It was just going to be an ordinary week; getting the recorded tracks ready for the album pressing, rehearsing the new women who’ll be playing their debut gig at Firebug, Leicester on International Women’s Day and promoting 3 comedy shows coming up at Leicester Comedy Festival next week. The bands from the start of last year – Dada Women, The Wonky Portraits, Velvet Crisis and The Verinos, along with Glitch Magnet, Virginia’s Wolves and Venus Attax are now establishing themselves in Leicester, being approached by other promoters and having wonderful live shows. Emails are now flying in from many of the 2023 cohort with their band names: BOILERS, Pretty Dirty Rats, Peri Peri Women (TBC) and Hot Flush (TBC). It’s all looking really exciting, with plenty to do.
Then an article about the Unglamorous scene is published in Positive News
“We’ve created a whole new approach to music,” Miller told Positive News. “It’s kind of a hobby for us, but we’re actually producing great art rock, and that’s not been done before by ordinary women from our age group. We’re proof that you don’t have to be young or the typical student type to start a band. … “I had a brainwave,” she said. “If you’re playing quite simple music like garage rock or punk rock where there’s only a few chords, I could actually teach women how to play, write some simple songs and support them as beginners.”
It’s a great piece and writer Robin Eveleigh demonstrates that Unglamorous is a valid punk-style entry to the current alternative DIY music scene. It’s not a community project designed to do good and win grants to sustain itself; neither is it obsessed with getting attention, record deals and millions of followers.
The Positive News story is well-received via the Unglam WhatsApp chat, but it soon becomes obvious that other media outlets source stories from PN. Would we do a podcast interview? Would we be interviewed for an English teaching magazine? Could The Guardian do a feature and interview some of the older women involved? Could Channel 5 News come up and film a jam session and talk to some women? So we rapidly pull it together, find those who are available to punk rock it up over lunchtime, and those who can do phone interviews in their work breaks.
Here’s what Channel 5 came up with … and the calls from other media shows are still coming in. Some people are saying how good our PR is, but we don’t have PR … we just have a really brilliant idea that appeals to so many people and they can see the fun that we’re having with it!
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