If you were touring America these
days and you wanted to contact your manager or, indeed, anyone back in the UK,
all you need to do is switch on a laptop or tablet or smart phone and use Skype.
And if not Skype exactly, you’d use Viber or exchange e-mails or instant
messages. But in the early 1990s, the internet was very slow and ridiculously expensive
and most people weren’t online anyway. So, when Crystal wanted to contact
Madeleine, our agent, to find out how things were doing she had to seek out a
payphone and drop a lot of coins into the slot for a not very long and usually
unsatisfactory conversation.
I don’t know how
or when Crystal originally got Madeleine to represent her. She was Crystal’s agent
long before I first heard her live and she’d also represented John River before
the River Bank became famous and ascended well out of her league. I sometimes got
the impression that Madeleine was working for Crystal as a favour, although she
did also manage some other rather more successful bands that regularly toured
Europe and the UK. None were fabulously rich or famous, but they made enough
for it to be worth Madeleine’s while. This roster included folk groups, a jazz
band and several minor league Rock and Pop groups. The most commercially successful
band was called the Seven Imps. They were a Death Metal group who’d originally come
from Norway but had now settled in East London and bore a remarkable resemblance
to Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs as illustrated by Arthur Rackham. To be honest,
she and I were never really the best of friends. I think there might have been
some sexual tension between us. I considered myself to be Crystal’s primary
lover after Mark and I think Madeleine might once have believed that she
occupied that role. Whatever the reason, she was never especially friendly
towards me. Madeleine was a rather offhand manager when we returned to England and,
in the absence of anyone else, it was me who became the de facto acting band leader.
John River and Mark
both told me that Madeleine was critical in the early days of Crystal’s career
and it was she who persuaded Christine Giordano to adopt a stage name that was
less of a mouthful and thereby become the eponymous Crystal Passion. The
acoustic sound of her first album, Triad,
was a much better fit with the singer-songwriters Madeleine managed—such as Mary
Jane Clover, Lenny Shroud and Joanna—than it was with the direction the music took
after she teamed up with me, my sister, Jane and Jacquie. And it was through
Madeleine that Crystal Passion got signed to Gospel Records.
All the same,
she still doesn’t get much of a mention in Polly Tarantella’s biography.
“So what’s
Madeleine got to say?” asked Olivia.
“We’ve had more
news coverage in the UK over the last few days than we’ve ever had,” said
Crystal.
“Good or bad?”
wondered the Harlot.
“Mixed,”
admitted Crystal. “And none of it’s about the music. There was a short article
about us in the NME that was on our
side. It was about our American tour and how we’ve been maligned by the
right-wing press and misrepresented on television and radio. It was more about
the failures of the American media than an account of the gigs we’ve played.”
“That’s
something at least,” said Tomiko.
“Well, it’s
better than the articles about us in the
Sun, the Daily Mail and the London Evening News where we’ve again
been called Crystal and the Passions. In fact, the Daily Mail even managed to spell my name with a ‘K’, so that I’m
now Kristal as in Kristallnacht. At least they don’t also accuse me of being
anti-Semitic.”
“What do they
say?” Philippa wondered.
“That we’ve
been scandalising all of America with our shocking stage act. That we’ve been appearing
on stage in the nude and having live lesbian sex in front of our fans. That we’re
in the same tradition of scandalous and outrageous rock groups as the Sex
Pistols, the Slits and Throbbing Gristle. And, what’s worse, the only gig any of
them report is the one at the Purple Robe
in Detroit. There’s a small photo of us in the
Sun but it’s difficult to tell what’s going on because it’s obscured by so
many black rectangles. There’s nothing about our gig at Boston. Nothing about
our gig with Veronica in Newport. And there’s something in the Daily News about me once being John River’s girlfriend…”
“And is that
so?” Bertha asked.
“Hardly. John
is my cousin. Even I draw the line at that.”
