Loud and Quiet Presents Midnight Chats.
Evening listeners, Welcome to a new midnight Chats. Some of these podcasts we allowed to bake for a little while after we've done them, and others are more like a kind of catch of the day where we record them and turn them around while they're still fresh. It's midnight on Thursday, the twenty seventh of September. The year is twenty eighteen, and on Monday just gone, I met up with Anna Calvey to record the conversation you're about to
hear now. I wasn't aware of this until I was leaving the place where I'd met up with Anna, but it was actually her birthday that day, and if i'd have known, I probably would have sung Happy Birthday to her on this podcast. But probably for the best that I didn't and spared her and I that embarrassment. But maybe it didn't surprise me that she didn't mention it, as Anna doesn't strike me as someone who wants to
make a fuss about that kind of thing. In fact, it's rare for you to read or hear anything about her that doesn't mention her unassuming manner and her soft speaking voice. But what I learned from meeting up with her is definitely don't mistake that exterior shyness for a lack of ferocity and vision or opinions as you're about to hear before I share that with you though. This is the fourth episode in a fresh run of Midnight
Chats this autumn. If you haven't caught up yet, do check out those that we've put out already, me chatting to Interpol and Stuart going to Brett Anderson's house and having some fun with Chili Gonzalez. If you're into this new series as ever, do rate the podcast wherever you're listening to this or leave a comment that helps other people discover what we do, and of course do subscribe. That's an important one. We've also just put out a new edition of the magazine that we make Loud and Quiet.
Yoko Ono is our cover feature interview this month, which is exciting and it's Loud and Quiet dot com for more information about that if you want to get hold of a copy, on with episode fifty four of Midnight Chats and My Guest Tonight. Last month, Anna Calviy released Hunter, her third album, a record that thematically is about the
feeling of truly letting go. In the official blurb that goes along with these kind of things, it's described as a queer and feminist record, a visceral album exploring sexuality and breaking the laws of gender conformity, as vulnerable as it is strong, as beautiful as it is hush. And that's the backdrop to my chat with the South London songwriter. But we also caught up about the Mercury Prize, which
happened last week. We also met doing that a few years back and discussed the progress that needs to be made around the constructs of gender in society. What else the Bad Seeds, Patti Smith, store cards, bootstore cards, loads of stuff that we talked about, and I also listed off a bunch of rubbish bands that I was in as a teenager, So do enjoy that part and I calvey then seeing in another year on Planet Earth with this episode of Midnight Chats, and welcome to our podcast
Midnight Chats, Hie. How are you doing today?
I'm very well, thanks.
I just pointed out to you wearing a really nice cozy looking fleece, this lovely like sheep esque. Getting into autumn, you kind of need that stuff.
I'm always cold are you? And other people say, oh, yeah, me too, but it's like no comparison. I've never met anyone as cold as me.
Do you like going into winter and like layering up and doing all that stuff, or where you just just bring me the summer.
I'm horrified by the winter. Yeah, I'm cold in the summer. That's how bad it is.
Cold this summer. Yeah, we got reptile blood.
I think I have.
How's things? How are you today?
I'm very well. Yeah.
About to go on tour. It starts on the twenty seventh of September, so I'm preparing that deep in rehearsals.
Is that what you've been doing with most of your time recently?
H Yeah, rehearsing and kind of buying all the things that you sort of forget when you're on tour and you're like, oh no, I don't have X.
So now I'm just trying to be as prepared as I can.
Is it like going on holiday where you have to go to wherever beforehand boots, run around the shops and like be like I've got my long list of things.
Yeah, like how did I manage to spend seventy pounds.
In boots? Now? Is this even possible.
Yeah, you're like, at least to get the points on.
No, I don't. I don't do cards.
I don't you don't go for the loyalty cards.
No, I don't like them. I don't believe in them.
There's something a bit creepy about how it's basically their way of just following your purchases.
Yeah, and then yeah, I don't like that.
It's lovely to have you on the podcast. The last time that you and I met was a few years ago because we were both involved with the Mercury Prize and we're invited to be judges on that, which, certainly from my point of view, was a real real pleasure to be involved with something that i'd followed for many years. How did you find the experience of doing that, because you've done the Mercury Prize judging things.
I've done it twice. Yeah, I think it's really interesting how you know how to see on the other side, because I've been nominated and judged it, and it's kind of really kind of amazing how passionate people are about it. But also it's really hard to listen to that many albums, didn't you find I think.
