The Elephant in the Rehearsal Room by Kristiane Sulek
Breaking The Record
The Elephant in the Rehearsal Room: Why it’s time to Break the Record on gender imbalance in the music industry.
It started with a conversation. One had by many, by girls all over the country, in every town and city, in every place that music was. For girls and young women, trying to find your voice in an industry dominated by men can feel like an attempt to try and shout the loudest. It can feel like you’re not just being heard, that you’re not being taken seriously.
‘We wanted to create this space’, says Breaking the Record founder Christine Spriggs, ‘that women came to feel and to be heard’. All too often, young women can feel like the music industry is a man’s game, with festival headliners and industry roles staggeringly dominated by men. It can feel like trying to catch up before you’ve even begun. ‘In my experience’, Christine recalls, ‘I remember feeling like I had to try and shout louder, to be bolder, just to be taken seriously. But we shouldn’t have to do things like that, we shouldn’t have to try and be like men’.
And it’s not just ‘something we’re imagining’, Christine quotes Bjork, who despite spending 30 years working in the music industry recognised that ‘everything a guy says once, [as a woman] you have to say five times’. It’s not just a case of not being able to shout the loudest, it’s a case of not being taken seriously. Of feeling that people just aren’t listening to you, in the way that they seem to listen to men.
‘There was this one thread I felt I needed to address’ said Christine, who has worked in the music and creative industries for most of her adult life, ‘the elephant in the rehearsal room was the music industry’s gender imbalance, inequality and stereotyping. That was my observation, my experience and I couldn’t ignore it. I had to explore it. I had to try and do something about it’.
And as the Me Too and Time’s Up movements began to surface and gather momentum, Christine felt that the gut reaction she had known for so long was suddenly being backed up by a tidal wave of undeniable evidence. ‘I began to look at the figures as they surfaced’, that women were earning on average 20.8% an hour less than men (European Commission, 2017), that just an estimated 5% of UK sound engineers were women (Soundgirls). I found myself asking why this was. I knew so many women that wanted those industry roles, who were so capable of taking those headlining slots - but why weren’t they?’
‘I called upon my own experience as a woman in the industry. I felt that these women weren’t showing up in these headlining slots or industry roles not because they
weren’t as talented, or as capable as their male counterparts. But they weren’t getting as close to these opportunities because they were being pushed away at the very beginning from taking their first steps into the industry at all.’
Breaking the Record (formerly Bangin’ Pans) was born from a desire to create a space that women came to be and to feel heard. Through workshops, training sessions, songwriting classes, networking events and skill shares, it was going to be somewhere that young women could come together to build their skills, forge a network and find their voice as the next generation of women in music.
The project is targeted at girls and young women in the Liverpool City Region as an accessible, high-profile music programme, supporting ways into music making and campaigning for gender equality in the industry.
Part of the project was a virtual choir programme led by singer, professional vocal coach and performer, Jennifer John. The choir programme was made up of vocal coaching sessions and collaborative songwriting workshops alongside discussions about female empowerment and equality. The choir project will culminate in a song release ‘We are She’ composed by Jennifer and the participants, featuring the girls and young women who have taken part. ‘It has been really inspiring working with this group of exceptional girls and young women to create this virtual choir piece’, says Jennifer, ‘the whole process consisted of a series of conversations around what it is to be a female in the world right now. Through those conversations, we produced a piece called We Are She that says it all, with the passion that we felt it’.
‘In the world of creativity’, Jennifer says, ‘ collaboration and equality make a dynamic combination. Breaking the Record is no exception. Having the opportunity to work alongside some extremely talented and insightful girls has taught me so much about the importance of voices being given a platform on which to be heard and the magic that can be created when this happens’.
‘Christine and myself have always shared a passion for female empowerment and gender equality so to be able to realise this throughout the Breaking the Record project has been a dream come true. We are very excited to share the outcome with you’.
The song explores, both in its content and in the creation process, the action of women coming together to create, rather than being pushed apart. When we think of women in the media, what we see all too often is women made out to be rivals and men made out to be teammates. Female tokenism in the industry, in which we often see a small number of female acts in festival lineups, asks women to see other women as their competition, rather than their network. We just don’t see this in the same degree in a man’s experience of the music industry.
Emily Rose Clark, a participant in the virtual choir project shares that she’s ‘so honoured to have been a part of the Breaking the Record choir. In this weird and challenging time, to have a safe space to have conversations about identity and community that we all wanted to have - to discuss how we see ourselves and how we would like the world to see us - that was such a special experience. It was comforting at first, but then it became so empowering to have women from such diverse backgrounds vocalise their stories and, with Jennifer’s patience and guidance, embrace themselves and their power. I know the song will encourage women to do that more, and I can’t wait for people to hear it’.
Given the current restrictions, all the recording process had to happen online remotely. The 9 girls who form the Breaking The Record choir all recorded their parts separately. The video was produced by another talented woman called Jazamin Sinclair, who turned the song into a strong online choir performance.
Here’s to all of the incredible girls and women involved in the project, the workshop leaders, contributors and creatives. Here’s to women finding their voice and breaking the record - challenging the male dominance of the industry and coming together to create something amazing. Here’s to a more equal industry in the future, and the power of the female voice that we can’t wait to hear more of.