“Don’t worry
about all that shit,” said Judy Dildo. “No one pays attention to what’s printed
in those rags.”
Unfortunately,
Judy wasn’t quite right. Even in the 1990s and without the prevalence of the internet,
news could still carry a long distance. Maybe it wasn’t as instant as it is
these days, but it was fast enough.
Later that day I
was hanging around our camp site with Andrea, Tomiko and Crystal while we discussed
how to capitalise on the success of our first gig and what numbers we should
play at our gig on the closing night. We weren’t going to be the final act. That
honour was given to a local Syracuse all-woman Hard Rock band called Third
Rock. We weren’t even the second-to-last. That slot was taken by the Women of
Babylon, a Riot Grrrl band from Brooklyn defiantly proud to be both mixed race
and lesbian. That was the perfect combination at this festival which the Crystal
Passion band surpassed only by virtue of us having almost three times as many
women as they had. But we were looking forward to being third from last and
wondering whether we should perform some other cover songs. Andrea was keen on
playing Carole King’s It’s Too Late
while I was arguing the merits of Alison Limerick’s Where Love Lies.
But our
discussion was interrupted by Ariel Golgotha who appeared by our tent dressed
in denim shorts, hand-weave sandals and the official festival tee-shirt.
“Gee! What the
fuck! Have you heard this horse-shit rumour, you guys?” she said.
“Sorry, Ariel,”
asked Crystal innocently. “What horse-shit?”
Ariel looked
Crystal up and down from her face to her toes, clearly uncomfortable at standing
at such close proximity to a naked woman. Her freckled face visibly reddened,
but she continued regardless.
“The horse-shit
about you guys performing at a strip club in Detroit. I mean it’s fucking groovy
that you’re like naturists and into Mother Earth and all those good things, but
Gee! Strip Clubs! I mean, guys… What the fuck! Is it true?”
Crystal lowered
herself onto a deck chair, partly to obscure her nudity but also to take the
more submissive role appropriate for further negotiation.
“We’ve not been
lucky with some of our bookings, Ariel,” she said.
“But a fucking
strip club. In front of fucking… fucking… in front of men. Gee! I mean, like what
the fuck! This is a woman’s festival. We’re here to celebrate our sisterhood.
We’re not here to pander to male chauvinist fantasies and fucking… fucking… stuff
like pornography and the oppression of women. Just tell me it’s all horse-shit,
guys. Come on.”
“It’s not what
we wanted to do,” said Crystal. “We had a gig arranged at the Detroit Fall,
which is normally a folk-rock club. But when we got to Detroit, we discovered that
we’d been booked to play at a club called the Purple Robe instead. We didn’t
know what kind of place it was and we felt duty-bound to fulfil our
obligations.”
“But fuck! Gee!
You didn’t have to play at a fucking strip club. What will the sisters think?
It’s like the opposite of everything we stand for.”
“Do you want us
to cancel our gig, Ariel?”
“What? No. I
don’t think so. It’s too late for that. But Gee! I don’t know. If word got
round… You’re not going to start having sex on stage are you? I’m open-minded,
fuck knows. But there are limits, you know. There’s only so far you can go with
free expression before it becomes pornography. I mean, naturism is one thing.
That’s communion with nature and being Green and aware and as one with the
spirits. But sex on stage, even in front of the sisters, that’s fucking…
fucking… It’s not right. Is it, Crystal?”
“Not at all,
Ariel,” said Crystal. “And you can be assured that we shan’t be doing anything
like that at all. We’ll just go on stage and perform our songs. That’s all we
want to do and that’s all we shall do.”
“Well, that’s
cool then,” said Ariel who seemed relieved but evidently not completely
reassured.
This
conversation visibly upset Crystal. Once Ariel was out of sight and earshot,
she sank her head into her hands: her face obscured by her long hair.
“What have I
done?” she wailed. “How has it all come to this?”
