After years of being something of an afterthought and/or the provenance of “girls just sing better” dorks like me for a couple patriarchal decades, the exhumation of “female-fronted punk” truly took a quantum leap in the 2010s. I became acquainted with Erin Eyesore, née Erin Fleming, who lived in San Francisco as I did and hosted the great Ribbon Around a Bomb show that was only classically rad 70s/80s femme-punk. She had me onto the program at the Radio Valencia studios once and let me “spin” some of my best mp3s. It was fun to email her links to the Reference of Female-Fronted Punk Rock bootlegs every now and again with a quick “Hey u ever hear this?” and get an eye-roll emoji back. She was still doing the show recently at her and my joint alma mater KCSB-FM Santa Barbara, too – shows linked here.
Erika Elizabeth, too – superstar DJ, musician, risograph designer and writer – she did a killer piece in 2014’s Dynamite Hemorrhage #2 fanzine on female-fronted punk obscurities that helped further the disentombment of so much of this music. Right before that, I happily picked up a copy of 2013’s Only Death is Fatal #1, published out of Montreal by a woman known to me only as Megon, and it’s this deep dive into ultra-obscurity we’ll be talking about today. Unless I’ve got it wrong, Megon only published this one print fanzine before going the full digital on her “blogspot” blog, which ran out of steam in 2017 yet not before making a full accounting of hundreds of female-fronted punk and post-punk corners.
She was the type of editor to hear a weird UK DIY song on a comp track by a band with a ridiculous name like Cool To Snog and say, “Hey! I need to interview the folks from Cool To Snog!”. Someone needed to, and we’re all the better for it. That’s really the unstated mission statement of Only Death is Fatal #1 – to turn over the previously unturned rocks. She tracks down the two sisters from the only band in here besides Bona Dish whom I’d heard of – the Anemic Boyfriends, from Alaska (!) – and gives what I’m sure is the most full airing of their history to them they’d ever been proffered. Turns out the ‘Boyfriends moved to San Francisco, and then away from it, not once but twice!
Because these bands were barely talked to by fanzines in their day and almost all moved on (as people do) to raise families, work jobs and so forth, you get a sense that even the band members struggle to remember what actually happened in 1980 and why. Megon will ask the sort of naval-gazer of a question I’d ask, something learned through deep online & offline scouring and tape insert reading, only to get an answer like, “Ah, you’ve really got me there. I don’t know how that came about”. But she did a phenomenal job sourcing original photographs & flyers, and going deep on the questions – she actually knocked it out of the park with Bona Dish, who I myself interviewed in 2013 as well, and got a cool photo that the band didn’t send to me (sorry, Megon gets it mate).
And then, after all of this flurry of female-fronted punk documentation from Erin, Erika and Megon, Jen B. Larson put out the book Hit Girls: Women of Punk in the USA, 1975-1983 just over a year ago. I suggest you give it a gander if you’re so inclined. Sin 34 and the Inflatable Boy Clams get their own chapters, so you’re likely to want to get involved.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 