Bitch, Please: Ladies Tea
No One Spilled Any Tea
When I first saw the photograph, it made me ridiculously happy.
I can’t even put my finger on why, but I know I wanted to know everything about this moment in time, I had a million questions, none of which would get any answers. Maybe my sheer joy was looking at what rebellion looks like, acknowledging that it could be just women sitting in a room, sharing a drink, knowing they’d changed so much for music and for women.
These six absolute legends: Debbie Harry, Viv Albertine, Siouxsie Sioux, Chrissie Hynde, Poly Styrene, and Pauline Black, sitting side by side in a London hotel room. Drinking tea… Somehow no one, in interview history, asked these women to share more about this significant moment. Or if they did get asked questions, was the answer always, “It was fine.” That doesn’t seem possible.
These weren’t just women in bands. These were women who rewired a movement that supposedly belonged to angry Guys with guitars.
For a moment, these incredibly talented women were all in the same room, I want the footnotes. Someone had the good fortune to take pictures, that’s all I can find out, the photographer’s name. I’m frustrated.
It’s not teen angst unless it’s from the Aunis region in France, when you’re fifty, it’s sparkling frustration.
I was around sixteen when I found Siouxsie. Or maybe she found me.
Dark hair, dark eyes, a voice that sounded like it came from some deeper atmospheric layer of the earth. I loved all of it, the mystery, the authority, the way she radiated witchy confidence in her dark weirdness. I needed that example.
You can feel weird and dark and alone so easily as a teenager, but when light comes in through the cracks like that, you feel it.
I blasted her voice through the pathetic speakers of my 1975 VW Bug and sang along like I was somehow a part of it.
Pauline Black occupied the other end of the spectrum for me. Her voice was sunshine. Playful but razor sharp, woven perfectly through the music. The kind of sound lifts you up and gets you dancing in your seat. The more I learned about her, the more intensely she became a beacon of strength, feminism, and anti-racism; just an outspoken and brilliant human. The Selector's music was the soundtrack to days out with friends, talking too much about too many things.
Everyone knew Heart of Glass. Everyone knew Blondie meant Debbie Harry.
And somewhere in my early rummaging through record crates, back when record stores were still plentiful, I grabbed the first Pretenders album and wore the grooves out.
Then came the punk and sass of X-Ray Spex and The Slits. Poly Styrene with that voice that sounded like no one else on earth, brightly colored outfits like an angry Easter egg screaming about identity. Viv Albertine kicked the doors off and helped change what punk, and guitar playing itself, could look and sound like. She rejected traditional rock virtuosity in favor of jagged, experimental rhythms that fused punk with reggae, dub, and raw improvisation.
Sure, I can find interviews with all of them.
I can tell you about parts of their lives that made headlines and probably a few parts they wish hadn’t.
But for all the cultural gravity of that photograph, almost nothing exists about the moment itself. One very lucky photographer, Michael Putland, just happened to be in the right London hotel, but I can’t tell you one iota about what actually happened in that room that day. Who talked the most. Who was awkward or funny. Who was shy. Who lit the first cigarette. Nothing.
Six women who helped reshape punk, sitting together in the same room, I have so many questions…
I know this, Debbie Harry invited them. She later said, “I really wanted to get together with all the punk females for an afternoon of celebration. It’s a great memory.” Then she laughed and added that if she tried to recreate it today, it wouldn’t fit in a hotel room. “I would need a hall.” She’s not wrong.
These pioneering women paved the way; most are still performing, and they are bad bitches. I found some writing from Marcey Rizzetta, who’s take on the newest phase of bitchdom explores the evolution from Basic Bitch to Bad Bitch. Per Rizzetta’s definition, that’s a woman who knows exactly who she is and refuses to negotiate that fact. A woman who isn’t performing for approval, softening herself for others’ comfort, or shrinking to make the room easier for anyone else. It’s everything that inspires me when I look at the photo: women being authentically themselves. You can find wonderful interviews with each of these musical icons; they’re smart and savvy and learning reading about, even if I never found out how this tea went. May there be a future Ladies Tea, and for the love of punk history, may we know more about it!
Bitch, Please is an ongoing series that is NOT just about being called a bitch. It is a cultural analysis explored through personal narratives.