“None of it’s
your fault, Crystal,” said Andrea, kneeling down beside her and wrapping an arm
around her shoulder.
“It’s all shit
anyway,” said Tomiko. “Who cares about that gig in Detroit? At least it helped
pay the bills.”
“We’re still going
to make a phenomenal loss on this tour,” Crystal continued. “We should have
just said no about appearing at a strip club. We should have stuck to our
principles.”
I wasn’t sure
what to say. After all, unlike my sister, I was one of those who’d actually
performed on stage at the Purple Robe and, what’s more, had done so almost
totally nude. I’d hated doing it but I was also complicit.
“Shall we just
continue working on the set list?” I suggested.
“That’s mostly
been done,” said Andrea. “And judging from what Ariel’s just been saying I
don’t think we’ll have the opportunity to play bonus cover tunes, whether by
Carole King or by some House diva.”
“If we get the
chance we should try Eight Days a Week or
Norwegian Wood,” Crystal proposed with
a shy smile. “Anything by Lennon-McCartney goes down well.”
“How about we
play something decent like Lithium or
Smoke on the Water?” suggested Judy
Dildo who strode towards us from the direction of the food tents. She was wearing
a skimpy bikini top and barely decent denim shorts and her arm was around the
waist of a teenage girl with short black-dyed hair wearing a festival tee-shirt
and tight black briefs. Judging from her piercings and tattoos, this was a girl
who’d enjoy the music of Hole and Bikini Kill as much as Judy did. And the
evidence from her simpering affection towards Judy was that there was a whole
lot more about Judy that she’d been enjoying.
“Ariel’s just come
over here and told us that she’d heard about our gig in Detroit,” I announced
in the malicious hope of deflating Judy’s ego. I wasn’t feeling charitable
towards her. I mean, how dare she? Not only was she making love with Crystal
more often than I was, she’d also found the time and opportunity to pick up and
fuck the local talent.
“Shit! You mean
the Purple Robe.”
“Exactly,” I
said.
“That Ariel’s
one prudish bitch,” said Judy uncharitably. “She thinks that all it takes is to
have sex with a woman for her to be the fucking spokeswoman for a whole half of
humanity. She should go back to fucking church and sing hymns and shit.”
The girl accompanying
Judy giggled appreciatively. Disrespect towards the Christian faith patently went
down well with her. Nonetheless, Judy slipped out of the girl’s grip and slid towards
Crystal so that now both she and Andrea had their arms around her. And I was
just stood at one side and looked on ineffectually in the company of Tomiko and
a still giggling teenage girl who was rolling up one of those single-skin
joints that Americans prefer.
“We’ll show
those bastards we mean business,” said Judy boldly.
“That’s not why
I make music,” Crystal pleaded. “I’m not about confrontation, Judy. I’m about building
bridges.”
“Like fucking
Simon and Garfunkel,” Judy sniffed scornfully.
Judy’s teenage
girlfriend passed me her spliff which I received gratefully, despite the dampness
of the roach. “It’s the bomb,” she said. I nodded, but I’d already enjoyed
somewhat stronger dope earlier that day and was now up for a whole lot more.
“Fucking
traitors!” shouted a woman from behind me. “Scumbag Assholes!”
“What?” I said
twisting round my neck, while Andrea, Crystal and Judy jerked up their chins.
Neither Tomiko, who was now in possession of the joint, nor Judy’s girlfriend,
who was waiting for it to return, paid much heed to the commotion.
“You ain’t
feminists!” jeered one of three women who were emboldened by a concoction of
the kind of stimulant officially banned at the festival (and whose prohibition
Ariel whole-heartedly supported).
“You’re more
fluffers than feminists!” agreed her companion who like here friends wore
jeans, tee-shirt and a severe haircut (although not quite as radical as mine).
“Strip Clubs
and Pornos!” echoed the third. “If that’s what you think feminism’s about, fuck
off back to England!”
