Photo via Crack in the Road
Earlier this week, the Guardian put hard data to the lingering issue surrounding the gender disparity of UK festival bills. Analyzing the country’s 12 biggest festivals, they found that 86% of performers booked were male. Journalist Jenny Stevens asked festival bookers for their response to the data, and among the dispiriting replies was Download Festival's Andy Copping, who said that women who attend his festival like "watching bands more than being in them"; that "they just haven’t felt inspired enough to pick up a guitar or be the singer of a rock band."
As three female musicians among thousands here in the UK, we asked Copping (over Twitter) about his perception that women prefer not to be onstage. "It was an observation," he wrote. "How can you observe what a crowd of fans would prefer to be doing? Isn’t it likely that a lot of them, whether male or female, really would love to one day play on a festival stage themselves rather than just being in the audience? He also added that he chose bands on "Merit not gender—be shit, you don’t get booked."
Copping seems ill-equipped to get beyond the mythology of women as outsiders in music. He stated as much, but gender disparity is clearly not of concern at his festival, as the lineup features 96 all-male acts, and four featuring female performers. As more bands and fans debated the issue with him on Twitter, he summarily dismissed them as twats and bitches.
Nevertheless, let’s look at what he’s getting at with this idea that women are underrepresented because they are merely not "inspired" to be: Perhaps it’s that women don’t feel their artistic expression welcomed on their own terms; that they fear being patronized, objectified, and treated like a novelty, because music—the industry, the media, not to mention audiences and venues—is still largely a patriarchal domain. You need to posses metric tons of "inspiration" to navigate through that lot. How are women of an impressionable age going to see a female role model at a festival when there aren’t many? How are boys and men going to know that women are on equal footing as artists and that women deserve to be on a big stage when they so rarely see them up there?
The fact is, there are so many amazing and successful bands with women/non-binary/trans performers across all scenes—more than ever—that there’s no excuse for male dominated festival bills. In the small venues in which we play and perform, it feels odd to see bands that don’t feature at least one non-male performer—and it gets remarked upon, too. Why doesn’t this translate to bigger shows? Because of the gatekeepers of large shows and certain festivals see this as an acceptable norm. Melvin Benn, who runs Reading & Leeds, and Latitude, some the UK’s biggest festivals: "We don’t have a problem. We put on bands that people want to buy tickets to watch—so it’s the public that makes the decision about what bands play at festivals." (He conveniently ignores the fact that tickets for Reading & Leeds go on sale before much, if any, of the lineup has been announced.)
To claim that if you’re at the top of the pyramid of power in the music and festival industry, you’re utterly powerless to change the landscape is a sham; that even though you have the most influence, your decisions must somehow come from the bottom up is a ridiculous excuse. Festival bookers are keen to claim influence when it suits them; being unwilling to exert it to bring about positive, empowering, and necessary change is both ignorant and cowardly.
There are promoters in the UK, of big and small shows, who, without making a fuss about it, book diverse bills of incredible musicians. How on earth do they manage it when, we are being told, that in fact, women don’t actually play in bands?! It’s because they value the power of inclusions, they follow the various scenes happening across the UK in their full, diverse glory, they support smaller bands and take chances. They don’t block out everything that doesn’t conform to a narrow idea of what a band is—or who can be in one.