Hannah Ewens - Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture

Publishing Director Sarah Lavelle

Commissioning Editor Susannah Otter

Designer Claire Rochford

Cover Concept Justine Anweiler

Typesetting Vanessa Green

Production Director Vincent Smith

Production Controller Katie Jarvis

Published in 2019 by Quadrille, an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing

Quadrille

5254 Southwark Street

London SE1 1UN

www.quadrille.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

This book is a work of non-fiction. In some limited cases names have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

Cataloguing in Publication Data: a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

copyright Hannah Ewens 2019

design Quadrille 2019

eISBN 978-1787133273

For every girl who has ever had an obsession

Suggestion: replace the word fan girl with expert and see what happens.

Jessica Hopper, music critic and author

Look what I found! A conceptual space where women can come together and create to investigate new forms for their art and for their living outside the restrictive boundaries men have placed on their public behaviour! Not a place or a time, but a state of being.

Camille Bacon-Smith, fan scholar

CONTENTS

My parents werent big fans of music. My dad loved football but Id never enter the living room after a game was scheduled. The thunder hung around the ceiling and hed be sitting straight-backed, stiffly sniffing and otherwise silent. Mealtimes following could be deeply unpleasant. He should just support a better team, I thought. On the odd occasion they won, glee would creep into every crease of his face. Wed know then to ask, Dad, how did they play? and hed fist the air suggestively.

I distinctly remember being cynical about fostering this sort of connection with something with anything. What good was being a supporter if your very being was so precariously balanced on the shoulders of men you didnt know, creating enough resentment to permeate our whole house? I now know it took him away from us, from the house, to people who felt like friends, colleagues, to feeling a part of something bigger, when we lived, quite literally, on an island away from everything. That it was possible to transcend your surroundings.

The island I grew up on is small enough to walk across from one side to the other in a day, but big enough that youd never bother to. Mobile reception is still intermittent, although not as unreliable as it was, and you could pick up radio stations just across the water from France (an otherworldly message, when transmitted into your car as you drove over the downs). Its a place where restaurant banners spell their own name wrong but dont bother to correct it and menus inside are yellowed; where the families that come each year for almost-warm weeks get fewer and fewer, and disappear, taking the need for jobs, and leaving empty wine bottles and summer crushes behind. Its somewhere with an ageing population, where you might hear a Beach Boys track in the biting cold of winter, but whose more appropriate soundtrack might be the eerie warble of a theremin. Somewhere beautiful and, to me, sad.

My feeling is that being deprived of real communication definitely contributed to my disposition. There was an aloneness that enhanced yearning of various kinds.

I wouldnt have guessed it but I would soon self-define in one way or another by being a fan. To my mind, life started at ten years old in the early noughties. I was taken under the wing of one girl, E. With her coarse ginger hair and freckles so unruly in the summer they joined together to make a blob, she was considered almost as much of a weirdo as me, save only for the fact shed been around longer. Her breath smelt of stale bubblegum; she seemed to always be chewing. She was very strange. I was strange. Soon we were inseparable, and the boys could only conclude: You lesbians are weird.

Unlike mine, where other interests or worries commandeered the time, Es whole family lived through film, TV, art and, above all, music. I didnt have other friends or older siblings who had shown me culture before. And so long school holidays were spent at hers, as were weekends or evenings. I tried on everything she had: expressions, clothes, songs. Her mum, a photographer (which seemed impossibly cool), encouraged our interests by casually passing both of us banknotes through the drivers seat window on the way to the one nearby music retailer or even occasionally getting us tickets for gigs on the mainland.

E had many quirks. She could only fall asleep listening to quite loud music so wed lie in darkness wearing her pyjamas listening to Marilyn Manson or Blink-182 or David Bowie. Despite trying to keep up conversation for as long as possible to avoid being left awake, I always was. Her Hi-Fi system worked like a record player and would restart an album once it was finished, leaving me in an endless loop of heavy metal through the night. Sometimes Id creep out of bed and turn it off but itd often wake her up, so mostly Id lie there anxious, oscillating between frustration and appreciation for the time to learn the lyrics.

Much of the time wed be creating on some minor scale: learning to play guitar, writing out songs or singing over instrumental tracks into webcams. But our greatest pleasure would be one of us exploding over a song that the other, coyly waiting for a reaction, had discovered. From this we picked a soundtrack beyond what we were fed. With this we could: pretend to inhale our first cigarettes; black our eyelids and dye our hair; get as drunk as our bodies would allow with scene kids from neighbouring schools on the outskirts of the woodland that faced the sea, watching boys on other worlds, having taken drugs wed never heard of. In a way, it was like a secret club. Our personal fan club one we werent taught to have, but instinctively knew how to create together. Here we could avoid having combative dialogues about who was the best guitarist or which album in a bands discography was better with boys our own age. No response to music was off limits and I always felt validated. Nowhere else gave me the insight into personal politics that music did; I spent every evening on our first family computer researching riot grrrl and punk and feminism. Everything hideous that was happening to me as a teenage girl, either music or E had something to say about it.

Being a fan paradoxically gave me both the invisibility cloak I desperately wanted and a proud identity at an age when I felt smug about little else; it was the only identity that felt like it fitted comfortably.

The night I decided to put together this book, it was autumn and I was in a church. Ex-My Chemical Romance member and solo artist Frank Iero had just played an intimate show. I drifted about in front of the altar hoping to say goodbye to him. All I could see was his back, him sitting behind a table, and the faces of hundreds of fans feeling joy, agony, confusion, a mix of many