“You certainly
ain’t wanted here, you Asshole Limeys!” said the first.
With that and a
cackle of unsisterly laughter, the three women trailed off.
“What the fuck
was that about?” Judy’s girlfriend wondered.
“That was
totally uncalled for,” said Tomiko, whose cut-glass English accent startled the
teenager. “It wasn’t true and it wasn’t fair. We’ve none of us done porn, have
we?”
I decided not
to remind her of the Harlot’s history. “I hope that’s not the opinion of all
the women here,” I said.
“Of course it
is,” said Judy bitterly. “These pent-up stuck-up feminazis! If you don’t follow
the message word for word, you’re fucking toast.”
“They have a
point,” said Crystal who, as always, could see the virtue of even the most
contrary opinion. “This is a festival
celebrating womanhood. And what we did in Detroit didn’t further the feminist
cause at all.”
“Fuck it!” said
Judy angrily. “Come on, Crystal. Come with me. Let’s get away from all this prissy
feminist shit.”
She arose from
her crouched position and Crystal stood up beside her, allowing Andrea to slump
into the now vacant deck chair. Judy then walked off with her arm round
Crystal’s waist.
“Hey, girl!”
called out Judy’s new girlfriend. “Can I come along?”
“Sure thing,” said
Judy who walked off with one arm around Crystal’s waist and the other around
her teenage friend.
“Where do you
think they’re going?” Tomiko wondered.
I almost expressed
the petulant opinion that I didn’t know and I didn’t care, but my more
sympathetic sister spoke before I could.
“Crystal’s distraught,”
she said. “A change of scene will do her the world of good.”
“And just where is that change of scene?” I
remarked. “What is it that Judy and
Crystal do together?”
“You feel the
need to ask,” countered Andrea accusingly. She’d never fully approved of her
sister’s infatuation and this wasn’t the first time she made it apparent.
I wouldn’t be the
only one to wonder where Crystal and Judy had gone when late that night neither
of them had yet returned to their tent, although I might have been the only one
to see a pattern in this unexplained absence and the greater amount of time they
were now spending together. It wasn’t until the following day that we saw them
again though it was totally uncool for anyone (especially me) to actually ask
where they’d been. It was enough to know that Crystal was distressed by the hostile
attention and the inward conflict with her conscience. I was the only one who’d
take offence that it was with Judy rather than me that Crystal had chosen to
unburden herself. Sure, I still had the intimate attention of Jane and
Jacquie—not to mention the opportunity to make love with all or any of the
other eight women in our entourage (with the notable exception of my
sister)—but these could never be enough. I hadn’t dropped out of university and
abandoned the promise of a career with the Ministry of Agriculture and
Fisheries just to be the keyboard player in a commercially unsuccessful ten-piece
band.
Even so,
whatever resentment I harboured against Judy is nothing compared to that expressed
by Polly Tarantella. I sometimes wonder why Polly’s so vehemently hostile. She’s
never met Judy and never likely to do so. And of all those in the Crystal Passion
band, no one was more like the kind of Rock Star axe hero that Polly is more
often enamoured with. Rock music’s pantheon is full of men and, increasingly,
women who play electric guitars, wear tight clothes and strut their stuff
across the stage. And this is exactly what Judy Dildo was all about. Even her
stage name was in the honourable tradition of Rock Stars like Billy Fury, Sid
Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux. And yet Polly has taken against Judy and is whole-heartedly
in favour of Pebbles—even though my stage name owes more to Hanna-Barbera than
it does to Malcolm McLaren. I’d much rather listen to Orbital or D’Angelo than
anything by Black Sabbath or Queens of the Stone Age. My guess is that ever since
she became such a fervent convert to Crystal Passion, anything and everything
that reminds her of what she most often used to champion is now the very thing
she least wants to associate herself with.
