Track Of The Day: Charmpit – ‘Bridges Go Burn’

London DIY band Charmpit have indeed been charming our ears, and our hearts, for some time; having wowed us with their energy-filled charisma live on more than one occasion, and following the joyous sounds of their Jelly EP, they’ve now announced the release of their debut album, out next year via Specialist Subject Records.

Taken from the album, new single ‘Bridges Go Burn’ is filled with all the sparkling fuzz, jangly, shimmering hooks and luscious honey-sweet harmonies we’ve come to know and love. An empowering ode to moving on from toxic relationships and standing up for yourself, it’s a perfectly uplifting, luminous slice of ‘Anarcutie’ pop-punk to soundtrack this week’s anxiety…

Of the track, the band explain:

“We grew up in the 90s and 00s surrounded by examples in books/movies/songs of falling in romantic love and breaking up. Pop culture offered us so many blueprints for romantic relationships and comparatively few about other loving relationships. But in our experience, ending friendships, or being estranged from family, was heartbreaking, often more heartbreaking than our romantic breakups. We wanted to contribute a breakup song about friendship and family heartbreak to pop culture. It can take time to burn a bridge, especially when it’s guarded by a troll. You can forgive yourself for taking the time you needed to exit that toxic relationship. And when you exit it, you can write a pop banger so it ain’t so dang depressing. Strike a match, light it up, better bitter than deep fried!”

Filmed at the band’s home, Charm Gardens in East London, watch the new video for ‘Bridges Go Burn’ here:

And keep your eyes peeled for the debut album from Charmpit, out in 2020, via Specialist Subject Records.

Mari Lane
@marimindles

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Guest Blog: Gez Smith (Lips Choir / Girls Rock London)

For the past three years, Girls Rock London has put on a night of music to raise funds to support their programming year-round. This year we are presenting a special edition of our annual summer party on 30th June, showcasing some awesome DIY acts led by women.

If you haven’t come across us before, Girls Rock London creates opportunities for women; girls, trans and gender non-conforming folk to learn and perform music. We work with youth and adults, mainly through our ‘rock camps’, where participants learn the basics of an instrument from scratch, form a band, write a song and perform it at a live gig in just a few days. We’re all about demystifying music-making and making it accessible to as many people as possible, and our work with young people is also focused on improving peoples’ confidence and self-esteem.

Girls and trans youth in this country face real challenges in terms of their mental health, and we are trying to do something positive to address that. This year for the first time GRL! wants to continue working with young people all year round, and not just at the camps, and the money raised at our summer party will go towards helping to make that happen.

So, you probably want to know who’s on the bill…! There will be two bands that were formed at our rock camps – Concrete Bones and Judi Hench. Judi Hench were the first band to start making music as a result of Girls Rock so hold a very special place in our hearts, and Concrete Bones are going from strength to strength, having formed at last year’s women’s camp – they have done loads of gigging over the year and have just recorded an EP!

Charmpit are our headliners. They were formed as part of the First Timers programme which takes place at DIY Space for London, and one of their members is also a volunteer with Girls Rock London – they are one of the most fun bands I’ve seen in ages!

And completing this all-woman bill is Lips Choir, of which I’m a founding member. Lips was formed by a small group of people back in 2009. We were looking for a musical outlet but we couldn’t find anything that felt right for us. As we were all working on social justice campaigning, it felt natural for us that Lips would be a space for anyone who self-identifies as female – and we wanted to sing music that we listen to now, and grew up listening to.

It started with eleven people in a room singing a song that we had arranged the week before, and very quickly grew. We now have 100 members and a waiting list of 400!! We were really surprised by its popularity – it seems lots of people feel the same as we do about wanting to sing with other people, but haven’t found a place to do that. Communal singing is something that people have always done, and until recently in this country, people would do mainly do in church. Now that church attendance has fallen dramatically, many of us feel that need to carve out new spaces where we can come together and sing. We’re also really lucky that we’ve had amazing musical directors over the years who write really original arrangements that we absolutely love to sing!

