BID
Bi-Monthly Magazine For Lesbian And Bisexual Women Issue 15 FREE
BEHAVIOUR . IDENTITY . DESIRE
Contributors
Onomé Okwuosa is a freelance writer and journalist. She spends her week writing reviews, lifestyle articles and working on a futuristic sci-fi novel. She’d happily eat her weight in chicken wings and custard creams but loathes the mere mention of marmite -bleurgh!
Will Richard is a 22 year old musician who performs his own songs in venues around London. In his spare time he tries to convice the public to join the RSPB and volunteers at London Zoo.
Sophie Cohen is a19 year old English Language and Media Student at University of Brighton. She regularly contributes to B.I.D Zine writing about fashion. Likes: Rubiks Cube and Tartan Dislikes: Mushrooms and Arrogance
Lotte Murphy-Johnson is a 22 year old writer and TV researcher. She spends her week working for a TV production company and her weekend frantically putting together the B.I.D zine with her girlfriend Holly. Likes: chicken curry, baked alaska, Amanda Palmer Dislikes: Corriander, chewing gum, self-obsessed people
Lili Murphy-Johnson is a 19 year old art student at Central Saint Martins. Nowadays she mainly focues on creating artistic jewlrey but also paints abstract art and portraits. According to her CV she is: an enthusiastic, friendly, full-figured young woman with catering experience looking for love and full time work. Available to start immediately.
Holly is a 23 year old Montessori teacher who lives in London. Her passions in life are tattoos, women and computers. Shes loves music and in her dreams she’s a punk rock front-woman like Brody Dalle, in reality she is trying to learn the ukelele and can just about play Hot Cross Buns. Holly is an avid photographer and rarely ventures far without a camera. She launched B.I.D zine with her girlfriend Lotte and she enjoys being her own boss.
Contents Page
Lili Murphy-Johnson
THAT’S SO WHACK, IT HURTS WITH THE STUBBLE Holly Richardson tells B.I.D what she thinks
PATTI SMITH: THE LAST GREAT BLUESMAN? Will Richard takes a look at Patti Smith
of one prickly issue.
and her legacy.
UHH REVIEW Lotte Murphy-Johnson takes a look
HAIR HALL OF FAME Check out the top five
at Uh Huh Her’s gig last week where B.I.D managed to ask the duo a quick question.
lesbian hairstyles, all inspired by your favourite characters and celebrity lesbians.
FASHION Sophie Cohen tells you how to DIY your clothes this season!
B.I.D Don’t forget to keep checking our blog for extra news and exclusive articles!
That’s so whack, it hurts with the stubble Holly Richardson gives her opinion on a prickly issue
SO, I HAD AN INTERESTING CONVERSATION AT COLLEGE THE OTHER DAY. I was chatting with two female friends about something mundane like what we did over Easter break and the somehow the conversation turned and the next thing I knew we were playing an impromptu game of Would you rather... For the uninitiated, one person asks a question such as “Would you rather be chased by a horse sized duck or ten duck sized horses?” and the others have to decide what they would rather have happen, the lesser of two evils shall we say. And when the choices began to involve pubic hair it really got interesting. “Would you rather have hair down there that you couldn’t get rid of, that no matter what you did it grew back immediately to its natural wild state, or have size double G breasts?”
