• From One Alien to Another: Alien She Interview Each Other

    March 8, 2018 - By 

    Katie and Aoife of Alien She interview each other and delve deep on the topics closest to their hearts for International Women’s Day. Photos by Sarah Ryan and art by Katie O’Neill. Why do you make art? Aoife: I need to express myself or I’ll explode. Expression is the opposite of depression. It’s something I find comfort in, and maybe other people will find comfort in what I create. Katie: It’s a deep impulse. It helps me express myself in a way that I find very challenging to do verbally. I figure my life and my feelings out by making…

  • In Their Hands: A Conversation with Wyvern Lingo

    March 8, 2018 - By 

    Bray’s Wyvern Lingo chat to Nicole Glennon about being women in the Irish music industry,their camaraderie, activism and plans for the future. What does it mean to each of you to be a woman in 2018? Caoi: It’s socially more acceptable as a woman to dress in a garish fashion..? I don’t think about being a woman. The day our album was released, we were loading the van after our sold out gig in the Button Factory in Temple Bar, and some random prick walking past smacked my ass. When I ran after him, punched him in the back and screamed at…

  • Being a Woman, Singer & Vocal Coach in the Music Industry by Nichola Hegarty

    March 8, 2018 - By 

    I’m a 31 year old female singer and musician with 16 years’ experience performing music on stage and 5 years’ experience in vocal coachin, and like a lot of performers, I’ve been singing from a very early age. My father was a musician, lead guitarist and lead singer in numerous showbands back in the 60s and 70s. At the time when my dad was in the height of gigging, there were no iPads, iPhones or laptops to look up lyrics to a song, so you had to rely on your memory, a well-inked pen with plenty of paper to write…

  • Sorcha Loughrey Hoey: Shake off the Shackles and Shimmy

    March 8, 2018 - By 

    My foray into performing proper began with my running and hosting Burlesque shows in Dublin. Not content in the sidelines, I then began to perform myself. I have always had a penchant for glamour and ‘fancy dress’ since I was a child, so this was a way of my incorporating that into adulthood as well as trying to resolve my own body dysmorphia and learn to see myself in a different light. I truly believe my experiences as a performer have changed me as a woman. It allowed me to tour universities, youth clubs and women’s groups giving talks on…

  • Fan-Girl Power: Feminism and Female Fandom

    March 7, 2018 - By 

    In a recent interview with The Guardian, Kim Deal of The Breeders claimed that “misogyny is the backbone of the music industry.” The events of the past several months have started long overdue conversations about gender equality in creative industries. This misogyny does not stop with music industry professionals or artists, though. Female fans – especially those in their teens – are regularly subjected to sexist stereotyping and derision. Language of madness is frequently used to describe female fans. Fangirls are apparently “hysterical” most of the time – a term that harks back to the Ancient Greek notion of a…

  • Women of Note by Rebekah Fitch

    March 8, 2018 - By 

    I draw a lot of inspiration from artists who can create an entirely new world from their music. Their art becomes more than the songs, almost like an alternate universe that acts as a physical manifestation of their art, extrapolating and illustrating it in different artistic mediums. I think that this is something that’s done in an incredible way by so many female artists. People like Florence and the Machine and Björk. It’s exciting, it transports you, and it pushes the boundaries of their art. These are also women whose age can never define them, which I think is such…

  • Caroline Cawley – A Promoter’s Perspective

    March 6, 2018 - By 

    Caroline Cawley reflects on her time working as a promoter for Club AC10 and DJing in Dublin. She currently lives in the UK and plays in two bands, Dystopian Future Movies and Church of the Cosmic Skull.  Whilst holed up in my room (one ear of my Walkman secretly inserted), gazing out across the rolling Sligo fields and ‘studying’ for my Leaving Cert at the turn of the millennium, the idea of playing my favourite slightly left-of-field alternative rock tunes to a bopping audience would have seemed like an unattainable dream. But ask and you shall receive. After leaving university…

  • Niamh Farrell – A brief History of HamsandwicH

    March 6, 2018 - By 

    “So, what’s it like being the only woman in band with all guys?” This question is one that I have been asked time and time again, over the many years I have sang in HamsandwicH. It’s a question that always confuses me. Whenever I am asked, the answer is always “No different I’m sure, to a band with all guys or all girls. We are just a bunch of friends having a laugh and making music.” And yet I have often felt that wasn’t the answer they were looking for. They want something maybe more along the lines of: “Oh,…

  • Women as bitches and how we got here – Rosemary MacCabe

    March 7, 2018 - By 

    “Women are awful bitches, aren’t they?” It’s an often-heard phrase, especially when discussing blogger-focused forums – which I do, pretty often. As a sporadic blogger and one-time “social influencer” (a term that means, essentially, that I’ll take money to promote products online, which may be distasteful but honestly, wouldn’t you?), I have a vested interest in said forums – not just because they occasionally talk about me, but also because it’s an industry from which I think I will never be entirely removed. What’s that they say? Once a media shill, always a media shill. It’s a fast-moving world online.…

  • In Between Days – Transitions with Keeley Moss

    March 7, 2018 - By 

    I can think of no bigger honour than being asked to contribute an article for International Women’s Day because not only is it a cause that I wholeheartedly support but in the wider world there are still some people who refuse to accept me for who I am. This I know because my own band just split up for that reason. But more on that later. I’m legally a woman, and my birth certificate states that I’m female. I’m also trans. I began transitioning as a desperate necessity when I found I could no longer live another day suppressing my…