Girls On Top

This is the second Zrazy interview we ve run in Hot Press this year. And if that seems like favouritism, we ve no apologies to make for it. Why should we? Since the release of their new album, Give It All Up nearly a month ago, not one national Irish newspaper or magazine has had the guts to interview the duo and only Hot Press, In Dublin and The Dublin Event Guide have given column inches over to a review of the album.
Likewise, apart from a single appearance on the children's programme, Hulabaloo, Zrazy have not been asked to appear on RTE television and their album is receiving little, or no, airplay. Anyone who listens, without prejudice, to Give It All Up will have to conclude that such blatant lack of media support has nothing to do with the music, which easily stands alongside the best currently being produced on these shores. This, after all, is the duo that the respected London listings magazine City Limits once hailed as currently being tipped as the next Irish success story . Besides I stand over my own statement that their single I m In Love With Mother Nature and the album Give It All Up are two of the most important, and subversive, records ever released in Ireland. Therefore, one can only deduce that the problem with Zrazy, for many people, is their declared lesbianism and, perhaps, their politics in general.
But before Maria Walsh, Carole Nelson and I honed in on the contentious issue of the media response to their music, we decided to explore together the social outlets for lesbians in the party-time lead up to Christmas, particularly in Dublin, where both are based. Our evening started in the recently massively revamped The George Bar and Bistro, St George s Street, Dublin 2 . . .

As you can see from looking around here, the gay scene is pretty much male dominated, says Maria. Basically, because males have more money, as in both the punters and in terms of having the finance needed to own a bar like this. Cyril, and his partner, who own The George, are years on the scene and the extension of this place coincided with the change in legislation in relation to homosexuality during the summer. Suddenly there was The George and FiFi s across the road in Dame Court and Shaft night-club and the whole gay scene exploded but it s only now that women are starting to come in here.
Maria explains that what she calls the dyke scene in Dublin basically fell apart, in terms of a focal point, after J. J. Smyth s in Aungier Street stopped running its lesbian night.
Apparently what happened was that Sunday World came in to write about the disco and as soon as that article was published there was hassle, as in car windows being smashed outside the pub. That was about two years ago, she explains.
And that kind of response is probably rooted in the fact that there is a double-edged sword involved when it comes to female gays situation. Gay men are vilified but anti-lesbianism can also take on a dimension of misogyny compounded by the thought that these women don t want men and certainly, at times, choose not to socialise with them at all. That attracts another layer of contempt, the idea as you said in the review of your album, that lesbians are saying let the men go fuck themselves which many are.
This dismissive attitude hits at the centre of male power in a patriarchal society, telling men, you re not as necessary as you think. Indeed, you re not necessary at all. That obviously galls a lot of men, who sometimes resort to violence to express their frustration as in smashing windows of cars parked outside lesbian discos. Because of that, after two nights of violence, J. J. s closed the disco, after it had been run there for ten years. And The Sunday World took no responsibility for that at all.
Obviously, if Carole and Maria are cruising they ve more opportunities to connect with potential lovers in a bar that isn t three-quarters full with males, gay or otherwise. Is that a core factor in why they d prefer to have a lesbians only bar?
We don t really need to cruise in these situations, says Maria, laughing. When we play live on stage the world is our lobster to quote Racquel, from Coronation Street! In situations like that there are lots of women there who are available. Especially when we play in places like Berlin, Vienna and London, there are gorgeous women in great abundance! But for lesbian women here, who do want to cruise places like The Trinity, in Pearse St., have taken over to a degree, from J. J. s.
Carole, as a lesbian born in England and who writes about the subject of relocation in the song Inside The Garden , from Give It All Up, suggests that gays coming to visit or live in Dublin, might have difficulty getting information on the gay scene.
You can, of course, pick up a copy of Gay Community News. If you can find one that easily, but it would help if magazines like Hot Press had a gay listings guide, she says. Though, obviously a problem in that might be that certain pubs and clubs don t want to be seen exclusively as gay venues, or whatever.
Maria also believes that certain people would not want specific areas of Dublin to be seen as gay areas.
That s what happened with the Temple Bar area, she says. The gay scene was there first, focused around the Hirschfield Centre, and it was seen as the focus of alternative Dublin. The Dublin Resource Centre also was like a queer alternative venue but now there is obviously no room for gays there as the Hirschfield Centre is being squeezed out, by Temple Bar Properties, or so I hear. Gay Community News is based there now and they re trying desperately to re-open the Centre but are apparently, being prevented from doing so. But then that can also happen to specific venues and clubs when straights start seeing them as a cool place to be which is something that has started happening recently in Shaft. And when proprietors see there is more money to be made in catering for straight customers.

