Cuckoo’s Nest 1989 - 90
1990
“I was recruited to the Cuckoo's Nest, a
women’s ceilidh band, because the Birmingham City Council Women's
Unit had put up some money to organise a women-only ceilidh and they
wanted a women’s band to play. Pam Bishop was going to put together
this band, when the whole thing fell through, they hadn’t got it
together and there was no gig, but a group of us by then was playing
together, I think I was the only one still, just, identifying as a lesbian.
I later kind of came out of that life; we weren’t a lesbian band but we
were relevant because any feminist or lesbian groupings wanting a women-only band would have to look to us whether they like folk music or not,
because we were the only game in town, other than a few rock line-ups
that came and went”.
“Year on year we performed on [International
Women’s Day], and also the Women in Ireland, who kept going, every year
they got some money from the Women’s Unit and they couldn’t get an
Irish women’s band so they’d get us, and we’d do some Irish stuff, and
it used to be in Zebedees, the Anarchist Café, run by Radical Roots,
until it ran out of money.”
Contributed by: Belinda, 60