Now that is a conundrum. What would you choose? A huge, cumbersome pair of breasts which would probably mean you’d have difficulty tying your own shoes and which would give you debilitating back pain or going au natural down there, forever. At that point I didn’t really feel it appropriate to divulge my own grooming habits but let’s just say that for me the decision was an absolute no-brainer, as I frequently end up in a ‘natural’ state due to my inherent laziness and my refusal to conform to societies female grooming ideals. I am aware that porn, celebrities and peer/partner pressure all influence young women’s body ideals but when did letting it grow wild and free become on a par with having huge, potentially damaging breasts? As Amanda Palmer says “Grow that shit like a jungle, give them something strong to hold on to”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not opposed to a trim or a tidy or even a neatened edge, sometimes it is necessary (Again, courtesy of Palmer, “If it get too bushy you can trim”). It is the phenomenon of taking it all off which is just plain weird in my opinion. It really does make women look like oversized pre-pubescent children and I’m not sure when that became a good thing and I’m worried if it is. The two girls I was talking to were both straight and therefore have male partners, is it that men rather than other women are the ones who are more reluctant to embrace women sporting a jungle and who prefer a deforested timber zone? From my experience gay women are more likely to be fuzzy and be proud of it than straight women. I wonder if the fact that they are not being influenced by men or trying to please the opposite sex has any effect on their attitudes to their bushes. It’s the men who ask their girlfriends/wives/partners to rip it all off who I find slightly disconcerting. Anyone who has ever watched The Sex Education Show on Channel Four will know that teenage boys watch and look at a lot of porn and, as a result, they seem to find women with pubic hair repulsive. When they are shocked to see a woman with hair down there it fills me with despair. Young girls freely admit on camera that they do lots of things just to ensure boys will find them attractive and not be turned off by them. Anyone who is turned off by a woman in her natural state clearly isn’t that into women and it’s sad that women feel they have to put so much effort into changing their bodies in order not to repulse boys and live up to their bizarre expectations. As I was thinking about what my friends would say if I told them that the last time I neatened anything down there was when there was a J in the month (a slight exaggeration, but only slight) I also wondered what their reactions would be to my rather bushy underarms and my fuzzy legs. Such an admission would probably be met with gasps and shocked expressions, which is ridiculous in my opinion. If women want to remove every hair from every orifice then that is completely their decision to make, but when those decisions are influenced by men (or women) who are merely conforming to the expectations and stereotypes of society then it’s a problem. If you are happy with yourself then your partner should accept that and not try to change you. After I had written a first draft of this very article I noticed a story trending on Facebook with the headline Ladies: why you should stop shaving. I read it and it lead me to a blog entry where a woman details her experiment where she attempted to ditch the razor and the Veet for a year. It has been a year and a half yet she still hasn’t reverted back to the ritual of hair removal. She dispels all the common myths; no you don’t smell more, yes you can go swimming, and potential partners don’t find you repulsive. She did find that people stared or made comments in public which is not at all surprising; to many women and men the sight of a Hairy Mary is unusual and apparently worthy of staring or pointing. But it shouldn’t be and I for one will not be conforming when summer eventually rolls around. I will proudly hold the overhead handrail on the Tube wearing a strapless top and flash a kind smile at those who think I’m weird.
HAIR HALL OF FAME With the arrival of Season two of Lip Service women in the UK seem to be going crazy for Frankie’s new hair. We lesbians love a good hairdo, you can forget the Rachel shag, we have our own hair icons:
THE FRANKIE
THE WHITNEY
THE SARA
THE LISBETH
THE SHANE
Patti
: h t i Sm
at e r g st a l e ? Th n a m s blue
By Will Richard
PATTI SMITH, WITH HER ICONIC ANDROGYNY, SPITTING lyrics and fluctuating tempo, sat on the boundary of two of rock and rolls most influential movements. In many ways, the 1975 release of her début album “Horses” marked the end of the blues boom, that had been pouring from the Thames delta over the previous decade, and the beginning of the intensely controversial, reactionary yet undeniably significant force termed punk. Patti, and her band - “The Patti Smith Group” (Lenny Kaye – guitar, Richard Sohl – piano, Ivan Kral – Bass, Jay Dee – drums), are credited with the creation of many of punk’s musical and theatrical trademarks, that subsequently contributed to it’s reputation as the purest form of rebellious, free thinking yet ultimately dangerous music. Patti, like any artist, was to some degree a product of her time, influenced by those before and contemporary to her. The second wave of rock and roll (the first led by the likes of Little Richard and Elvis) had begun ten years previously, spearheaded by English bands such as The Rolling Stones and The Who. It took, however, a fellow New York based troubadour, Jimi Hendrix, to create the music and stage-show that would most influence a young Smith (her final tribute to Jimi being her cover of his album-title song “Are You Experienced” on her 2007 album “Twelve”). Hendrix, although in many ways absolutely original, had his guitar well and truly tuned to the sounds of the underground Rhythm and Blues (or Chitlin) circuit, having played on it for many years before his cruelly rapid rise to fame. Smith and Kaye, the main creative forces in the band, took many of his delta based lessons on board, and applied them, all be it through their own circumstantial filters, to their own musical process and performance. Smith’s inimitable singing style is often reminiscent of the partially atonal musings of blues greats like Son House (whose legendary “Death Letter” was covered by the White Stripes