But even with
Crystal back—and no sign or mention of the teenage girl who’d accompanied her
and Judy—we weren’t fully able to concentrate on preparing for our final gig as
the festival’s antepenultimate act.
Word of our Detroit
gig increasingly became public knowledge as the day progressed. Whereas on the
first day of the festival Crystal could do no wrong, now there was no crime
against feminism she wasn’t guilty of. A scrappy signboard was erected near our
tents on which was painted a crude arrow pointing in our direction and the phrase
This Way to the Porn Sluts! However,
as many of the Riot Grrrl bands had names at least as provocative as ‘Porn
Sluts’, this probably didn’t have quite the negative impact that the women
who’d put the effort into painting the signboard had intended.
There were no
longer any groupies following Crystal around wherever she went and only Judy,
Thelma and Olivia were now sharing her tent. In fact, Crystal hardly showed her
face in public at all. This was a wise policy as every time she did, she
attracted the attention of an affronted woman or other who’d shout something
like “Jezebel!”, “Traitor!” or “Judas!” in her direction. Or a tirade of abuse
along the lines that no true feminist would be seen dead near a strip club let
alone perform inside.
“Crystal
Fucking ‘Linda Lovelace’ Passion!” shouted one woman scornfully.
“Suck my dildo,
bitch!” shouted another.
“This abuse is
as bad as any of Crystal’s supposed sins,” Andrea remarked.
“I hate to say
it,” said Bertha. “I love and admire Crystal, but she kinda deserves this shit.
She did agree to sing in front of a
load of fucking strip club punters. And it wasn’t just the one time she agreed
to flash her tits for the fuckers.”
“It’s easy for
you to say that,” I said. “You weren’t even there.”
“And I fucking
never would, whatever you paid me,” Bertha continued. “Fuck knows what Jenny
Alpha was thinking when she agreed to roadie for you that night. It’d take a
fucking fortune to persuade me to do what she did. And then I’d have to hide my
face for shame for the rest of my fucking life!”
“Bertha’s
right,” chimed in Philippa. “Crystal should never have agreed to appear at the
Purple Robe. Whatever possessed her to be so fucking stupid?”
I thought of
countering this criticism by repeating the arguments that had seemed so
persuasive to me at the time. That it was a way to earn money on a tour that was
haemorrhaging cash to the extent that the band’s survival had become doubtful.
That after all the shit we’d already got on the tour, what difference did a
little more make. That the audience might well include men who were genuinely
interested in listening to our music (and we managed to sell more CDs at the Purple
Robe than almost anywhere else we performed). That if Crystal had asked me I’d
walk through the Valley of Death to demonstrate my love for her.
But the truth
is that none of us were feeling positive about appearing on stage that evening,
sandwiched as we were between the Djuna Barnes Folk Trio and the Women of
Babylon. Crystal cancelled the customary dress rehearsal without comment, although
we knew it was from fear of organised disruption. We could no longer wander
round the festival with the self-confidence we had on the first day (and I made
a point of hiding my shaved head under a woollen hat in the hope of not being
recognised). The only members of the band still openly supportive of the decision
to play at the Purple Robe were Judy Dildo, Jenny Alpha and the Harlot. In
fact, the Harlot went so far as to say that if there had been onstage sex as so many of the festival women at the
festival believed then she’d have made a point of being up there with the rest
of us.
“What could be
more cool than to have Judy’s fucking dildo in my twat and your fist up my
arse?” the Harlot said provocatively.
“Um!” I said,
feeling decidedly uncool as the image of doing this while being watched by the
creepy Purple Robe clientele flashed through my mind.
The only person
oblivious to the prevailing mood was Tomiko. She seemed genuinely surprised that
the rehearsal was cancelled. She was put out to be told that the set would be
almost exactly the same as the Mary Jane’s gig in Philadelphia and that it was
unlikely that we’d play songs by the Beatles, the Kinks or the Dave Clark Five.
“Fuck!” she exclaimed as if it was the most polite expletive imaginable.