We’re no different to any other DIY band putting on shows ourselves at venues like The Coronet, Union Chapel and St John at Hackney. We’ve gone from strength-to-strength, performing to sold-out audiences and appearing on the main stage at Bestival. We’ve collaborated with Goldfrapp and performed at the Royal Albert Hall with her, gone to Shut Down Yarl’s Wood Demonstrations and sung in solidarity with detained women there; sharing our stage with women refugees and asylum seekers are just some of the amazing experiences we’ve had so far.

So what can you expect if you come along to the GRL! Summer Party…? Plenty of women onstage singing their hearts out, playing instruments and having fun! Women are so underrepresented on and off the stage in music-making and performance, so it’s always inspiring to see them not waiting for permission and just cracking on with doing what makes them happy, and making amazing music along the way.

Expect accessible, excellent music – pop, punk, dance, rock and some amazing covers – and The Lips set is going to be a completely new set full of dance classics, to take us into the final part of the evening. And, as well as all the unmissable music, it’s also a chance to contribute to a project that directly tackles sexism in music and wider society.

It will also be hosted by the comedian Kemah Bob and there will be DJs afterwards, so expect to see plenty of Lipsters on the dance floor… We’ll see you there!

Huge thanks to Gez Smith for writing for us! Find out more about Girls Rock London and all their amazing work here. And make sure you head down to their Annual Summer Party on 30th June!

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Interview: FemRock

Here at GIHE HQ we’re currently counting down the days to FemRock‘s DIY not-for-profit gig night in Brighton on 30th June. Kindred spirits of ours, they are all about putting girls to the front and promoting women in music. We caught up with FemRock to get the low down on what to expect this year, the meaning behind their manifesto and the artists they’re loving right now.

Hi FemRock!  Congratulations on your second annual female-fronted festival! FemRock is a PR company, so can you tell us a bit about how you began?  What inspired you to setup FemRock?
Thank you so much! So, FemRock began in February 2013 in response to a lack of women’s representation in the music scene. I’d grown up with a passion for going to live shows and eventually noticed a real lack of line ups that involved women, let alone bands that were fronted by women and especially bands fronted by women being higher on the line-up than an opening slot. I was sick and tired, and questioned why there was such a lack of diversity in these line-ups. At first I thought that maybe women weren’t as involved in music as men were, due to the sexist nature of the music industry, but soon discovered that it went deeper than that; women were involved in music but all male and male-fronted bands were prioritised. So, when I moved to Brighton I decided to create what I believed the music scene’s I had been involved in before were lacking. Thus FemRock was born!

And what kicked things off for the FemRock Fest last year?
By the time we decided to create FemRock Fest we had been running for 4 years. It was around this time that the lack of diversity in festival line-ups was in the spotlight, and I’d built up a strong team around me to run FemRock together. So rather than waiting for existing festivals to correct this problem, we decided to create our own festival with a line-up that showed just how many amazing bands had women members and frontwomen!

As part of the FemRock Manifesto you make an emphasis on being feminist, d.i.y. and unapologetically political – can you expand on these for us and what they mean to you?
Feminism runs through everything we do, as individuals and as a team running FemRock. It felt important to state that explicitly in our manifesto – not only are we creating spaces for women to make and share music, we’re also placing that within the broader world of activism and the significance of lifting up the voices of women and other oppressed groups. We invite feminist groups to display flyers and petitions at our events, and work alongside local campaigns whenever possible. At our festival we always fundraise for relevant causes and provide spaces for organisations to display their information and talk to attendees. We don’t shy away from our politics, and we work hard to ensure that an accepting and loving culture is created at FemRock for people of all identities while recognising that we are all learning and growing. We don’t tolerate hatred and harassment, and we hope that our girls to the front ethos helps to create a night where everyone feels safe, heard and can have a great time too.

