Transcript:
OH-4315_AngelaCooper_e06_part1.mp3
Angela Cooper: [00:00:00] Somehow this idea came up, didn’t say that we needed a women’s band, that we could play our own music, write our own songs, and we were here in like Olivia Records were coming over from America and ain’t going to marry and all of that sort of thing. It’s like, yeah, well, we can do the same. So the first gathering of that was in the Women’s Center. And it was just I thought, like, you could play with the drums, couldn’t couldn’t you? And someone could play better keyboards and someone had been training guitar. We just got these group together of people I hadn’t seen before, but I started singing at that point. We were, as far as I recall, our big aim at that point was to play at the Edinburgh conference, which was going to do this big thing in Edinburgh.
Dr. Sarah Feinstein: [00:00:41] What year was that?
Angela Cooper: [00:00:42] I’d have to look back onto thee… it was the seventies, mid, early to mid seventies. And we went and as far as I remember, that was 2700 women. Was there pretty much our first gig, which was quite amazing. We might have played some little gig before that. And then we’ve got pictures of us there on the aircraft, the arcade, the women’s music archive in our dungarees. And it’s just it was very hot because with so many women in this room and I can remember was on the stage when we were like, oh, and then somebody said, like, let’s check our top software. And some of them took the tops off. And then the next minute we just looking out at the sea and breasts, you know, with all these women with the tops off. And it was just like this amazing. Whoa. You know, because we can because we just could. And that was like a real high point in our lives, I think. Just talk about liberation part of that moment in time. You know, with those women, we were playing our music. They were dancing to women’s music. They were seeing women play instruments mostly for the first time. I’ve never been on before, you know, and we’d had to sort out where to get the you know, how to get all that together, what goes on in the background. And that was very exciting and I’m sure on that night, probably a lot of women ended up kissing a woman or something with a woman that they hadn’t done before because suddenly they could, you know, and it was kind of OK. And so the ones who were maybe like me, who’d been a bit more, you know, closeted or something, know some of them, we’ve never even occurred to them. You know, it was like, oh, you know, she’s nice. And they were at meetings together. So this whole thing was going on. That’s a thing that push people together. And some of them went back to their husbands and the blokes or whatever, but some of them never did. So there was certainly around the country, hundreds of women went through that, being part of the gay, straight gay scene coming up in discos and in some of those women would come to them.
Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:02:41] And we were trying to create a platform that people could come to where they felt comfortable and safe and just, you know, to come together for the first time since, I suppose the suffragettes.
Angela Cooper: [00:02:55] That was women only, coz that’s the thing there was nothing women only on the gay scene.
Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:02:59] Yeah, these were all women only events. And it was, you know, I’d say 90 percent of lesbians turned up and we used to pack the halls.
One comment