Colour Me Wednesday

Presenting the genre-bending, the anti-capitalist, the provoking Colour Me Wednesday, a four-piece band out of Uxbridge on the edges of Greater London attempting to breathe life back into the area’s arts and culture scene and bring hope to those pushed out by the machismo of politicallycharged music.

“It’s kind of interesting that the people who criticize anti-capitalism or anarchism or communism or whatever’s being too idealistic, that we don’t have a clear idea of what it is that we want. But I think the unrealistic thing is to have a clear idea,” Jaca, drummer for the Uxbridge four-piece Colour Me Wednesday, tells me. “You can point out the bad parts about what’s here, and it’s good to have a good, clear plan to what your ideal world would be, but that’s also the unrealistic part of it as well, so it’s pointing out the flaws but being like, well what would be left over? Maybe it would just be nothing.” We’re talking about the ideas that emerged from their sophomore album, Counting Pennies in the Afterlife, a genre-bending, immersive glance into the anti-capitalist and feminist ideals that the band hold dear to themselves, and subjects that rise to the surface often for a band made up of a group living in an area of London that’s all but been leached of its DIY music and arts culture.

The very last stop on the Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines – a full hour’s journey from where I was staying in Putney – Harriet tells me on our quick drive to their home from the station about their

attempts to bring a spark of culture back into the area where decreasing arts funds from the council have made cuts to these programs, leaving many of the youth in the area high and dry without any community centres or creative outlets. “People talk about a scene or community in Uxbridge, not realizing that it is just us,” she says, then laughs. “I always fantasize about, imagine if there was somebody we didn’t know about…” We’re truly on the edge of London, the edge of the scene that exists within what many may consider the greatest hub for music in Europe, even the world – perhaps over the edge itself? It’s what’s inspired ‘Edge of Everything’, one of the songs vocalist Jennifer Doveton wrote for the newest album, existing in this space many people ignore or have never even heard of.

We’re sitting on various pieces of furniture in Jen’s canalside home, perched on the edges of her bed, nestled in an armchair, and me sinking into a beanbag on the floor. Gray sunlight is trickling through the many windows on this overcast early-summer day into the oneroom accommodation that was an extension from the family’s boathouse just a few steps from the door here, where Jen and her sister/band-

Harriet grew up. Jaca and guitarist Laura now live in the neighbourhood as well, near enough to Harriet’s other bandmates from The Tuts, and they pride themselves in having attracted more and more musician friends to move away from central London out to Uxbridge.

The majority of people living in London, especially those who moved into the city and are living centrally as transplants for the convenience of closeness, are completely unaware of the outer boroughs like Uxbridge. Where East London has the culture of East- Enders and cockney accents, easily recognizable by most of the wider world, West London seems to get lost in the crowd, some believing Westminster or even Chelsea are the furthest western reaches of the area, even though the majority of the workforce in the centre commute from similar distances. It’s not as though West London hasn’t had its due influence on the culture, despite it being erased in the last few years: the EMI factory where the Beatles’ vinyl was pressed is just up the road, the BBC centre is nearby, and Southall had its thriving years

as a hub of the punk scene, churning out bands like The Rats but now having fallen into oblivion in that regard.

With Ealing Council in one of the biggest deficits of all councils, due to the Tories’ continuous victories driven by the promise not to

raise council tax, the plunging of the council into deeper and deeper debt means funding for the arts has been all but completely decimated. Youth centres, days centres, music venues, anything: it doesn’t exist here in West London. Events may happen in Shepherd’s Bush or Ealing itself, mainly larger concerts

that forget about the local scene, but Uxbridge seems to exist as an island high and dry away from the saturation of arts and culture, at least disregarding bands like Colour Me Wednesday and The Tuts, attempting to breathe new life into the area and put Uxbridge back on the map. “About every ten years,

some naïve idiots like us will try and make something happen,” Harriet explains. “We’ve tried to put on gigs, and we put up fliers at the schools and really encourage young girls to come to things, and it’s just so tricky. Don’t regret doing it – it was cool – but hard work.” Even with all their drive and dedication, it’s still difficult to draw a crowd from the area.

Even with Brunel University nearby,

supposedly a perfect pool of eager young adults to pull to shows, they’re fighting against the greater desire to go all the way into the city. “They’d be spending all their money going to London because they think nothing happens here,” Jen says. “Stuff does happen here, but you have to go to it – you can’t just keep going into London.” Laura will put the odd house show on, and look out into a crowd consisting of only the band members playing

the night, and a few friends having commuted in from central London. Where the local scene there is dying, Colour Me Wednesday and their friends are trying to prop it back up, giving it more life.

“A lot of people say we’re in the dystopia now. This is the dystopia,” Jen continues on from Jaca’s thoughts. “Can we get any much worse than this?” Harriet adds. Jaca chimes in, “Yes,” then laughs. “Anti-capitalists. That’s us.”

Jen’s lyrics on Counting Pennies in the Afterlife handle a lot of capitalist ventures, from the draining of funds from the arts and culture programs in their area, to the “general critique of things like capitalism thriving in the patriarchy,” Harriet describes. “The whole album is critiques of things that are consuming people.” In a world where you can’t turn your head two degrees in any direction and not catch a glimpse of detrimental capitalist pursuits breaking someone down, it’s a tempting idea of many to blow it all up and start anew, hence the focus on a post-apocalyptic theme throughout the album, but, like Jaca said, what would be left over? Destroying Uxbridge’s council, the cause for the lack of arts programs

in the community, might get rid of whatever is holding their citizens back, but may also destroy any communal structure needed to support the arts in the first place. Perhaps destroying the world will vanquish corrupt politicians, greedy businessmen, bigoted and horrible people in power, but will any good be saved in its wake?

