Welcome to Fan Club. We’re putting on monthly events at Rough Trade, (Nottingham), to promote and celebrate female-identifying artists, musicians, writers, illustrators, whatever. Females doing awesome things is what we love, and we want to share that with everyone. We want to make the night super inclusive, so if you feel you want to get involved, just shout! Fan Club parties will happen on the first Saturday of every month, at Rough Trade, Broad Street, Nottingham. If you want to get involved in any way at all, you can email us at ‘fanclubnotts@gmail.com’
Thanks to: One Beat Zines (Julia Scheele & Sarah Broadhurst) Babe Punch Mouni Feddag Rachel Nelson Noel (Cupboard Promotions) Ganda Media for printing our zines, posters, flyers and stickers. (http://www.gandamediasolutions.com) & to everyone who dances on the tables xo
Spice Girls by Mouni Feddag
@FANCLUBNOTTS FACEBOOK.COM/FANCLUBNOTTS
B E L L Y KIDS
Belly Kids have fun releasing Books, Prints, Tapes and all sorts of odd accessories. You may be familiar with ‘Thrill Murray’. a colouring book dedicated to Bill Murray. They’ve also produced a Scratch n Sniff book (“Instant Touch”), a sticker collection chronicling the life of Kurt Cobain (“Kurt and the Gang”) as well as “More Than a Woman”, a beautifully illustrated colouring book dedicated to the heroines of 90s RnB/Hip Hop, and “Sister Like You”, an anthology of fierce females in Ancient History.
One of Belly Kids’ latest offerings is ‘Cute Yum’, by Mel Stringer. Inspired by fruits and eccentric Japanese fashion, Cute Yum is a bubblegum explosion of the awesome and kawaii. Mel also sells zines, stickers, badges, and apparel, all featuring body-posi and ethnically diverse babes.
SHOP : https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/girliepains http://www.bellykids.co.uk/books/cute-yum/
SHOP : http://onebeatzines.bigcartel.com/
One Beat Zines is a zine-making collective and distro, run by Sarah Broadhurst and Julia Scheele. They publish zines, by others and by themselves, aligning themselves with those who have something to say, whether it’s in the form of comics, essays, photography, fiction, collage or any other medium that comes to mind. They are mostly interested in publishing strong feminist voices, and working with women of all ages and backgrounds who are not already established in the current comics and zine scenes. One Beat are currently working on a new anthology under the theme of ‘IDENTITY’, which will be out in time for Thought Bubble (a comic art festival in Leeds 9-15 Nov).
NOT A NEW WAVE: A SLEATER-KINNEY FANZINE
PINK SPEX
DOUBLE DARE YA
A 35-page zine filled with pure, unbridled Sleater-Kinney enthusiasm and love for your favourite feminist rock band. Includes everything from essays, personal stories, illustrations and comics.
A zine about sexuality as seen through women’s eyes. Full of personal, sad, sweet, and incredibly NSFW drawings, collages and writings.
A full-colour anthology featuring comics, illustrations, essays, and interviews about/ inspired by Riot Grrrl, zine culture, and punk-rock feminism!
Mouni Feddag (hello@mounifeddag.com) Mouni has very kindly spent some time illustrating various things for us. She describes herself as “a drawing person born & based in Nottingham, England”, and holds a Communications Design degree from the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt in Germany (class of 2014). Mouni has very recently signed with a children’s illustration agency, and she is crazy excited about the possibility of making children’s books in the near-future! Mouni’s work in this zine is: Front & Back Page (“Laundry”) Page 2 (“Spice Girls”) Page 6 (“Cramps”) Page 8 & 9 (“Grrrl Power” & “Cacti”)
You can see more of Mouni’s work at www.mounifeddag.com
Girls Don’t Care About B-Sides by Rachel Nelson. Between the ages of 11 and 16, I had an almost exclusively female group of friends. I went to a mixed-gender comprehensive school, but the people I spent my time with were girls. Throughout this time, I moved through a range of different musical obsessions (Geri Halliwell, Destiny’s Child, Britney Spears, Ash, Nirvana, Blink 182, Foo Fighters, Green Day etc etc.), as did my friends. We weren’t all alike in our music taste; we had the usual disagreements about which music channel to watch at a friend’s house and which radio station to listen to, but we all loved music. I don’t think I’m describing a strange scene here; in fact, I’m almost certain that most people reading this would relate to it, whatever their gender. When I was 16 I went to the party of a male acquaintance who was beyond shocked that my friends and I knew and enjoyed Rage Against the Machine. They were surprised because, as they put it, they ‘didn’t think girls liked this music’. It would be easy to put this down to youth and inexperience, but as I got older I began to see this viewpoint more and more often. The punk / alternative scene has often been described as a ‘boys club’, and has, for a long time, looked very male-dominated from the outside. From the age of 17 until, well, very recently I suppose, I attended a lot of gigs in which every band on the bill was all-male. I met so many friends through going to watch live music; it would not be an exaggeration to say that getting involved in the music scene changed my life. I made instant friendships with people based on that one thing we knew we both loved. I shared bodyheat and snacks and hair bands with people I barely knew while waiting in line, desperate to be as close to the front as
stickers by Melissa Chaib http://shop.melissachaib.com/
possible. When people ask me ‘how do you know [insert name]?’, the answer is always ‘music’. The friends I made were almost always female. The people I was surrounded by in tiny clubs were female. Yet, whenever I heard someone talking about music on the radio, on television, or writing about music in magazines, giving an opinion – they were male.
The longer I spent in the music scene, the clearer it became that women fell into distinct categories: we were meant to either be groupies, desperate to be groupies, or attending with a boyfriend who had undoubtedly introduced us to music. A date of mine once described himself self-deprecatingly as having ‘the music taste of a 14-year-old girl’. I couldn’t understand why that would be a bad thing; I’d been a 14-year-old girl who loved music - why was my 14-year-old taste inherently bad? About a year ago I was listening to my favourite podcast when the presenter declared ‘girls don’t care about b-sides’. I was so hurt and angry. and at first, I immediately thought that I was over-reacting (a side-effect of living in a sexist society). When I thought it through, I knew I had a right to be furious. This guy was saying that women don’t care about music, and this was something that I had felt the undertones of in every music magazine I had ever read. Women don’t care about the b-sides, they just care about the singles. Women don’t know about music like men do. It has been inferred again and again that we don’t really like bands, we just like boys in bands. We don’t listen to music, we listen to our hormones and they tell us to follow that young cute rock band. When a band has a heavily-female fan base they are no longer cool. This viewpoint just didn’t live up to my life experience; I had over fifteen years of bonding with girls and women over the music we loved so much that we didn’t know how to build lives around it. In the past year, I have seen more bands on stage with members of various gender identities than I have ever seen in my life. The music scene holds a plethora of scenes within it and I may have just fallen into a new one, but I’m hoping that this change is spreading. I’m hoping that the influx of women on stage will shine a light on the masses of female fans in audiences, in record stores, on the internet, in the street. I’m hoping that my view on a band and my ability to play or not play an instrument will someday not be in any way linked to my gender, and bands can stop being described as ‘female-fronted’ as if that’s a genre. Mostly, what I’m hoping is that female-identifying people can take as much from seeing themselves reflected on stage as I have. Your ability to love something has nothing to do with gender, and your viewpoint matters. You belong here.