Stephanie Phillips
Big Joanie's guitarist, vocalist and songwriter
An interview with Stephanie Phillips, songwriter, guitarist and vocalist from Big Joanie, whose new album ‘Back Home’ is out now.
AG: When you put the band together, did you set out to create a black feminist punk band?
SP: When I put a little message on social media, it was for a black punk band because I thought, ‘That will be cool. I was playing in feminist punk band at the time, but I was the only black person. It felt odd. It felt awkward. So I thought, ‘Oh, a black punk band, that'd be really cool.’
But through a process of elimination we ended up with a band where we are all women, and we all are feminists and all black. So it was a coincidence that worked out well, but I do think it was important to kind of state who we were.
And it was kind of seen as a bit controversial at the time, in 2013, to say that you're a black feminist band. It wasn't really seen as a selling point.
AG: You’ve written a book about Solange Knowles, with an accompanying Spotify playlist. The music on it isn't punk, so I think it's worth pointing out that for you punk is an attitude rather than just your classic three chords and standing up in front of a crowd and bawling your head off.
SP: Well it's so many things. I think that my understanding of punk always came from The Raincoats more than it did the Sex Pistols. I love the idea of you can do anything you want and you can just completely deconstruct an instrument and a song. And that is punk and that is DIY. So for me, it was never about writing three chords, it was always about how do we break something down and become like Slits or The Raincoats or X Ray Spex and Poly Styrene.
It was always about seeing things beyond the aggy lads.
AG: Solange is an artist who has had to follow a tougher route than her sister Beyonce…
SP: Yes, that's definitely something that I resonated with. Solange is related to one of the world's biggest pop stars, and as much as that could be a benefit for her in terms of proximity to this massive music industry machine, it was also a detriment because she was always compared to Beyonce, and was always the secondary person in that world.
In order to find herself as an artist, and a person, she really did have to start thinking about how she wanted to be and experiment with all these different sounds and came back around to find herself.
The ‘Seat At The Table’ album was such an impactful album for her and for the black community and for so many people around the world as well.
She’s such an impressive artist in terms of her inability to stick to one particular form. There's always new things that she's doing, she's never really stopping which is very impressive to me.
AG: Your first album ‘Sistahs’ came out in 2018 and at the time there were reviews suggesting you were ‘bright new things’. But by then you'd actually been going for about five years.
SP: We probably got it all wrong compared to the way that people are supposed to go about it, but we we’re from the DIY punk scene in London and didn't know anything about the music industry.
We only knew about playing local shows, sometimes we worked with other bands, self-released our own music or worked with DIY labels, so it took a while for us to actually get beyond our own scene and for people to take us seriously and recognise what we had to offer.
AG. I'm a great believer in the DIY ethic. In the 80s I started my own football fanzine and that was one of the things that I keyed into from the original punk scene - bands like the Buzzcocks, creating their own record label, as well as making their own music. That notion of independence is perhaps as strong as ever now in the music business.
SP: Oh, definitely, and it has to be because there's going to be a very, very small contingent of people that will be sellable, that are marketable - able bodied, cis white males - and it's not going to be able to have space for anyone that is different.
If you don't fit into the rules and structures of who is a marketable artist, you have to go your own route and find out ways to make it for yourself, because no one's going to bring you to the stage, no one's gonna do it for you.
AG: I suppose that makes life tougher in one way for you, but I think there’s a great virtue to it. You have to tough it out. Maybe it doesn't make it financially easy, but you do find your own path, don't you? There isn't a price, really, that you can put on that.
SP: Oh, definitely. People will say, “Oh, you were around for five years until you had your first album”, and now we've been around for nearly a decade. But I wouldn't really go about it any other way, because I feel like we've learned so much more than some of these super fresh new bands, that are played on a few shows and are instantly being put out there to the world.
I feel like when we step on stage, we feel very confident in what we do. We know our sound, we know who we are, and we’re not really willing to bend or break that for anyone else. And I think that’s the best way of doing it. To me, it's just always going to be a part of who we are and part of how we see punk.
AG: You live now in Birmingham and grew up in Wolverhampton but had a spell in between in London. How important is it to you to back home in the West Midlands?
SP: Like a lot of creatives - or just a lot of people – in their mid-30s, it just became so expensive and untenable to live in London. I was just paying all my money towards rent and paying bills, and you feel like your living space is getting smaller and smaller and smaller, as you have to keep moving around in London. So the idea was to move to Birmingham and to get my own flat, and, and just live by myself and have a bit more of a an adult life, rather than the kind of life I was living in London.
So it’s partly convenience, but also I think I wanted to come back home and be close to my family and be closer to who I grew up being and who I was here, because I think the identity of being a Midlander growing up in these cities is very different to living in London.
And it does feel like a home now to me, and it’s really important to have a home because it’s quite hard for people my age to actually have somewhere that's stable, and that you feel like you're not going to be turfed out of within six months.
AG: Amongst my (mostly) white mates, we talk about how how proud we are of the fact that Birmingham and the West Midlands generally is a very multicultural area. We draw strength and inspiration from that. Our perception is that Birmingham's embrace of multiculturalism is warmer and deeper than it is in other parts of the country. But we're (mostly) white people. Are we kidding ourselves?
SP: You're right, I think Birmingham does have to be celebrated for its multiculturalism. And I also think that's kind of why they're even gets a bit of forgotten as a second city because it is so multicultural. And it's not the British ideal of the second city that people want it to be. Especially because it does closely resemble London in its demographics.
But speaking to people that have lived here for a long time, I think it does feel like sometimes there is a bit of a separation between the white community and the South Asian community and the black community as well. I guess that's an ongoing process and a long process, so there’s still work that needs to be done. So as much as we can pat ourselves on the back for certain things, there's still more that can be done to make it a fully unified city, because we deserve to learn from each other and to celebrate each other as much as we can.
AG: You created the Decolonise festival in London which is non-profit festival for punks of colour. Tell us a bit more about it?
SP: Decolonise came about as an idea because we thought that considering England's history and British music history, it’s a bit odd that we don't have a festival that actually celebrates the history of people of colour in alternative music scenes. So a group of us got together and formed a non-hierarchical collective for the first Decolonise festival in 2017.
The idea is that we're celebrating the history of people of colour in the punk scenes, alternative scenes, we're putting on bands that are around today, bringing a lot of politics and activism and talking about things that go on today. And the hope is that anyone that comes to the festival will then go home, and either want to start a band or want to start some community activism in their area.
So it's about having that radical approach to music and to creativity and culture.
It's not just like ‘punk is anger’ and then leave it at that. It's about ‘punk is radical activism’ and ‘how can music change the world’?
AG: I sense your lyrics are always personal. I’ve played your single ‘Happier Still’ a lot. Is that about depression?
SP: My lyrics are always filtered through me because I'm writing them, but they're not always 100% personal. Sometimes I don't really know what they're about until a year or two later, so going through them and answering questions on them, I’m usually only uncovering things at the same time as the interviewer.
But yeah, it's a song about depression, but I don't find it's a depressing or sad song. I think it's a funny song in terms of you're aware that there's something wrong, you're aware that you need to do something about it, but you don't have enough time or space, so it's just like, you’re willing yourself to be better, to feel happier for that day or whatever. It's the other side almost, isn't it? You know, there is that defiance about it? You know, ‘I'll get this done’.
This is an edited version of my interview with Stephanie at Brum Radio - you can hear the full version via my show page