Here at GIHE we have massive respect for all those D.I.Y. artists out there, so it’s great to see an organisation supporting them by putting so many of them on your line up!  A couple of our favs are on there – in particular Charmpit, Militant Girlfriend and The Baby Seals – how did you go about picking the bands for the final line up?
It was a combination of us approaching bands we’ve watched and admired from afar and inviting back bands who are FemRock favourites that we’ve worked with in the past. A festival is a great way of bringing together all those bands together to create one stellar line-up and we’re so excited to have them all on one line-up – we feel so spoiled to have them all!

How do you all feel about the general lack of female headliners at a lot of big festivals at the moment?  
I don’t think there’s any excuse for the lack of diversity or lack of adequate representation on big festival line-ups and I don’t think it’s good enough to make a promise of correcting this by 2020, as many festivals have pledged, when there are so many talented bands involving women out there right now and who have been there for a long time, and simply gone unnoticed. We have a long way to go, but hopefully we’ll get there soon.

The festival is not just about music either is it?  You’ve got 2 vegan food stalls and a feminist marketplace – can you tell us a bit more about that? 
We’re very fortunate to have Cactus Kitchen Gals and Vegasmic catering our festival! Cactus Kitchen Gals do super tasty vegan junk food which is the perfect festival-fuel! Vegasmic will be selling delicious vegan sweets and treats! Our feminist marketplace was a huge hit last year so we decided to do it all over again! The marketplace is held in the courtyard of the venue and is made up of stallholders selling artwork, illustrations and creations and community organisations and activist groups. We also have DJ sets outside throughout the day to give a real festival vibe.

Finally, as we’re a new music focused site, are there any particular new bands or artists you’d recommend we check out?
Some of our favourite bands that you’ve not already mentioned include Sit Down (YES! We LOVE them!), who are a Brighton-based garage-punk two piece whose frontwoman is also their drummer, she is a force to be reckoned with! We’re also HUGE fans of The Nyx, The Menstrual Cramps, Bloom, Jellie Rolls, The Great Malarkey and CLT DRP among SO many more. We could keep going forever…

Huge thanks to FemRock for answering our questions! 

Femrock’s second annual female-fronted festival returns to Brighton on Saturday 30th June at The Green Door Store. There’ll 10 female-fronted bands, 2 vegan food stalls, a Feminist Marketplace full of creatives and activists and outdoor DJ sets throughout the day. Ticket info here.

Full FemRock line-up:

The Baby Seals
Sit Down
Militant Girlfriend
Bitch Theme
Hussy
Charmpit
Hexmaze
Suburban Death Twitch
Gullsband
Quim Smashers

 

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Track Of The Day: Charmpit – ‘Margot’

Charmpit have indeed been charming our ears, and our hearts, for some time now. With this year’s Jelly EP providing the perfect summer soundtrack, they have also wowed us with their joyous live set when playing for us at The Finsbury a few months back. And now, they continue to spread their empowering, fun-filled message with a brand new video.

Asserting that there is good in the world despite all the bad, ‘Margot’ oozes a sparkling, pop-punk fuzz with all the jangly, shimmering hooks and honey-sweet harmonies that we’ve come to know and love from the band. A short, sweet blast of uplifting, anarchic joy, it highlights the repeated refrain that “every baby is a natural-born punk”; reminding us of the need to nurture the innocence of the young and turn it into goodness and empathy that will last a lifetime.

Of the track, the band explain:

“We wanted to write an anthem for all the parents and carers, to everyone who takes the time to explain to kids why the things they see don’t make sense, how and why our world is messy and imperfect, and what justice could look like… MARGOT is 2 years old and our punk muse: Margot is here to make friends AND to win, their creativity and curiosity keeps us dreaming.”

Watch the joyous new video for ‘Margot’ now (featuring Margot herself – a child that bassist Anne Marie has cared for since she was a baby), and celebrate the beautiful, unifying power of love and friendship in the face of all the world has to throw at us.

Mari Lane
@marimindles

Photo Credit: Jon Mo / @jonmophoto

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