rocknroll_n_blues_queens | Oh shit there is all black women punk band and I am HERE for it! (Reply)

Big Joanie - Fall Asleep

Big Joanie - How Could You Love Me?

Women of Color have always had a place in punk. Big Joanie is here to remind you of that

Big Joanie is the sort of band you get to a show early for. In the past three years, the London-based group has self-released three rough-hewn EPs on their own imprint, Sistah Punk, each one featuring songs that blend tangling post-punk guitar lines, spit-shined hooks, and a “sprinkling,” Chardine says, of black liberation politics. Their most recent EP’s knotty title track, “Crooked Room,” took inspiration from a lecture by Seattle-born writer Melissa Harris-Perry, who compared life as a black woman in a white patriarchy to trying to find a true vertical in a room where all the angles are out of whack. “That’s exactly what it is,” Steph Phillips, Big Joanie’s lead vocalist and guitarist, says when we meet in a cozy cafe near South London’s Caribbean Brixton Market. “[Society] distorts the world around us to try and make us see things not as they are, or to try and make us fail.”

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On stage, Steph has a serene focus and a deep, assured singing voice. But she admits to a natural reserve, explaining that she lived vicariously through the riot grrrl music she devoured as a teenager in the middle England town of Wolverhampton. “As a very shy person, I loved hearing someone else stand up for themselves,” she says. A couple of hours away across the Midlands, the outgoing, quick-to-laugh Chardine grew up nurturing a love for Nirvana in Kettering, the town “where all the fucking government parties do their research for middle England.” In London, bassist Estella Adeyeri was listening to British alternative radio station XFM — “back when it wasn’t just blokey music,” she says. MORE