OH-4315_AngelaCooper_e06_part2.mp3
Dr. Sarah Feinstein: [00:00:00] And do you remember for the Edinburgh Conference, what was your set list?
Angela Cooper: [00:00:08] We’ve still got we had our little leaflets that we printed. We’ve got those that they put on the archive. We were we wanted to make it. So there was some things people knew. So it’s sort of like my girl. So, I mean, at the time and things that you could dance to and reggae because you were good at the reggae drumming, weren’t you? So they could use and Jimmy Cliff stuff. And we pick songs like You Can Get It If You Really Want. And, you know, some of the songs had a message that you were a bit and had a good beat because we were a dance band effectively. So you couldn’t just get up there and just sing, you know, blues and things, because we were just, you know, so we try and mix and match and then we write some of our own stuff, you know, because it’s always a bit funny trying to dance to music you’ve never heard before. And then we’d give our leaflets and things and and we did benefits for strikes, didn’t we,
Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:00:55] 67?
Angela Cooper: [00:00:56] Because in our band we had Maoists, we had radical feminists (which is what we’d be), a libertarian socialist feminist, or whatever. We had a transgender person. We were ahead of our time.
Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:01:08] Absolutely.
Angela Cooper: [00:01:09] And so we tried to represent every of our views, you know, and so some of the political ones who were involved in strikes, things would go and do benefits would be benefits for lesbian groups. We did a benefit for Sparerib, we went down to London and played down there.
Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:01:28] And we even went to the local jailhouse.
Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:01:32] We played at Styal Prison.
Dr. Sarah Feinstein: [00:01:34] Oh, did you?
Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:01:34] Yeah, we did.
Angela Cooper: [00:01:35] Yeah.
Dr. Sarah Feinstein: [00:01:35] And how did that come about?
Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:01:37] Well, my friends ended up waving to me from the floor! I wanted to run out when we walked in I said I could hear I was setting up the drums. The next minute I heard someone shouting “Hi Luchia, you a’right?”, and I felt like, oh my God! I turned around and there’s all my old buddies!
Angela Cooper: [00:01:56] We got in touch with them and said, Would you like us to come and play? And of course, they said, yes, you know, and it was quite a solitary experience anyway, because we went in like in a van and yeah, yeah you know, and it was a good atmosphere…. but then, of course, we came out and they didn’t, you know, and you sort of realised they were in there and, you know, so, yeah, we over those few years, we really tried to to sort of get out there.
Luchia Fitzgerald: [00:02:21] …the thing that, you know, really ticked me off Angela, you know, just to butt in for a second that, you know, when I was on that stage and I was looking at some of those women, I was thinking they’re in here because their crimes were society driven, as one would say, you know, and that really upset me. They were all of society driven down to oppression.