The year that we did it, which was twenty fifteen. I think it was the year that we were both doing it. It was something like two hundred and fifty albums. Yeah, to get through. How long was it? Like? Three months? Four months?
It didn't feel very long, no considering how many you had to listen to.
When people ask me what the experience was like, I said that it was really exciting because I never felt like I was across more British and Irish music than I did at that point. Because you get given this vast amount of music, but equally did kind of take over your life from it? What was your like coping
way of doing it? Because I was. I found that to get through the list of albums that they give you, I was like getting up in the morning, put my headphones on, like make up my breakfast, definitely listening to music on my way to work, maybe a bit in my lunch break, and then definitely coming home in the evening. And I'd worked out that I needed to get through a certain amount of albums a day.
You were so organized.
I think I was just more scared not being able to. I'm always like, I'm one of those people that plans ahead to just in order just not to screw up.
I can't really remember how I did it, but I do remember I would make notes on the ones that I wanted to come back to because they had something interesting. And I guess the thing that it really made me think about is, I mean, how important the first song is on a record, and that like you really have to grab people with that first song, and not just
the song but the production of it. It's hard to like be like, oh wow, this is interesting when it just comes in with an acoustic guitar going gee g gee. You know, it's like that's not putting your best foot forward.
You know, I know exactly what you mean. You need to grab the attention, don't you. Yeah, this is all timely because the Mercury Prize happened last week and so Wolf Allice won it this year. But the experience of well, for people that aren't massively familiar for how it works. You're given as a judge, you're given a list of
albums listen to. You have to get to them all you submit I think it's around a dozen to then be considered, and it's narrowed down to the shortlist, which gets shared and then on the night the judges for the award get into a room and they battle it out and eventually come out with one name and it's and so one away from the listening side of it, how did you find the night of it when you were in the room, like discussing the pros and cons of albums as an artist? Did you find that useful?
Did you find it interesting hearing this mixture of musicians and critics and broadcasters all kind of sharing their views on things.
I think the tricky thing about it is it's not really about your take. It's because they were as I understand it, it's about does it reflect British music in that year? And that's a funny one because that doesn't It might reflect it, but that doesn't mean it's good.
It's sarand he reflected British music like two years ago within got nomination.
But maybe in a way it's good that it's slightly removed from you. It's good to develop the ability to listen to music and think this isn't for me, but I can see the value in it. And that's what you really had to do. Doing the Mercurys is like, even if it's not for you, you can still see that it reflects something important that's happening. But at the beginning I found that a bit tricky to separate how I really felt when.
I first did it as well, it felt like there were a lot of wise and experienced voices in that room debating these things. He'd done this thing before, and I walked in and absolutely no idea what to say. I kind of knew what I wanted to say, but didn't have the confidence to sort of share my opinions and stuff. But you grow into it. I think, you know, what, if you get nominated for the Mercury Prize again, will you be thinking knowing that these sort of conversations happen
about your music? You know exactly what the process was. Now been on the other side of the fence and experienced that and heard people analyze and deconstruct music to the ends. Degree would that be? How would you feel about that?
It makes you realize what an amazing thing is to just get on that nominated list, and how many albums they will have to listen to to come to the conclusion that yours was worth being on that list. I think that's the main thing, because I think the last bit, like I said about you know, does it reflect British music.
That's not really about whether your record is good or not, but there is that difficult moment where it goes from people talking about everything they like about it and then it's about the power of deduction of like you know where with the holes and each album. That's the bit that I I definitely wouldn't want to be in a fly on the wall if they did that with my record.
They're very encouraging to be positive and talk about the spend time talking about all of the positives around each release, but then there has to come that moment where it's like, well, now we've got to talk about the merits of this album versus this album, and then those conversations creeping and then people, you know, people's voices get slightly loud. There's a few bits of like table banging and all that kind of stuff.
It was all very civilized, though I wanted there to be some kind of fight someone walked out and discussed.
You know, I wonder if that's ever happened.
Ye.
Yeah, the year that we were on it was quite very civilized. Nobody had anybody else up against the wall being to win. So you released Hunter, your third album a few weeks ago. Now, how did it feel to share that album with everybody? And how have you felt about the reaction to the record.
