It’s a greyish Saturday afternoon in late August, and alongside other street party attenders, I’m watching two flamboyantly dressed women, one clutching a flute, backed by three male musicians while they shout out the lyrics to their new song, Kiddy Ska Party.
“I told you about my stitches / I told you about my stitches / Stop talking about my stitches / Stop talking about my stitches,” one is yelling. In the front, her almost-two-year-old daughter gestures towards her while an audience of adults, from old blokes with beers to young parents with prams, look alternately elated and amused. Somewhere near the jerk chicken stall my son runs up and down, having never played on a street without cars before. The scene is one of beautiful, eccentric mayhem.
This is postpartum punk, the ethos behind the band Pushy Pushy Pushy, “two fresh mothers and three sound candies”, on what they hope is a journey towards the Pyramid stage. Lead singers Ania Poullain-Majchrzak and Florence Devereux, who play alongside John on drums, Andrew on guitar and George on bass, were making music before they had children, but it was motherhood that liberated them creatively.
I spoke to the duo in a pub local to us. “I don’t want to swear,” Devereux grins a bit sheepishly, as though there are kids listening, “but you give less of a fuck, in a way. When you become a mum, your tolerance for caring becomes a lot less. So it kind of unleashed us.”
Considering all the screaming, bodily fluids and late nights, it’s ironic that punk and motherhood aren’t exactly known to go hand in hand (though Nico and Siouxsie and the Banshees wrote the occasional song about it, and Patti Smith collaborated with her daughter). But generally, as in the field of visual art, women with children have historically struggled to make space for themselves and to be taken seriously – despite the fact that every single human life on the planet is born of a mother, so it’s hardly the artistic niche it’s made out to be. Pushy Pushy Pushy have made it a personal mission to carve out space for mothers in the music industry to subvert this inequality.
Poullain-Majchrzak says that she used to censor herself, but after having a child she felt more free “to take the lid off and let it out”. I know that feeling well. There have been times since becoming a parent where I have wanted to go into the kitchen and scream. So why not scream into a microphone? The loss of identity, time, sleep, social life can make you feel rageful, certainly – but it can also make you feel as though you’re bursting with more creativity than you’ve ever possessed before.
“After giving birth, there’s that sense of desperation, in a way, around the limited time you have to express yourself,” says Devereux (a pertinent lyric: “I’m in a prison of my own making / Gave birth to my girl when I was shaking”). “That scarcity of time means that you cherish it even more. It focused our minds, it focused our energy,” Poullain-Majchrzak chips in. “You are desperately trying to save yourself, because you are under the pile of nappies.”
In refusing to buy into a picture-perfect vision of motherhood, Pushy Pushy Pushy are the antithesis of the tradwife movement and its fixation on home- and baby-making. I first saw them play a year ago, at another local street party, and though it felt cathartic, it was also huge fun. Their stage presence owes a lot to performance art: at a gig earlier this year, the band put together a Punk Mother Chaos Choir which they assembled by putting posters outside local stay-and-plays (I cannot tell you how much I love this, and how much seeing such a flyer would have felt like a life raft alongside all the notices for weaning workshops and breastfeeding groups).
“We had people who had children, who didn’t have children, who had different genders,” says Devereux. “Anyone who feels connected to that kind of, yeah, the primal energy of birthing.” It was a powerful moment being joined on stage. “They just basically … there was no rhyme or reason. They were just screaming and hitting the different instruments, as I remember. It was just chaos.” They now want to run regular jams with other mothers.
As a blueprint for maternal creativity, Pushy Pushy Pushy inspire. They recognise that you need art to survive, and that to pursue it requires two vital conditions: the time and space without children to write and record, and the entourage of friends and family who care collectively and free up that time. It should be comforting to any mother with art ambitions who feels she is treading a tightrope between care and self-expression. They dream of one day playing the Acropolis (“the day I hit menopausis”, according to their song Ciao Darwin), but their more immediate plan is to design a child-friendly tour bus. Will it one day take them to Glastonbury? They are certainly pushy enough to get there.
What’s working
I am enjoying Helen Charman’s vital, meticulously researched Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood, which as well as telling the stories of the mothers fighting for change over the past 50 years in the UK and Ireland makes a radical case for liberated, collective mothering. I have a feeling it might end up being to our generation what Of Woman Born was to the women of the 1970s.
What’s not
My boy isn’t sleeping well and hasn’t, really, all summer. I’m completely exhausted and trying to hold it all together, but at times it’s really, really hard. To all those sleep-deprived parents out there: I see you. Solidarity. I hope we all get some kip soon.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
