A sad story

Tonight I went to see Scream Club. After listening to a few too many Robots songs this afternoon I realised that they were actually quite annoying and I was possibly not in the right place to see them, and so Scream Club became all the more the focus of my evening.

I arrived at the O2 Academy and everyone there was a twatty fifteen-year-old girl bleating incessantly and taking MySpace pictures of herself and her friends. Throughout the evening I saw one woman I thought might be gay, barring Scream Club. This isn’t anything to hold against anyone, but it did make me feel a bit more alienated than I was expecting to be; I later found out from Corin that Scream Club had only sent an email saying they were going to be performing in Britain a few days ago, so I guess those who might have been interested probably weren’t aware.

The first band on were fucking dire. They were called 123 something (123 on? 123 go? Something shit like that) and were comprised of lazy fucking ‘pretty’ boys who seemed to believe that being male and wielding a guitar meant that they were worth something. They sounded like an awful mixture of Low Shoulder, Euphoria Audio and Fall Out Boy – they sang in American accents despite being British. The lead singer was only a performer in that he performed privileged male heteronormativity – he was constantly flirting with the audience in a really sickening, authoritative way, and most of the teenage girls were fucking loving it. I felt grossed out and left to rant at Corin for a bit down the phone.

Upon returning to the room I bought some Scream Club merch, feeling more than ever that they were to be my salvation from marginalisation and general extended fury. I spent £22 at their table on a DIY purse and a t-shirt. The t-shirt was an XL women’s size; I did not get it because it was the last size they had; I got it because it was the size that fitted me. I usually wear a size 14, although I can sometimes fit into a 12 depending on the generosity of the sizing. Size 14 is not fucking extra fucking large. I felt a bit grumpy about this but didn’t pursue it, still mostly excited for Scream Club to come on. It was at this point that a girl a couple of people along from me started repeatedly impersonating a rape alarm. I wanted to tell her to stop because it was triggering and trivialising an important issue but I felt like I'd just come across as lecturing and mental. I also hoped she'd just stop. She didn't.

And then Scream Club came to my rescue. They were wearing awesome stripy DIY suit-y things and looked superb. Cindy Wonderful said that Party Time, their opening track, was about everyone, ‘boys, girls, in-betweens’ getting together and having a good time. There was audience participation (SC: What time is it? Everyone: PARTY TIME!). Things were looking promising. But that was literally the queerest moment of the entire gig.

While they didn’t go so far as to remove all references to homosexual feeling from their lyrics, they cut out swear words and more explicit sexual references. This fucked me off because I thought Scream Club were all about sexual liberation, about being able to be explicit without being told you were being inappropriate or wrong. Turns out I was wrong. They still played And You Belong and Girl, You Look Expensive, but the queerness was only visible if you already knew they were queer; the vocals were not particularly clear and their between-song banter indicated nothing.

The worst twist of the knife came when they closed with Revolution. Cindy, who clearly thought she was being inspirational, was talking about how the song was about the importance of challenging injustice. The examples she used were sexism, racism and ablism. Of course I think these are laudable – but they missed out homophobic?! They didn’t even mention the elephant in the fucking room?! I mean, Jesus fucking God, the three –isms mentioned, whilst barely always fully acknowledged, are the most fucking famous ones, and also the ones which many an ignorant person can (to their minds) unproblematically tell themselves they are tastefully avoiding. They did not acknowledge the insidiousness of prejudice; all they did was tell a roomful of twats that ‘revolution’ was flapping around with fake guns and feeling self-satisfied. Of course you can’t hope to convey every complexity of discrimination in one set, but you could try a lot fucking harder, especially if you’re a band whose core fanbase is comprised of queers who felt they had a home in you. That’s what I felt – I thought they were going to relieve me from feeling misplaced, and represent, or even just acknowledge, my values and identity politics. But nothing of the sort happened – they seemed to be far more concerned with appealing to as wide a demographic as possible rather than staying true to the very principles that they purported to support. I was left feeling disenfranchised and really, really let down – particularly when these people eschew playing Sapphic Traffic, a genuinely positive queer night where the audience would really get something out of seeing them and where they could be fucking real and inspirational, in favour of playing with a bunch of penises with guitars and a band whose every output sounds pretty much the same as all the others. Or the fact that they wouldn’t play ST at all if Staffy didn’t pay far more than she was willing, or even able, to do.

Cindy said they were going to be at the merch table after their set to meet people. At first I left the room, feeling like there was nothing I wanted less than to meet those sell-outs, but then I thought that perhaps I could turn the situation into something positive and just try to encourage them to be a bit queerer, maybe. I imagined telling them about how I’d found out about them, that my girlfriend had told me on the first night we met about the bands she was into, about how they were one of the bands she said were her favourites, along with Team Dresch, and that I’d had no idea who these people were and it was really awesome to discover all this queer music I’d never known before, and how she’d put Internationale on the first mix CD she made for me and how we used to listen to Big Deal at her house all the time. I imagined saying this to them and then casually mentioning that I was surprised that their set wasn’t queerer; not berating them, but just sayin’. But after twenty minutes they hadn’t shown up and Robots were going to start their set in ten and there was no way I could even hope to express this to them once they’d started, and I also realised that I was probably far better at expressive myself in writing, so would be better placed to try to email them or something. I left and called Corin and ranted to her all the bus-ride home.

Now I’m in my house with my mother and dog and some wine. I feel a bit less upset, but still rankling. I have £22 worth of merchandise that I am going to have to seriously work to reclaim. I understand that being out is difficult, I do. But when you are, you make a promise, however tacitly, that you will defend your right to be. When you are an out queer artist, you lead your fans to believe that you will represent them, because you are in a far better position than they to do it. I am not naïve; I don’t think that being an out queer artist is going to give you financial security, or that financial gain doesn’t matter to the artist. But there is a fucking line between compromising and selling out, and tonight Scream Club crossed it.