Yeah, I've been really happy with how it's been received. I think because the record is very much about specific themes and things that I'm really passionate about. My marker of success is have I translated that to the listener, whether you like it or not. It's not so much the point as and you know, do people understand what I'm trying to do? And for the most part, I felt that in terms of reviews and stuff, that people
have understood what I was trying to do. And then from a more personal point of view, it seems that people who follow me have been really loving it, and that just really feels wonderful and really warms my heart. When you care about something so much, it means so much when people respond to it.
I want to get into talking about the themes that you discuss on Hunter, surely, but for people who know your name perhaps and know some of your music, but maybe don't know that much of your story, tell me about your kind of like your first introductions and kind of foragers into music, where you found your first kind of loves was that at home? You know, was music introduced to you by your parents? Like where did that that love of music and then going on to perform music?
Where did they all kind of foster?
Yeah?
I guess there was always a lot of music in my in my house and my parents were you know, hippies in the sixties, so they they had all these kind of great record were a massive record collection, which I devoured when I was a teenager, and I'd been playing the violin since I was six. When I was eight, I saw Jimi Hendrix play. There was a video of Woodstock and that just after that, I.
Was like, was that like a VHS or something?
Yeah?
Yeah, I was like, forget about the violin, you know, I want to play the guitar. And my dad played guitar. He played kind of rock and roll stuff on the guitar, and I got him to teach me some stuff and then I started, you know, trying to write songs. I think I wrote my first song when I was twelve, called Isolation, which is slightly worrying. And I came to singing very late. I was really into the guitar and that was my thing. But I loved the idea of being able to be so liberated and free that you
could go to sing. And it was a long journey for me to become a singer because I'm shy and my voice is very quiet. But I gradually kind of chipped away at this voice and I just really put hours and hours and hours listening to singers I loved, like Scott Walker or Elvis or Edith Path, and gradually this kind of voice grew and to what it is now. But it started, you know, as a little waif you know, I mean, it was like my speaking voice, and now it's become this animal.
It's a nice way of describing it. What about the lyrical side of things. It's one thing on that journey to discover that you can share your voice, but it's another one to develop your personality and try and articulate feelings in your lyrics. So did that come in tandem or did they move at different speeds at different times?
I think lyrics I always felt less confident about, and I feel I made a bit of a breakthrough with this record in finding a way of being It's trying to find a balance between being mysterious and direct and if you go too far on either way, you kind of lose the power. And I feel like this time was the first time I really feel that I've found a way through this balance.
How do you think you found that breakthrough? Is that just a bit more experience.
I think it's experienced.
Yeah, And also think I had a lot to say on this record, and that really helps. I knew what I wanted to say. I knew that I wanted it to be clear enough that if you wanted to listen to the lyrics, you could find where I'm coming from. But I wanted the music to be strong enough that you don't have to listen to the lyrics to be able to understand the emotion of the song.
And before we talk a little bit about that, with the influence of your parents on your music taste, was your dad in any eight bands? Did he get to go and watch him play?
No, I mean he was in a band when he was like twenty or something.
Did any evidence of that still exist?
Oh, that would be so amazing if it did, but I don't think so. But he looked very cool. I mean he used to wear a cloak. Oh yeah, he was a pretty outBut frog.
Yeah, what was it like more traditional like rock and roll stuff or what kind of thing did he play?
Yeah, he liked kind of Chuck Berry and he was in to the Beatles and Captain Beefheart and I guess, you know, like classic sixties stuff.
Would your moment this similar kind of thing or was he mean something different?
Yeah?
I mean they were both a bit you know, a bit mental.
I like to think forward thinking the stuff that you were discovering.
Yeah.
I mean there's always this thing of my mum going on about how much acid they drop to my dad trying to stop her telling us.
What were they like? Were they always quite encouraging to you, like as a young person when it came to music discovery and just like social experience and stuff. Were they open minded?
Yeah? They were very.
You know, they weren't strict at all. And I mean my dad did a lot for me, you know, like he would take me to rehearsals when I was sixteen in my first band, and we'd go to guitar shops together, and I mean I really kind of owe a lot to him, really, and on my first record actually dedicated it to him, because, yeah, I don't think I would be a musician if it wasn't for him.
Not that I'm a successful musician like yourself, but I still have fond memories and going to my first band practices when I was a teenager and the parents of the you know, people that was in a band with at the time, you just think of them as like, come on, dad or mum, like you just like you just help me out, like we need to get this
pa system into the back of that forward focus. But now you just think, wow, like it's actually I feel very kind of grateful for them just being there doing that and encouraging it, and probably not I don't know what there was genuinely going through their mind when they came to watch us play gigs, whether they were.
