Chapter in The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror (Routledge) Publication date: 9th October 2023
"The Idyllic Horrific Field, Farm, Garden, Forest, and Machine"
From the publisher: "Venue Stories is an anthology of creative non-fiction that remembers, celebrates and reinvigorates our complex and plural relationship with small and independent music spaces. Written by musicians, promoters, fans and academics who have a shared passion for small music venues and musical cultures in all their splendid variety, this anthology features memoir, essays, life writing, historiography and autoethnography. Each chapter is united by a focus on the personal, the sensory and half-remembered. These are stories that cross disciplinary lines and blur distinctions between creativity, reportage and critical analysis.
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"The field of music production has for many years been regarded as male-dominated. Despite growing acknowledgement of this fact, and some evidence of diversification, it is clear that gender representation on the whole remains quite unbalanced. Gender in Music Production brings together industry leaders, practitioners, and academics to present and analyze the situation of gender within the wider context of music production as well as to propose potential directions for the future of the field. This much-anticipated volume explores a wide range of topics, covering historical and contextual perspectives on women in the industry, interviews, case studies, individual position pieces, as well as informed analysis of current challenges and opportunities for change.
Ground-breaking in its synthesis of perspectives, Gender in Music Production offers a broadly considered and thought-provoking resource for professionals, students, and researchers working in the field of music production today."
Abstract: From a romanticised distance, farm life blurs into idyll; in closer focus, there looms the foreshadowing of accidents, slaughter, murder, and suicide. This rural eerie emanates from barn and sty, through land and soil, from field, forest, and garden. In the song, ‘The Garden of Jane Delawney’ the band Trees warn that should you pick a certain rose therein, your hair will be engulfed in flame. ‘Green Fingers’ by Siouxsie and the Banshees evokes the macabre with the suggestion of a diabolical and lascivious hand grown from the planting of a severed finger. ‘The Flatlands’ by And Also The Trees, creates a less gory sense of unease, insinuating the edgelands where nature and industry interfuse, with lyricist Simon Huw-Jones writing of ‘pylons in lace white fields’ (1993). His is a landscape over-ripe with rotten fruit and cursed with stillborn piglets, a landscape inhabited by revenants as blighted as Hardy's Tess and Jude. Primarily through the lens of song, but alongside a wider consideration of the arts, this chapter explores the notion of a warped sense of the idyllic as a compelling element of Folk Horror, with a rurality steeped in the uncanny, the sublime, and the liminal.
JUNE 2020
CHAPTER : 'Three Pronged Attack:
The Pincer Movement of Gender Allies,Tempered Radicals and Pioneers.'
BOOKS / CHAPTERS - FUTURE PUBLICATIONS
Book A kind of memoir - Currently at 57,000 words and counting.
Chapter "Kings Cross, Kentish Town and Kensington Gore via Gallowgate: In Search of the Goldilocks Zone" appears in VENUE STORIES - (Equinox Publishing) - Available now