Quiet riot: how UK Riot Grrrls missed the point

Refusing to talk to journalists is always a risky strategy, as any Old Labour heavyweight will confirm.

Withholding the official line as “punishment” to newspapers for inconvenient stories may be tempting, but it’s always best to get your point across. The alternative - assuming that “no comment” will mean no story - is laughable. Like it or not, if the subject is newsworthy enough, journalists will write about it, with or without you. You lose.

The long-forgotten Riot Grrrl movement of the early 1990s made this mistake, at least in the UK. It was hopeful and admirable, albeit shambolic. It was useful if only as a means of enabling women to go to gigs without getting squashed. It wasn’t afraid to label itself as feminist. The D-I-Y music was of questionable quality, but was spiky and good-natured enough to be passable, which was OK because the message, rather than the music, was the point.

But the bands took themselves too seriously. Grrrls’ favourite Huggy Bear refused to talk to the music press and even took the totalitarian step of trying to ban journalists from gigs. For all their sloganeering and posturing, the band’s silence made them (and in turn, the entire Riot Grrrl movement) appear paranoid, humourless and inarticulate.

Women of a more outward bent, though initially receptive to Riot Grrrl, soon lost patience. The Grrrls suffered the indignity of Courtney Love dismissing them as them as “a little pack of oestrogen lemmings”.

Niki from Huggy Bear eventually offered this explanation for the band’s self-imposed silence, in a 1994 interview to journalist Amy Raphael: “We recognised early on that the journalist/popstar dialogue is a complex system of mythologies and identifications to do with fake hierarchies which connect preferences of desirability via the kinds of photos which are used to represent you or how much space is given to each member of a band in an interview”.

Well that explains it, then. Or at least, it demonstrates why non-journalists need journalists. It also explains why the Spice Girls didn’t bother getting to grips with Riot Grrrls’ weighty philosophy before getting started on their big adventure.

Towards the end of 2007, Black Dog published what it hoped would be the definitive history of Riot Grrrl. In journalistic terms, the movement is ripe for re-examination, not least because its original members are coming up to comfortable middle age. The book’s arrival should have seen a flurry of features about Riot Grrrl in the broadsheets and the music press – a mini retrospective – but it was met with a deafening silence.

Riot Grrrl was feminism’s greatest missed opportunity. Thanks, Grrrls, for nothing.

Not that bright

When I want nostalgia I reach for reissued Look-in or Jackie annuals in hard-back, “best-of” format. Only a cold-hearted monster could mock such blameless fun.

But one old, familiar title is missing among the proliferation of reissued 60s, 70s and 80s comics on the first table through the door at Waterstones. Where is the wry, ironic, bumper reissue of Twinkle?

This snub might seem like an oversight on publisher DC Thompson’s part. The Twinkle comic of the 1970s and 80s, for girls under the age of 8, was Thompson’s best-selling annual in 1975, outselling even the Beano. But a flick through an old copy of the annual reveals why - its eponymous, gnome-like, dead-behind-the-eyes heroine and her friends are all mini-drudges. Slap-bang in the middle of feminism’s second wave, they spend their time do-gooding, ballet dancing and entertaining baby siblings.

Girls in the 70s were force-fed Nancy the Little Nurse, a blank, smug child in a dolls’ hospital. Then there were The Three Pennys, a pointless trio who devoted their lives to a puppy called Binky. Liberated characters are like hens’ teeth, and are bludgeoned into submission when they do appear. Jenny Wren, for example, is an independent, helpful character that likes to find a practical purpose to fashionable clothes, but in 1975’s episode, she makes use of a safari jacket to rescue baby chicks. And that’s, er, it.

Unlike Jackie, with its do-it-yourself, punky fashion tips, or the dynamic and resourceful Judy, Twinkle and her chums are dull. Which might explain why DC Thomson didn’t bother to reissue her.