diversity,
of meeting minority quotas? I didn’t sign up for this.
While this lineup is shit on grounds of gender inequality, it’s symptom of an endemic problem in the
industry. Music, and in particular alternative music, is a male-dominated arena. Women have to do
much more to stand out than men: you can name any number of jangly guitar bands fronted by skinny
men in tight trousers from say 2006, but how many including women? The 2009 indie bubble was
filled with white boys making bleeps on their keyboards and singing incomprehensibly – I still have
no clue what Golden Scans is on about – but the smaller number of female artists getting hyped were
ones doing something a bit different, like the harp-twanging, lung-busting anthems of Florence and
the Machine, or the astonishing primality of Fever Ray. I’m forcibly reminded of the saying that
women, to get anywhere, have to be not just as good as men, but better. Equality’s not come yet, and I
can see it in the pages of my NME.
Women in particular branches of music – metal, indie rock, post-punk stand out immediately – are
treated as highly unusual. The odd female singer in a male-dominated band – Paramore,Wolf Alice,
London Grammar – is treated as a quirk, a unique selling point: because,of course,music is a man’s
world. Savages created hype not because they were a post-punk band about thirty years too late, but
because they were an all-female post punk band. And we still call female-dominated groups girl
groups: if that term, ringing with the music snob allusion to pop music, is acceptable, why don’t we
call bands ‘boy bands’ and lump Bastille and Alt-J in with One Direction? Why is the ‘band’ idea a
male one, so that we have to distinguish female artists from the norm?
Best album lists tend to place most weight on male bands or artists. Critical acclaim for women comes
in spite of their gender. Only four women have won the Mercury Prize, with PJ Harvey having won it
twice. Is this really because men are better at making music than women, or is it symptom of the
continued problem of internalised misogyny?
They say there’s no accounting for taste:one friend of mine told me that he just didn’t like female
singers on aesthetic grounds. But isn’t that just product of the society we live in that’s constructed
women as inferiors? Music’s normalised as a male domain, where women have to go above and
beyond to be heard and seen,and to be critically recognised.

2. And along with being a symptom of a wider problem, the Reading and Leeds lineup is an issue in of
itself: visibility. It is hard to imagine yourself as something you never see:think of being a young
female musician in that crowd on August bank holiday this year.
Demoralising doesn’t cover it.