A song-by-song explanation reveals depth and analysis behind Jen’s insightful lyrics, with varying levels of thematic content which are clearly well thought out and show civil intelligence around social issues. ‘I Thought It Was Morning’ deals with seasonal affective disorder, paired with the “abstract anxiety that it brings out in you,”Jen explains. “You then have nightmares about the end of the world, because that’s how anxiety works. It’s nonspecific, and then you’ll have a nightmare about something that’s the worst thing that could possibly happen. But then, in some ways, you quite enjoy apocalyptic dreams, because it feels like everything’s so tense and everyone’s working so hard, and it just would be nice to be free for one night.”

‘Boyfriend’s Car’ handles this subject through the scope of this

machine, working perfectly and smoothly for those it benefits, and detrimentally for those who conveniently don’t have a voice to speak out against it. “The people who it’s going wrong for don’t have a voice,” she says, “but they’re the people that could take it down.” Namely, the band and others like them using their platform in the public eye to speak out against the situations and people marginalizing those less powerful, by making others feel less alone.

There is a kind of power in a community like this, empowerment through a group of similar-thinking people, especially when their peers speaking about similar anti-capitalist ideas are part of the niche group of men in punk. Aggressive and “shouty,” as they have been for decades, they’re not exactly inaccessible, but the oft-violent nature of their shows push people away. Colour Me Wednesday, all quite femme and making less classically angry music, work in the hope “to subvert that aspect of what punk means to lots of people, that it doesn’t have to be fighting each other in a mosh pit to really fast, loud, heavy music,” Jaca explains. “It can be fun and supportive and catchy, and that hopefully women and trans people

can feel more included in the stuff that we’re saying, which, we know from all the millions of documentaries and articles and whatever about how inaccessible male dominated punk scenes are, that there needs to be more of that. We’re hoping to sort of be that, or be able to have that sort of conversation with people who listen to our music with

people like us, queer women and trans people.”

“And the way of sending that message out is something that’s not relatable to a lot of people, but it’s the same in activism,” Jen continues. “Feels like the only valid form of activism is one that’s supposedly fueled by anger, but if you want to be a good activist, you can’t exist in a constant state of anger. It’s just not possible. You won’t get anything done. You have to have moments of calm and clear-headedness to be able to actually tackle issues like that. It feels sometimes disingenuous when people say that the only way you could get that kind of ant-capitalist message across is through aggression, and a lot of it is machismo, isn’t it? And, in that way, it’s hard to be taken seriously, even if we have the same messages.”

They’ve faced misogynistic and strange adversity in the face of concert-goers, especially when grouped with other bands that perhaps speak on the same subjects, but perhaps don’t sound so similar. Recently having supported Propaghandi, a show which they enjoyed despite much of the crowd being white cis men (a commonality at

these kinds of shows), reviews written afterwards detailed a message that was no doubt a product of that crowd. “’It was just a bit too nice, they sound too nice for me,’” Harriet sneers, quoting the reviewers, “and this man had clearly just rejected our messages because it wasn’t masculine enough.”

Women and nonbinary people in bands will recognize this: the very same compared them to Blondie, a lazy point of reference that seems to be the only one in the repertoire of these men absorbing music like this. “It’s so lazy, but it just goes to show they can’t connect with it because they’re so stuck in that way of being able to connect with critical punk music, it has to be coming from mostly men to them,” Harriet says. “They’re almost like, no, it’s too sweet, it’s too nice, it’s frivolous.”

Jen agrees: “It’s like, it’s feminine, therefore it’s soft, therefore it’s ineffective, otherwise our message isn’t strong enough.”

Others find solace in accepting the messages as their own. “Our fans are actually quite shy,” Harriet

says, indicated by the soft-spoken nature of their responses to the band’s songs and lyrics. “Online, I wouldn’t say it’s not like there’s hype hype hype with loads of interactions, but when you do find them, it’s like finding someone’s diary entry.” Self-searching on Tumblr, for instance, means they’re met with a slew of under-the-radar blogs detailing how they’ve found a theme to relate to in Colour Me Wednesday’s lyrics. ‘These lyrics are me!’ “They listen to it in a very personal-to-their identity way,” she continues. “They pay real attention to the lyrics, and don’t reject our messages.”

The music itself helps listeners relate their own experiences in a broader sense, especially with the band’s knack for making contradictory atmospheres between serious topics and catchy melodies. “It’s good because you can write a song that’s essentially quite sad-sounding in terms of the lyrics, but then have it in a major key, makes it sound a bit more hopeful,” Laura says. “Listening to sad songs is nice as well, and cathartic, but listening to some lyrics about maybe something similar to what happened to you as an experience or an identity thing, and then it being in a pop,

uplifting sound could bring you out of - I dunno,” Harriet continues. “I just feel like it could help people, maybe mentally. I feel like it helped me, anyway.”

There is no doubt that Colour Me Wednesday have touched a great many people across the globe, their reach extending across continents in an attempt to lift up those who perhaps do not realise they have a voice against marginalisation, in any form. They’re facing erasure as a band in an area of withering arts, and in the face of the largely male, cishet music world, but they’re doing everything in their power to change that. “It’ll go down in a little niche bit of history. It’ll be like, oh, yeah, in Uxbridge there were these bands!” Harriet says. “Footnote. We reference stuff like that in our stuff, like “Heather’s Left For Dead” about women in musical history as tiny little niche. Man, man, man, man, man, and then the footnotes at the bottom: everyone else.” Moving in these great strides towards greater change will hopefully mean change for the better – Uxbridge and Colour Me Wednesday will be going down in history through this group’s efforts, and not only as a footnote.