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One fateful night in 1983, backstage at London’s Lyceum Theatre, a life-long friendship was conceived via a chance encounter over a borrowed lipstick. Tracey Thorn was just breaking through in her music career, performing that night with her band, Marine Girls, but soon to become famous as one half of British duo, Everything but the Girl.
Lindy Morrison, the drummer for Australian indie band The Go-Betweens, was a decade further along the road, and appeared before Thorn as “self-belief in a mini dress”. The subsequent 37 years of friendship and survival of two talented women navigating the male-dominated music industry has now been captured in Thorn’s third book, My Rock ’n’ Roll Friend.
Having already established herself as a powerful literary memoirist with Bedsit Disco Queen (2014) and Another Planet (2020), Thorn now offers a unique opportunity to consider her career in counterpoint to another great musician – the woman who mentored, inspired and supported her as she became the artist we appreciate today.
As with the best of personal storytelling, this book positions Thorn and Morrison’s private experiences within a wider public context. Their friendship and careers are chronicled within the context of challenging external forces as they fight to be taken seriously in an unrelentingly chauvinistic music media.
Thorn’s laser-sharp prose is at its most fierce when documenting the shoddy treatment of Morrison by the music journalists who fixated upon everything about her other than her musical talent. NME reported that she “drinks, swears and threatens too much”, Sounds that she had “a reputation as the kind of woman who would come up to you at a disco and grab you by the throat” and Ireland’s own Hot Press described her as “some kind of perverse librarian”.
Male domain
This talented drummer was intimidating for simply existing in a male domain, for being articulate, confident and demanding respect. As Thorn suggests, “How disappointing, how frustrating, to find that the world of rock ’n’ roll operated along the same lines as a ‘60s private girls’ school in a small Australian country town. Your dad wanted you to be more demure, and so did the NME.”
This book is a radical act of correction that resurrects Morrison from reductive portrayals of the past while also spotlighting how much work remains to be done in relation to how women are still being reductively portrayed, silenced and oppressed by the media outlets obsessed with them. And yet this book is more than a rebalancing of the history books or intervention on an artist’s musical legacy – it stills feels like a radical act of feminism to have a book celebrating female friendship.
Thorn captures the ebb and flow of a relationship spanning almost four decades with grace, humour and style and handles Morrison’s reclamation with great tact and respect without ever veering into sycophancy or overt sentimentality. Thorn said to Morrison: “Making sense of the story is my problem . . . Be indiscreet. I can be discreet later.”
There is a strong sense that if Morrison had told the story of her life herself we’d be reading a very different book. Despite her voice appearing on the page in snatches of dialogue and letters, Thorn paints such an evocative picture of this powerhouse superwoman that the absence of her voice in a formal way feels profound.
Clunky exposition
Even a foreword or epilogue from Morrison would have been a powerful addition if it wasn’t possible to have these two great women artists directly in conversation with each other. Some chapters are written as a letter from Thorn to Morrison but the register doesn’t always chime. Exposition that feels clunky to relate between these intimates would often work better in the regular chapters of reportage. Compression of these letters to that of Thorn purely addressing Morrison in a more authentic expression of her feelings towards her, without the impulse to fill in the gaps for the reader, would have landed more successfully.
Thorn’s writing is littered with literary references that really speak to her deep understanding and knowledge of literature – extracts from Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood and many more sit alongside press clippings and quotes from a wide spectrum of thinkers and artists. When these frames of reference deepen our understanding through juxtaposition or particular insight, they offer a glorious texture. At other times, however, they feel an unnecessary crutch for Thorn that weaken what was already an impactful, engaging account of her own.
This book brings us one step closer to the great reckoning for the music industry that is surely coming. As Thorn says of the essential need for strong relationships between women, “female friendship isn’t a cosy thing, it’s a necessity”. The same could be said for this book. Read this and you will reconsider the way in which many women are still being portrayed in the media right now.
To all parents wanting to raise feminist daughters, I suggest you buy them a drumkit. For feminist sons, buy them this book.