What kind of band were you in?
They were kind of went through different stages, to be honest, I was always in band with my brother and so my music tastes would kind of mirror his as we went. His first band, he'll hate me if he's listening to this, But the world needs to know. This was a status quo covers band called one hundred percent and their first gig was playing outside of shopping center in Hereford and we went there and it was a Saturday afternoon and they just had played status quo covers for about an hour.
There is video footage of that that exists, but I didn't manage to share that is wedding unfortunately, to recover it to share other people. But from then on it was like he went a bit brip pop. So he did love like Oasis bands like that. He would write the songs. I would write the lyrics and he would sing. Looking back, my lyrics were very strange and I was trying to be very clever, but it was really a thirteen or fourteen year old trying to be really smart
with my lyrics. I wrote a song called prune Juice once that was the big hit. And yeah, we went on. I guess things evolved and they went through a stage of sounding a bit like the Redheart Chili Peppers, and then there was like a grunge thing. There was a big So this is like the late nineties going into the early two thousands. Then like new metal came along, didn't it. That was strange. We did sound a little
bit new metal for a while. I feel like, actually talking about it now makes it sound like we kind of chased whatever the popular sound was at the time and that was a really bad idea. We don't make music together anymore, but I do think I wonder what if we got together in a room now, what it would actually sound.
Like, hmmm sharing?
Probably, yeah, exactly. I'm going to go and make a new George Esra album with my brother next week. Probably, yeah. But those formative experiences I've still got really fond memories, even though I would feel very embarrassed of kind of like sticking the cassette on or in whatever form it exists now, listening back to it. But yeah, definitely, the parental support is something that I was kind of very
fond of. You went on to study music, didn't you, at university, and then after that you taught guitar for quite a long time. What was that experience like? Did you enjoy the experience of kind of mentoring people through different stages of their aptitude for guitar.
I generally only like doing stuff I'm good at, which maybe is bad. But I didn't really feel I was a very good guitar teacher because the way that I learned the guitar was by ear and by writing my own stuff, and I never had a teacher, and so then it was quite hard to then try and teach what was not taught to me. And I did have some pupils that I was fond of and I you know, would like to see them, but in general, I am yeah, I didn't feel that I was the best teacher in the world.
Did you enjoy seeing the process of people get better and learn though? Was that the most rewarding thing about that? Also?
Yeah, I mean some of them didn't be fair. I mean, I think I think the nicest thing about it was like being able to be encouraging to someone and help their confidence, whether or not they got better or not. I just I just felt it was so important to like give praise when it was due and make someone feel good about themselves, especially because you know, I guess a lot of them were kids or teenagers when you
really need that. And I remember, you know, you know how how important heats can be when you're young in terms of like, you know, you look up to them, and you know want want them to think you're good at what you do. I don't know, maybe they all hate me, but if you know, if I could have been that for some of them, then you know, it felt like a worthwhile thing to do. But I don't think I could do it again.
How did that step between doing that, was that, like the main job you're doing for a number of years, we're doing different things at the same time, Or yeah.
I did a bit of session work as a guitarist and just teaching.
I did that for a while.
Let's talk about Hunter. Then. It's an album that you described as a utopian vision. What do you mean by that and how does it paint a utopian vision?
I guess for me, the record is about trying to find a place where you're not being defined by your gender or what's being expected of you because of the gender that you are, and just finding a real freedom and liberation in that. I guess that's what I mean by kind of utopian. Specifically for me, exploring the idea of a woman who was a hunter, who goes into the world and sees it as hers and takes what she wants from it and explores her pleasure without any
sense of shame. This felt really important for me to kind of explore this because I'm so tired of seeing women being depicted as being hunted by men in the media and in films, and I just wanted to give a more I guess multifested viewpoint of what a woman is, because if I compare what the women are like in my life compared with how women are depicted in our society, there's such a disconnect between the reality, and I think it's to the disservice of everyone and also for men too,
that these very small window of you know, what a man is meant to be, and how limiting that is for men as well.
When we talk about we already discussed your parents, for example, who sound quite kind of progressive in the way that they know, you know, their views on things. But so much has changed when I think of like my parents and me now and then the generation below that there is this evolution in attitude towards gender. Do you see any encoaging science that that is happening in any mediums? TV? Film? Example?
