Covid 19 and the necessary restrictions surrounding it have brought about a number of cancellations of music events, including what would have been Get In Her Ears’ very first festival. Taking place tomorrow, Saturday 18th July, it was set to be a pretty special day, filled with some of our favourite female and non binary artists. Fingers crossed we can finally make it happen next year…
One of the bands set to play was post-punk duo Deux Furieuses. Having previously blown us away live at The Finsbury with their explosive gritty energy and raw emotion, they’ve become firm favourites of ours over the last few years and we were really looking forward to hosting them once again.
In the absence of our festival, and any gigs, at the moment, Ros from the band has written a poignant guest blog for us about changing priorities in the current situation, and the importance of having a quiet space to write. Have a read, and be reminded of the duo’s incredible power with the video for ‘Let It Burn’ at the end of the article!
A Room Of One’s Own…
Deux Furieuses should have been playing Get In Her Ears Festival tomorrow. Instead, I have moved to the countryside in search of a place to breath and make music without thumps and texts from the flat above every time I strum my guitar.
I am writing this at night in a gatehouse lodge cottage designed in 1869 by Quaker architect Alfred Waterhouse, who also built the National History Museum and the red brick universities, for abolitionist MP Thomas Foxwell Buxton. I wonder who else has lived here over the past 150 years and what troubles they knew.
The neighbours on one side are a black and white horse in a field and a rabbit who munches grass outside the kitchen window every evening at the same time. There are red kites and buzzards swooping over head, nettles everywhere and a space where a shed used to be before it blew away. I can hear the sound of the London train which makes me smile every time it blows its horn, calling me back to London to rehearse with Vas.
Deux Furieuses were working on third album material before Covid 19, London lockdown and the death of someone close upended everything. It was Vas who found this cottage when I said I had to live some other way. No time in our living memory has been this uncertain. We have to do what we can to survive. For me it’s about being free to write music and having a ‘room of one’s own’. We intend to start demoing our third album as soon as I am settled.
Get In Her Ears’ first festival would have been a joyous celebration of female and non binary talent and is another missed gathering of our tribe. Playing live to an audience is a fading memory but we have to find our collective way back.
Get In Her Ears 