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 Centre. And it was just ad hoc, like, you could play with the drums, couldn’t couldn’t you? And someone could play a bit of keyboards and someone had been training guitar. We just got these group together of people I hadn’t sung 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.

Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:00:52] 1.700 women was there.

Angela Cooper: [00:00:54] It was 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 archive, the women’s music archive in our dungarees. And I say 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 tops of or whatever. And some of them took the tops off. And then the next minute we just looking out at the sea of 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.

Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:01:34] Talk about liberation.

Angela Cooper: [00:01:35] Just 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 maybe 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 suddenly around the country, hundreds of women weren’t there that, being part of the gay, straight gay scene coming having 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.