I have to say not really in politics or in TV or film. It's so male centric and even the idea of what constitutes are strong in politics. I mean, really, I think you know, a successful politician would be about someone who's good at communicating, not about someone who's so arrogant that they only have their view and they don't want to do anything else. Maybe that kind of idea was useful when we were cave people, but you know, now we live in a world where communication is how
you solve problems. It's about being able to listen. I think the one thing that feels positive is it feels that young people are more aware of not wanting to be pigeonholed and in one you know that a man has to be this and a woman has to be this,
and that feels really positive. And I guess just you know that there are a lot of young people, say who don't want to define themselves as straight, or they realize that the spectrum of human experience isn't something that you can necessarily put in boxes.
When you were thinking about this almost that kind of overarching theme of the album, are these like thoughts that you'd had for a long time and were trying to find a way to articulate, Or was it or did it come to you in the sort of early genesis of the album to them want to do it together?
Yeah, I think its thoughts that I've had for a long time because I'm very aware of you know, I'm very passionately feminist in my belief and also the belief that feminism benefits men and women. It just made sense that this would come out in my music and that it would come out in my lyrics. And when I had noticed that I was singing about these things, I felt, you know, that this really was the right track to go down, and I felt excited to explore it.
That whole question of kind of nature versus nurture. When we talk about the construct of gender and what people you know, this becomes this imposed thing of what people understand goes along with those things we had. We did a podcast, one of these podcasts recently with Gaz Combs.
He was very much talking about how his album was a meditation on how he wanted to challenge himself as a man and how he that stretch across generations because he has children now he's a father to daughters, but then also thinking about his parents and the way that they kind of encourage him to do different things. And he was talking about the language that gets used around
these constructs, around men and around women. But in his experience, those phrases that get you hear people say obviously of that man up and like don't cry and kind of like be a man, and all those really kind of quite dangerous things that have just become very normalized. Almost. Do you get frustrated by a lot of the kind of language in the way that things just get assumed and you know, you only have to walk outside to hear that kind of thing, don't you.
Yeah, I mean, there is such a fear of the women in society to the point where the idea of a man expressing feminine traits and feminine has become synonymous with weakness, even though I mean, I obviously I don't believe that that's the essence of what a woman is. That almost the ultimate insult for a man is that he has become weak like a woman. The idea of man up is is is very offensive to men and women,
I think, and I do. I do think that language has really really sends us really powerful messages unconsciously, and I always feel very very aware of that, you know, the gender of language from a female perspective, even things like the way that when we talk about women talking to each other, you know, we use the word gossip, which is kind of limiting what they have to say, whereas you know, women communicating with each other is is you know, so much more than that, you know, Yeah,
there's there's lots of ways in which, you know, language kind of plays a part unconsciously in how we see us.
Where do you think it starts and what examples particularly catch your attention? For example, from the moment that a child, the news of a child is going to arrive. Is like when a friends and family who've deliberately not shared the gender of their forthcoming child because they don't want people to go out and rush out and buy princess and pink outfits if it's going to be a door or fireman's outfit and all those kind of old fashioned
kind of understandings of gender. You know they've deliberately done that because they don't want to impose that on children. And so it starts. It goes straight from there, doesn't it.
Yeah, Well, I guess you know, as a child, you're you're constantly learning who you are and what society is and how you need to behave and react to the society that you're born into. And so I suppose as soon as you're born, you're you're learning cues from everything around you. I think you know, even without meaning to, it's very easy to kind of talk differently to kids of different genders. I mean even like you know, saying oh, you know, my little man, it's like you wouldn't say oh,
my little woman to a baby girl. And there's this idea that even when a little boy is tiny, it's like he has to kind of exhibit traits of strength that he's going to grow into a man, you know. And yeah, it's a tricky one because I guess it's a very slow wave of change and it's not going to happen overnight. But I think at least an awareness of this stuff is important, I guess for parents, and
I think it is happening. I think there are definitely more parents thinking about not wanting to put pressures on boys or girls to be a certain way.
Do you think art art, in its many different forms, whether that's literature and music, dad's theater, film, does it help people communicate the way they feel about this kind of stuff? So do you think that art can be a useful thing? Like if you make an album like Hunter, somebody can go I identify with it. It's really helped me understand my own thought process and then I can go out and have those conversations with friends or family or whatever.
That is that a hope for you or do you think do you think art it can be a useful conduit for that kind of thing.
I think it more than anything. It holds up a mirror to the culture that we're in, and you need to have some distance to be able to understand and assess what something is. And I think the mirror provides distance so we can look at where we are and and decide is that what we want?
