Western Mail review.
Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear at The Legendary TJs, Newport.
THE MUSIC was OK, but for once that's not important.
Both bands are exponents of the Riot Grrrl movement, an uncompromising pro-female cause with the stated aim of promoting an explosion of artistic activity from women, and an end to boring 'boyrock'.
It's generating a lot of publicity, and a lot of dialogue in all the right places. The national music press is taking it very seriously. It's being compared to the 76-77 punk rock thing.
Brits Huggy Bear take their first brave steps outside their small, insular circle, and find to their horror that they can't handle it.
They seem genuinely disturbed that their carefully rehearsed poems and confrontational stance on everything is not lapped up by the masses. It gets a reaction they don't like.
Suddenly their carefully rehearsed speeches are falling apart around them.
They want the audience to stop moving, to stop shouting, to move back. They want girls at the front, they want this, they want that. They want an awful lot.
They want the audience to show some respect. No way. Earn it.
Finally, the grrrls can't take it any more. They storm off in a huff. In just 30 minutes, Huggy Bear lose every scrap of credibility .
Bikini Kill pick up where Huggy left off.
They insist that only girls should be at the front of the stage. Why?
No doubt, this will end up as some bizarre twisted victory for the Riot Grrrls against the Welsh boyrock activists or something by the time it hits the music press.
But I see it as a British band who cannot handle an honest reaction to their own highly confrontational attitude, and an American man-hating band hell-bent on building barriers between the sexes that didn't previously exist.
Andy Barding (published 1992).
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