Dublin is one thing. But what is Zrazy s experience in an outside-Dublin context, in terms of venues in which they play their music and the gay scene in places like Cork, Galway, Belfast etc.?
We mostly play the standard music venues around the country and dykes do tend to come out of the woodwork to hear us, says Maria. But there can be hazards involved in that, because, obviously not only dykes attend the gigs. Like when we did something from the album, like 6794700 , in Galway recently and prefaced it with the note that s on the album sleeve, saying this is the number for non-directive pregnancy counselling in the Republic of Ireland etc., we noticed people beginning to leave in droves. The same night we did Cool To Be Queer and although from the stage we didn t notice what nearly happened our two girlfriends were in the audience and they told us later. It seems that during the song this guy picked up his pint and was about to launch it at the stage, when my girlfriend swung around to him and said don t you even think of it and that stopped him in his tracks. He put the pint down and left.
Apart from that you also get nights, like where we did Cool To Be Queer in a straight club in Belfast and it seemed to become a great anthem for everyone there and we came off the stage later, just floating. That s the kind of night that more than compensates for all the other crap. And in places like Cork and Galway there is a strong, healthy, alternative gay scene.
Maria points out that, as with many alternative bands, the lack of venues throughout Ireland is a major problem. Add this to the lack of media support for their music and what hopes have they got for shifting units in terms of their album?
Not much, says Carole. But, really, because of all this we re not pitching the album at Ireland as such. Our major hopes would be focused on Europe and America. In contrast with the experiences we ve just described, in relation to gigs in Ireland, we had a brilliant time when we played in America recently. We played six gigs, five nights in succession in New York and even had straights coming over to us after gigs wildly enthusing about us and wanting to buy the album and so on. It was great. And we sold out whatever albums we had, in that way, in America.
That said, Maria suggests that Zrazy s blend of Pagan soul, funk and Celtic music is probably better appreciated in Europe, particularly in a post-Brecht/Weill Berlin-style setting.
Apart from the women, that s why I love playing there, she says, laughing. It s more avant-garde there, less enslaved by the kind of Anglo-American rock/pop culture that now dominates Ireland as well. That s part of the problem for us here at home too our music is eclectic.
Carole cuts across. Another problem here is that we now have the lesbian label, which is not something we regret at all, in terms of having originally decided to come out, but it does mean that to many people our music is reduced down to that one single factor. In Europe, and America, our lesbianism is just a facet of our overall musical identity and audiences accept that because they tend to be just a little bit more sophisticated when it comes to taking the broader view.
We want to be identified as, but not reduced to just being lesbian. That said, the younger audience for dance music here in Ireland is much the same in that they don t really give a damn about your sexuality as long as the music is good. Our sexuality is obviously central to us, but it s not the only factor in the music. Far from it. Fundamentally, as far as I m concerned, what we do is play great gigs and I don t even think that we re doing that solely for gay audiences. We re doing it, first and foremost, because we love to play music. And live that s what comes across and makes our music a celebration of not just sexuality, lesbian or otherwise. There is a wildness in it that strikes some people as peculiarly Irish, in ways.

Nonetheless, many tracks on Give It All Up do celebrate a sexuality that is specifically lesbian, including the title song, says Maria having gently scolded me for my negative comments about the song, when I reviewed the album.
You so unfairly dismissed that song but then you re not perfect, just as we re not so we can t expect you to pick up on every little detail about the album, she says. You said the song was lacklustre yet to us what s more important is that it s teeming with lust! Why don t you tell Joe what the song is about, Carole?
It s about sex, basically, says Carole. It s about hot sex, good sex, saying to your lover surrender, give it all over to me . The last time we talked to Hot Press some men obviously were offended when we said a man should know what it feels like to, as Madonna said, have another man s tongue slide into his mouth. Or to be fucked, to be penetrated, to receive and that that s what this song is about, though it s addressed to a woman open up and receive what I have to offer you, don t hold back anything.
Carole pauses, and looks at Maria. Go on, Maria coaxes her. I m interested in hearing this too.
Well, what the song is also about is butch-fem , which is a contentious issue in lesbianism right, now, says Carole. It s very much a song sung by a butch who knows that her lover is a hot, sexy thing and that you can t be restraining her by putting on the wedding ring. Yet at the same time there is that element of possessiveness which makes her say you can sleep with anyone you want but I am the only one that you can really give yourself up to, now do it. A butch lesbian is a very sexually self-confident person and will assume that position of power with a lover. But in a post-feminist age, the idea that one might be passive and the other active is frowned upon. That is now seen as copying heterosexual patterns in a patriarchal society, and that kind of role playing is now seen as a thing of the past. But I see the butch-fem thing re-emerging as a more erotic style of being.
So is Carole talking about herself in this context and was the song originally written to Maria, when she was her lover?
It is me, sometimes, yes, says Carole, laughing seductively. But songs like She s Mine and When You Cry are probably more directed to Maria, in that sense. The lyrics of She s Mine related to a time we both had other affairs going on at the same time. So I saw Maria in a way that I knew there was so much love to go around and said let s not get hung up on this, explore, release it all but then suddenly there arose this feeling of she s mine , which is the possessive thing again.
And When You Cry was written pre-out, she adds, so it s much more coded, in that you can t exactly tell what the relationship is all about, or that I am talking about Maria specifically. Yet that s probably the most intimate and personal song on the album, in ways. It was about that time that occurs in all relationships, when sex becomes problematic but you realise, when a person reveals their vulnerability, that the love is still there, as intense as ever.
Maria interjects, And I do think sex as a problem is a dominant factor in more relationships that people ever reveal, irrespective of their sexual preference. It happens when people live together, in any context. Eventually the sex doesn t happen so often and the challenge is, how do you keep it going? One mistake we all make is trying to pretend it can ever be the same as it was when lovers first met. That mad, crazed phase of passion, when you want to get to know a new lover inside out and can t live without touching, can t be recaptured.
So we have to devise new ways of keeping sexual interest alive and that isn t always easy. In fact it s one of the greatest challenges facing couples. And people don t admit it.
I remember trying to talk to friends about it and it was like everyone refused to admit that this had ever happened to them. Everyone had to pretend their sex lives were still perfect, which is an impossible burden to live up to. People should be more honest about all of this. But they re not and instead they get their sexual kicks from taking other lovers or reading books, watching videos, whatever.