on their album De Stjl), Howling Wolf and John Lee Hooker. She uses this pseudo percussive vocal style interchangeably with bass worthy of Muddy Waters, Joplinesque angst and a Jagger like whine and sense of presence, all of which is, of course, complemented by a bucket load of Jim Morrison (The Doors). The drawn out wailing, feral panting, deliberate incomprehensibility and slurring, that make her so easily recognisable are, ironically, also some of most derivative weapons in her vocal arsenal. Due to her consistent mastery of these techniques, Patti, in many respects, has a far better “true blues” voice than the likes of Daltrey or Plant, both of whom are traditionally linked far more with this ancestral form of music. Her main power as an artist has, however, always been her lyrical ingenuity and fluidity. She is not, like many other more pretentious performers, afraid of simplicity. In her partial cover of Van Morisson’s “Gloria” she adds her most potent lyric of all; “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine...” in reference to her loss of faith as a young teenager. Beautifully simple, and unmisunderstandable - another trademark of blues. Although traditionally blues, and its derivatives, are often punctuated with the quirky use of metaphors, “I’m going down to Louisiana, baby behind the sun” (Muddy Waters – Louisiana Blues), as a whole the music tends to be lyrically ‘straight talking’, often with a narrative woven through the twelve bars. The first verse of “Free Money”, co written inevitably with Kaye, from the “Horses” album, has an undeniably blues based verse structure, and is an excellent example of a Waters-eque use of metaphor
“Every night before I go to sleep Find a ticket, win a lottery, Scoop the pearls up from the sea Cash them in and buy you all the things you need.” Although slightly truncated, if compared to a true-blues, it follows the traditional rhythmic pattern of repetitive short lines followed by an elongated final line for the turnaround (the final stage of the blues chord progression). The music to which these lyrics are put is often intentionally unexciting. Kaye’s drone like pulsing upon a triplet chord structure, complemented with Dee’s perfect, if slightly clichéd, shuffle allows the focus to remain solely on Patti and her ‘message’. Many parallels, however, can be drawn between this unobtrusive ‘backing’ music and the earliest rhythm and blues that developed in Robert Johnson’s shadow, the most obvious of which is the three chord structure. Blues, as any budding rock and roller knows, is based on the I – IV – V progression, irrelevant to the key of the piece. Smith’s music, like the rest of punk that followed, is based around a similar three chord structure, though the exact nature of the chords themselves are not so rigidly imposed. Like the vast majority of 20th century music, these chords are set to a relatively simple 4,4 time signature, however, the transient elongation and truncation of the bar is something that Smith and her band made very much their own in this era. Even this, however, has its roots in the blues of the south. Many blues artists, like the eponymous Johnson, played alone with only a guitar and their feet, or “Mississippi rhythm section” to quote Seasick Steve, to flesh out the pulse of the music. This meant that the time signature of the twelve bars, though this number also varied greatly, was very much dependent on the emotional progression within the song, slowing down and speeding up accordingly. Although rarely employed with a full band, as Smith would later use the technique, the reflection of the lyrical intensity within the fluctuating speed of the music is something that she undoubtedly took from these early pentatonic masters. “The Sex Pistols”, a London based band, are traditionally credited with taking punk to its cultural zenith. They, however, based much of what they were doing on Smith’s earlier work, and image; Lydon seeing the band at the Roundhouse during their triumphant British tour, would, ironically, later dismiss them as “Horses – more like Horse Shit” with typical punk generosity. The Pistols, with their 1977 release “Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols” to all intents and purposes took the blues out of the Patti’s music, again ironic, as it is the blues that embodies the ‘punk spirit’ far more purely, than anything that came after it. It is a beautifully simple form of protest music, formed out of great hardship and oppression, the likes of which Lydon and Viscious can only have guessed at. It is Patti Smith’s fusion of this purest form of sonic rebellion with her own musical and lyrical ingenuity that has made her such a lasting and iconic figure. She is, in many respects, the last of the great blues musicians of the 60s and 70s, all be it a remarkably ingenious and ultimately unique one.
Uh Huh Her
W E I V RE
AS FAR AS STERYOTYPICAL LESBIAN nights out go, I think I hit my peak last week. It started out in typical dykey fashion – a friend and I turning up in the same dark jeans and H&M hoodie. It’s a good job we’re not dating or the term ‘urge to merge’ would have reached new heights.
After attempting to disguise the embarrassing fact we were dressed the same, my girlfriend, my friend and I wandered over to the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. After a lucky spot we were whisked through the fast track entrance and found our selves with pints surrounded by hundreds of women. Who knew 02 Priority Moments could be so useful? After settling into the crowd our evening went something like this: Leisha Hailey, Camila Grey, checked shirts and denim sleeveless jackets. Not to mention B.I.D managing to get an exclusive interview with Uh Huh Her and sideling up with Abisha Uhl, Katie Murphy and the other girls from acclaimed Minneapolis rock band Sick of Sarah. Sounds pretty good right? Well, here’s our run-down of the evening…
Girls, girls, more girls…. and a few creepy guys It probably comes as no surprise to you that an Uh Huh Her gig would be filled to the brim with lovely ladies, most of whom were saphically inclined. A few hundred women and a handful of men: pretty normal for a lesbian gig. However, as we looked around the room, it was hard not to spot a group of three men huddled together staring around the room. Unfortunately for the female population of the concert hall, they seemed more interested in being surrounded by women than seeing any of the bands.