Is that?
Is that all life is meant to be? And maybe there could be more. I think that's the point of art really in some ways for me, For this record, I wanted to be galvanizing, you know, I wanted it doesn't have to be. I didn't particularly want an intellectual response. I wanted an emotional viscoal response and a listener that just makes you. You know, when music makes you want to just be a bit different in your life, like it just wakes you up for a minute. That's the
most powerful tool of music. And obviously that would be the dream that that could this record could do that for someone. That would be my ultimate feeling of it. You know, I'd made something worthwhile.
I really like the powerful visuals that you've created to go along with the music they've released so far from the album the video of a Hunter, which you collaborated with Matthew Lambert, Is that right? Just explain somebody if they've not seen the video for that song what you and Matthew set out and wanted to achieve with the visuals that you made for that.
We were just really interested in exploring how queer people explore their bodies and their own sense of pleasure, because, I mean, some of my record deals with this idea that when you're queer, you're not allowed to just simply be in love. You have to keep asking yourself questions about identity and what are other people going to think? And all these things that've got nothing to do with you. That's the baggage of society that hasn't caught up with
you know something more. Yeah, So we were talking about how powerful at this moment is when you are without shame exploring your pleasure, you know, as a queer person. You know, we really wanted to show that in this in this film. I felt I was really moved by
this video. I mean, I found it so powerful, this kind of health, the sense of freedom that you feel on these two people when they're exploring themselves, and also how strange it is that maybe it's from Biblical times, this idea of pleasure being a sin, and how it's still in our subconscious that to explore our bodies and to pleasure ourselves is somehow shameful, and here are these people doing it in the most transcendent, beautiful way, and I feel like it's a really important message.
On the music side of this. Putting the record together, you recorded in London. You had Adrian Utley from Porter Said came and collaborated with you, and you also had Martin Casey from The Bad Seeds. What was the experience of bringing those musicians into the fold for the recording part of.
This, Like I mean, I also had Maley Harpas and Alex Thomas, who my band that I tour with, they've played on the record too, but having Adrian Utley and Marty, I guess with Adrian, I was really interested in trying to create kind of soundscapes and orchestral sounds, but not using orchestral instruments. And he has such an amazing knowledge of all the possible sense that you could ever use, and the way that he plays them is like he's
playing a cello or something. It's very very unique to him and with Marty, I guess, you know, I've always been such a fan of the sound that the Bad Seed to make and this kind of wild abandon that they have, and it was my producer, Nick Lorney's suggestion to have him board, and you know, I think he really came up with some incredible you know, basslines, and you know, he really added something to the record.
Do you remember the first time that you saw The Bad Seeds perform.
Yeah, I think it was around two thousand and seven, and it was when I was actually writing my first record, and I was just so blown away. And I was lucky enough to support Nick Kay's other band, Grinderman. That was the first tour I ever did was to support Grinderman, and that was like a crash course in how to be in a band. I mean, they're just so awesome, you know, on stage, off stage, you know, so charismatic, just so bad at us.
You know.
One of the things that I wanted to talk to you about was a topic of conversation that came up when we recorded this podcast with Nadine Shah quite a while ago now, but she was talking about the representations of the voices of older women in music on festival bills, you know, on TV, on opportunities that come along with being a musician. When you stop and think and say, who are the slightly older female artists that get the opportunity the same platforms as older male artists, you can't
think of that many. It feels like it's it's much more difficult for them to be heard and to be seen and you know, to share their work. Do you think there's truth in that? Because it's when you stop and thinking, go, where's why aren't our festival bills full of Patti Smith's, Well, they're full of lots of other old, older male artists. Seems that that seems to be a you know, passed off as nostalgia and that's totally fine. Whereas it's like, well, yeah, where are yeah, the voices
of slightly older female artists. I think that's the truth in that.
Yeah, I think, you know, where are the older women in all parts of cultural life?
You know?
Which is so I mean, when you get older, as it is for a lot of men, you know, they become more confident, they've had life experience, they have more to say, and we respect these men because they have this experience, and yet women if they're not you know, hot young things, and you know, they don't get the opportunity to be on TV or because so much emphasis on a woman's worth is put on her body. Once her body gets old, she's presented as not giving anything
left to society. And I think it's represented in always, including in the arts, and it frustrates me so much because just as men, young men need male role models, young women need to see older women. It's it's really important.
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