“What’s happening with you guys?” And then before anyone could reply, she
rolled another joint and returned to the state of narcotic bliss that so became
her.
As the time for
our gig approached, we gathered together back-stage as a procession of all-women
acts performed ahead of us. Just before the Djuna Barnes Folk Trio was the
nearest to an electronic duo the Sisterhood Women’s Music Festival had to
offer. Like Soft Cell and Wazoo, Black Triangle consisted of a flashy singer
and an uncharismatic keyboard player. To my ears, the singing was oddly
stylised and the twiddling was decidedly too high register. And worse, the
beats were totally pre-programmed and flat-footed. It was a real relief for me
when they at last came off-stage. Was the very land from which Techno and House
owed its origins still suffering from such undanceable electronic music?
The Djuna
Barnes Folk Trio was a trio of women who played bluegrass and American folk
songs and were a blessed relief to me. Andrea and Crystal weren’t the only ones
in the band enjoying their set, though Judy said they were total shit and Jane
and Jacquie were more interested in a private joke about the fiddler in the trio
whose jeans kept slipping down and revealing her not notably appealing bottom
crack. At least the songs weren’t hectoring anthems on the virtues of womanhood
and lesbianism. They had a yearning thoughtful quality that made me wonder how well
the lyrics and tunes could be mixed by a Drum & Bass or Deep House producer.
But all too
soon, it was our turn to appear on stage.
And as we all
expected (with the exception of Tomiko who was a hundred yards away in the
mixing tent), we were immediately greeted by boos and jeering. There were even
a few banners waved up and down in the audience emblazoned with phrases like ‘Crystal
Passion: No Thanks!’, ‘Go Home to England!’ and ‘Strippers Not Welcome!’.
“Uh-oh!” said
Olivia as we came onto the stage.
“This doesn’t
look good,” said Andrea who joined Philippa and Thelma in the scuffle to take
position as far as possible from the front of the stage.
“Fucking
fascists!” Judy Dildo spat out, but not otherwise appearing confrontational and,
for her, dressed quite modestly.
“If they want a
fight,” said the Harlot unconvincingly, “I say: Bring It On!”
“Oh shit!” I
said in fear at what lay ahead.
Crystal, however,
behaved no differently to how she would normally. She made no marked concession
to the change in attitude expressed about her onstage nudity.
She walked toward
the front of the stage with as broad a smile as she’d have had if the audience
were greeting her with cheers. She picked up the microphone and ignored the
barrage of jeers.
“Put your
clothes back on!”
“Stick to Blue
Movies!”
“Fuck off
Judas!”
The jeering
died down as Crystal stood her ground and made no comment. Her smile was as
unforced and generous as ever.
“Can I have a
word please?” she asked the audience. “You’ve heard some bad things about me
and my band and I’d like to set the record straight.”
This plea
simply led to even more jeering and heckling, but Crystal let it all wash over
her. She maintained her beatific smile regardless while the volume of vocal dissent
steadily dipped.
“Daughters of America,”
she announced as if addressing not just the audience at the Sisterhood Women’s
Music Festival, but all women. “Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and
for the unborn children of America. For the days are coming, in which people
shall say that the women of today are fortunate indeed. Blessed are the barren
and those who will never carry children and the nipples which will never give suck.
Then shall the people of America say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’ and to the hills
‘Cover us’. For if those as innocent as us are the victim of such scorn, what
shall be done to those who have true cause for concern?”
This was
typical of Crystal Passion’s oblique mysticism and I didn’t understand a word
she was saying then and I don’t understand it any better now. Perhaps she’d
learnt this way of speaking when she was travelling across India. Or maybe its
origin was the music and mystical musing of George Gurdjieff that she loved so
much. Wherever it came from, it mystified and bemused the audience just long
enough for us to launch into the first song of our set, Bread for the Fisherman, with its equally enigmatic lyrics and its
punchy guitar riff.