Sick of Sarah
It was a nice surprise to see Sick of Sarah up on stage supporting UHH. The Minneapolis rock band, who did a 30 date US tour along with the awesome Hunter Valentine back in 2011 put on a good show and will hopefully get some more UK recognition as a result. Charismatic front-woman Abisha Uhl managed to make much of the audience fall under her spell with her high-energy yet laidback attitude and I’m certain that many young lesbians in the audience are now SOS fans. Their self-titled debut album is available to buy now and I would recommend having a listen.
Uh Huh Her We didn’t really know what to expect with Uh Huh Her as we’d never seen them before. However, as the band played a number of crowd favourites and a few songs off their most recent album it became obvious they definitely live up to their hype. A couple of songs in, a small section of the crowd began to chant “Alice! Alice!” Which, in my opinion was slightly embarrassing. Especially as the rest of the audience refused to join in. They quickly changed to yelling “Leisha! Leisha!” and “Camila! Camila!” which got a better reaction. While Leisha Hayley’s L-Word fame has certainly helped the band’s success, Camila Grey is not one to be underestimated. She has a brilliant voice - probably due to the fact she was classically trained - and a stage presence which is quite enchanting. The only bad thing I’d say about the whole evening was that the sound team weren’t really up to scratch. At one point a microphone was forgotten and Leisha’s guitar was tuned to the wrong key. Apart from that, however, the whole evening was really enjoyable and the LA couple put on a brillaint show! After being urged on by a ever-growing queue of lesbians desperately trying to meet the band, we managed to ask UHH one quick question: What’s your favourite song to perform live? “Oh, shit! I dunno!” was Leisha’s reply.
Sophie Cohen looks at new fashion trends and how you can DIY at home
The high street and fashion worlds have never been ones to stay still for long, each week they have new items and ideas floating around and every time I enter H&M, Topshop or River Island their displays have changed around. But I guess that is just how it works. So what has been all over the web and across the high street? Studs, tie dye and dip dye – things that we can buy in the shops and also do at home!
Studs- It seems that all of the themes are stemming from that good old 90’s grunge again (which I absolutely love). Designers are putting studs on literally everything: shoes, belts, t-shirts, dresses, shirts, jackets, jeans, headbands, collars, bags and jewellery and other accessories are littered with them. But studs don’t seem to be the cheapest of trends on the market – solution? – A few of my friends have bought themselves packets of studs (which you can get ridiculously cheap if you search the web) and have been customising their own clothing. I think this is a brilliant idea! You can enjoy a trend which is so hot right now without having the same clothing as everyone else.
Tie-Dye – For me tie-dye reminds me of mucking about at scouts and making silly looking t-shirts, it is almost difficult to imagine it being a fashion. That said, there are some amazing pieces out there. Tie-Dye is such a bold statement and you can have as little or as much as you want. Be it just a tiedye t-shirt or a whole outfit based on it (i.e. tie-dye dress.) Of course if you are going to tackle this at home make sure you wear gloves and don’t spill dye everywhere. I am definitely going to be giving this a go and get myself some customised one of a kind t-shirts for the summer.
Dip-Dye – I don’t know if you have noticed or not, but I have in fact had my hair dip-dyed for over a year now! I am one of that irritating people who doesn’t like having their hair one colour and changes it on a fortnightly basis. This look works really well on dark hair and light hair, just remember if you have dark hair (like me) you will need to bleach your hair first, because it is more likely than none that the semi permanent hair dye will not take to such dark hair. Once the bleach is on you can leave it whatever colour it comes out (maybe a blondey-ginger) or in fact by a semi-permanent hair colour and apply that. To keep the colour up it is suggested that you apply the dye at least once a week. There are plenty of semi-permanent hair dyes out there but my favourite are ‘Directionz’ they have such a range and there is bound to be one that suits you!
B.I.D ZINE Issue 15
With Thanks To: Holly Richardson Lotte Murphy-Johnson SOPHIE Cohen Lili Murphy-Johnson OnomĂŠ Okwuosa Will Richard