One video such lovers will not be allowed to watch on RTE, however, is the one Zrazy made for I m In Love With Mother Nature . By this stage, we ve moved from The George to FiFi s night club where, upstairs, the wine is reasonably priced and to one side of us sit a lesbian couple wrapped in an endlessly demonstrative embrace while nearby a half dozen guys gleefully croon that gay anthem, Secret Love along with the background music. Downstairs the disco is playing loud, pumping aggressive music.
We made the video for the single I m In Love With Mother Nature then discovered that Beatbox wouldn t show it, Maria recalls. The first time is seems they had a meeting about whether to show it or not and we got word back that the decision was no, they shouldn t be shown, because they are lesbians. Then I was in contact with the director of the programme and we did a little edit in the video, though we still left the scene of Carole and I kissing, in a very muted way. But because we preferred for the video to be seen, we shortened the kissing scene yet they still got back to us and said, no, it can t, because of that scene.
so I said that doesn t make sense, because you ve shown the Suede video, with two guys kissing . And he said they re successful at the moment and that was his answer! So, obviously boys can be boys in whatever context they want but women kissing is too subversive by far. It s a farce, really. But it all proves to me that it must be our lesbianism, more than anything else, that has led to this form of media marginalisation.
Carole insists that she fully understands why some people would be uncomfortable with even the concept of lesbian love and accepts that Zrazy s path in Irish pop culture is probably made all the more difficult because they are setting a precedent as openly-lesbian artists, rather than following where someone else has led before.
But all it takes is for some brave TV directors, and DJs, promoters, agents, to say ` what does it matter if they are lesbian, let s see what they can deliver, musically? And that is all we re asking for. You ve met us and know we re absolutely charming individuals, right? (laughs). But to others, we re some strange, nameless, subversive force, something they d rather avoid dealing with in any way, rather than confront. And the worst aspect is that we are at the losing end of all this and what suffers most is our music, because it doesn t get the exposure we believe it deserves.
Reflecting on their lack of exposure on programmes like The Late, Late Show and Kenny Live, Zrazy see an irony in the fact that they were one of the first groups filmed for a recent French film documentary on Irish music.
Last summer they did a three hour documentary on the future of Ireland and on alternative Ireland and we were really seen to embody that, to a degree, she says. That was shown in France last September and it really strikes me as strange that French television would sooner feature us than Irish television. But then we probably do mean RTE in particular in this context, because there has been interest shown by UTV and by BBC Northern Ireland, which, again, is ironic.
Zrazy also reveal that, as a true voice of alternative Ireland, they got tired waiting for the offer of a record deal and financed Give It All Up themselves.
And the great thing was that, out of necessity, we did the album for recording costs that were less than #2,000, she says. We recorded I m In Love With Mother Nature , for example, for #45! But then we were on the dole. Yet at the beginning of 1993 we decided fuck this, money isn t just going to fall from heaven so let s do it ourselves . Someone we know financed the thing and, fortunately, sales in America have already covered the initial recording costs so now we re into profit. We also heard yesterday, that despite the lack of exposure in Ireland most record shops have already sold out their initial order, though we don t know exactly how many copies that is.
Irrespective of whether or not they do get media support in Ireland, Zrazy are already planning their next album. Indeed, Carole speaks enthusiastically about one day doing a hardcore dance album. By the time we hit the Shaft nightclub she s eager to show me how much dance music means to her. Needless to say the interview finally dissolves in mutual sweat on the dance floor as this sensuous, and sometimes butch lesbian decides enough talk, let s loose our inhibitions.
Maria joins us later and that s when the fun really begins. And it included an imaginative use of ice cubes. But that s another story.