Why are the gender rules of rock and pop still so reactionary?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/05/gender-rock-pop-festival-fleetwood-mac

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“Don’t ask me why I obsessively look to rock’n’roll bands for some kind of model for a better society,” wrote the legendary US writer Lester Bangs in 1977. “I guess it’s just that I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for prophecy have been seeking its fulfilment ever since.”

Some might sneer at his naive romanticism, but anyone with a deep love of popular music should know roughly what he meant. Moreover, with the festival season looming, opportunities to experience one of the same epiphanies abound. The drill is simple: you stand in a field, your mystical leanings perhaps enhanced by a taste of this or that, and watch talented human beings do their thing on stage in the most spectacular way imaginable. If everything coheres, the mixture of lights, music and mass transcendence will do its work, and deliver something often impossible to explain but dizzyingly powerful: righteous if you’re lucky; utopian à la Bangs if it’s a really good night.

When you wake up in your tent the next morning, however, a troubling thought might occur. Sixty-ish years into the music’s history, why are the gender rules of rock and pop still so hopelessly reactionary? By and large, men still have a monopoly on bands, and most festival headline slots: it is sobering to reflect that among the 11 groups and solo acts topping the bills this year at Glastonbury, T in the Park, Reading/Leeds and the V festivals, there is not a single woman. One hesitates to piously sound off about such things when everyone’s having such a good time, but now we are well into the 21st century, that’s amazing, isn’t it?

Across music as a whole, women are still largely confined to the roles of either flamboyant solo performers or so-called singer-songwriters, who tend to appear further down running orders. Last year, all-male bands and male solo artists accounted for nearly 70% of major festival bookings, and the only female artist to headline a big UK festival was Lily Allen at Latitude – something that only happened because the all-male Two Door Cinema Club pulled out. At Glastonbury, to be fair, the male/female balance is carefully monitored, and the organisers insist that “having women at the top of the bill is very important to us”. In that sense, maybe an unnecessary modesty is to blame for this year’s positioning of Florence Welch, AKA Florence and the Machine – whose music, whether you like it or not, is of the requisite hulking dimensions, with a stage show to match.

This year, she has a Glasto slot immediately below the all-male Foo Fighters, and their rock ordinaire. “It would be wonderful to headline, but also I don’t know how I’d be dealing with that right now,” Welch explained. Can you imagine any male musicians whose first album had sold more than 3m copies saying anything similar?

Next Sunday, by contrast, a group will headline the last night of the Isle of Wight festival after nine months spent touring American and European arenas, and provide a glimpse of something different. After 17 years as an on-off quartet, Fleetwood Mac have assembled all five members of their most successful line-up and come back to remind us that they are by far the most successful mixed-gender rock band in history, though surprisingly few people have ever thought to follow their example.

The fact that their internal romantic entanglements made their most successful period such an emotional hell might serve as a cautionary tale. Then again, the incredible, fantastically honest music that came out of it all speaks for itself. Rock and pop tend to scrape perfection when they deal with love and relationships; in Fleetwood Mac’s greatest work, you hear those subjects explored with such power precisely because both male and female views are on show.

'I think every band should have a girl in it, because it’s always going to make for cooler stuff going on'

Lindsey Buckingham (a man, just to make that clear) is a kinetic stage presence and gifted guitar player, but performing alongside two women is part of what makes him very different from the standard macho guitar hero. Equally, for all that Stevie Nicks is all flowing tresses and robes and hippie ethereality, the fact that she commands the stage alongside three men confirms her sense of unimpeachable strength. Stage right is the newly returned singer and keyboard player Christine McVie, a brilliant and very understated songwriter, whose career history goes back to the time she spent as an anomalous member of the English blues-rock band Chicken Shack. (“There weren’t many women in bands then – I was always the only girl,” she recently told Mojo magazine, perhaps mistakenly using the past tense.) The two other men in the group – drummer Mick Fleetwood and the bassist, McVie’s former husband John – are at the back: give or take the former’s slightly painful nightly drum solo, a case study in the musical restraint that has always left space for the band’s front rank to work their magic.

I could listen to Rumours (1977) and the jaw-dropping Tusk (1979) all day: in fact, post-election, that’s exactly what I have been doing. The band’s average age is 67.8; there are rumblings that this tour may mark the start of the end.

“I think every band should have a girl in it, because it’s always going to make for cooler stuff going on than if it’s just a bunch of guys,” says Nicks. So, two questions: why have so few people ever seized on their example? And in the midst of a musical landscape so dominated by boring big gorillas, isn’t it time a few more modern musicians belatedly did?