I can’t say the
gig was a success as such, but we played for over half an hour and we
deliberately didn’t pause for long between songs so there was little opportunity
for the catcalls or boos to be heard. Except for Crystal’s nakedness, which in
any case was mostly obscured by hair and the way she held her guitar, there was
nothing in our performance that could have persuaded an uninformed observer
that there was ever a whiff of scandal associated with the Crystal Passion
band. Both Judy Dildo and the Harlot were remarkably restrained. We kept the
songs short and let them tumble out one after the other. The only ones in the
band to take solos were Andrea, Thelma and Philippa. Nobody seeing my sister
could imagine her as anything other than an earnest advocate of the sisterhood.
With her curly hair, checked shirt and jeans she looked more like a member of the
Djuna Barnes Folk Trio than the Porn Star or stripper that many in the audience
might have thought she was.
We didn’t
expect an encore and we didn’t give the audience the opportunity to ask for
one. As soon as Crystal had sung the last few words of a rather folky Rambling Woman she waved at the audience
with a free arm while her other grabbed her guitar as if in response to an
explosion of applause.
“Thank you!
Thank you very much for letting us appear at the Sisterhood Women’s Music
Festival. Hope to see you again!” Crystal shouted out.
And then as
quickly as was possible we fled the stage, Jenny Alpha and Bertha rushed on to
dismantle our equipment, and the Festival’s DJ once more took to her decks with
an uninspiring mix of records by 1970s’ women Soul singers like Aretha
Franklin, Roberta Flack and Gloria Gaynor. And we knew better than to walk back
to our tents where we were expecting to be waylaid by those in the audience
still angry at our well-documented betrayal of the feminist cause.
“Let’s see what
the Women of Babylon are like,” said Judy Dildo, as if this was the one thing
she’d been looking forward to all evening. I agreed to listen to the gig reluctantly,
but I actually rather enjoyed it, probably more so from having survived our own
set without having been spat on or hit by a thrown beer-can.
The Women of
Babylon was a band much more in tune with Judy’s musical taste but were admirably
fervent in their support for the lesbian and feminist cause. They were angry, very angry, at the injustices of male patriarchy and
its thoughtless chauvinism and casual sexism. They were a great deal more like
the kind of rock band the American media thought we ought to be (and a lot more
so than any woman’s rock group I’d ever seen in London or anywhere in the UK).
They even permitted themselves some gratuitous nudity, but much more in the
confrontational manner of Courtney Love and Babes in Toyland.
The festival
audience seemed divided amongst itself as to the virtues of the Women of
Babylon. Some in the audience were insanely enthusiastic about the band (especially
when the band were riffing on the theme of tampons and period pains) whereas there
were other women were just sitting out the set so they’d have a good seat for the
headline band. To my ears (but not Judy’s), the final act, Third Rock, was a
rock group that could have performed their set at any time in the previous
thirty years. The single distinguishing fact about the band was that they were all
women. Dressed in a sexually ambivalent uniform of jeans and leather and long
full-bodied hair, the band’s gender was quite simply the only thing that
distinguished them from dreary 1970s’ Rock bands like Iron Maiden, Blue Oyster
Cult and Grand Funk Railroad.
At one point in
Third Rock’s set, I turned my head round to check whether Judy Dildo was
enjoying the music as much as I was hating it, but instead of her being beside
me, miming to the Rock theatrics and guitar licks, there was no sign of her at
all.
Or for that matter
of Crystal.
“You’re looking
for Judy and Crystal?” guessed Jane who along with her sister understood more
than most my obsession with our band leader.
I nodded.
“They left
about half an hour ago,” Jane said.
“Any idea
where?”
Jane shrugged
her shoulders.
“Don’t worry
about it,” she said. “Crystal’s her own woman. And whatever it is that Judy’s
got to offer, it’s what Crystal wants most at the moment.”