Words by Angus Rogers
Photography by Maisy Banks
I’m walking in the door and a fissure closes behind me and I’m sewn in, I’m a thorn absorbed by skin, Tavern burrower, strips of fabric like gore everywhere, sawdust, soil, more like timesgone Romanian market town than house-show crumbage, Viv Albertine passes by, a halo of hawkeyed grinning women orbiting at their ease, someone’s hanging off the smokers’ doorframe in a scrap of sackcloth, spitting into the drain, I see my friends and people I don’t know. Now I think I don’t know any of them, not as they appear tonight, all consumptive-eyed and lining the walls like guerrillas in the backroom committee, very together, tonight’s revolution blistering and passing up arms already.
Scarlett’s here; it’s Scarlett Woolfe’s night, she’s nurtured A Woman Becomes A Wolf… at the George this last year but this, this one seems like a culmination, and though it’s her brainchild tonight clearly belongs to all attendants. Everyone and their mothers, it transpires. I hammer myself into a fraction of chair near the back of the pub, near the expanding/contracting rift that serves as focal point around the stagefront, spilling onto the floor in a slash of light and rough symbols.
Sienna Bordello rises from the pool of muck and pulls the poetry from her gut like rope and in periphery dancers adjust their rags and contort. One of those gawblessed nights where equipment is whatever, who cares if the mic doesn’t work, stand and shout or be handed any number of replacements up through the hive. Emily Izen Row haunts, timeless-voiced, a different point of light and a pitch-shift in the hush the lone nod to a new performance, singers, poets, dancers morphing out of the din under the low hot lights. It’s fucking rammo in the main room, it’s Bruegel’s Fall of the Rebel Angels. Daniel in the lion’s den…? Nay. Ever sat round a heaving campfire entertaining a well-balanced ketamine-mushroom nuance? AKA, headbowed in some glittering high court of imps and skinshifters? It’s like that but with both eyes open and a heartrending gong of community, of subterfuge too.
Viv takes a seat at the edge of the stage and the place pulses around her. Weaving In Purgatory in conversation. Woolfe, Hannah Mason, Antonia Colletti pass the microphone, asking questions of Albertine who asks questions of them, everybody has time, nobody need shush the audience who drip silent and welling with glee from the rafters around the holy union. A long conversation, the hardwon lives of working class women artists, the behemoth of a hateful music industry and the anger, assault, dismissal and violence it reserves for them, the rise against, a mother’s just deserves. Staying in and going out. Making it, making it, making it now, for now, wolves hate legacy, wolves eat posterity. Existence is legacy.
Weaving In Purgatory hammering on the big bass drum like sun on a prairie. A room up on its feet now. People throwing themselves into the dirtstrewn zone. Primal stomp. A hydra-head of the new witchfever that hauls itself out of England, gawdamn hallelujah. Hard to imagine the ambulances and scooter-borne pizzas hurtling through Shadwell outside these walls. A world in and of itself, spun from the will to do so, the need. Fearsome love, read on everyone’s faces.
Misty Miller’s guitar softens the churning din and the tavern realigns itself to her own folk
tradition, the voice carrying unheeded to the high back corner where I now balance, fat crow on a ledge. Smoke and haze, slow silent movement of bodies in and out of the spell. Soon Nina Winder-Lind’s band ascends stately to the podium and chimes out the new ancient sound, voices like animals, eagles, lambs, exultant or strangled, on the floor another dancer shudders in the good filth, shoulderblades and pelvic bones like rolling hackles moving impossibly about the stone circle, becoming the promised wolf - how long’s this night been going on? Seven hours? How many performers? Fourscore and seven? Fuck knows. It feels somehow like only one. Don’t remember blowing out into the night or catching the train. Must’ve spirited out the door and the fissure closed again behind me, thorn spat out by the skin.
Full photo gallery:
Full list of performers -
Viv Albertine
Rose From The Dead
Miranda Gray-Aragoneses
Sienna Bordello
Emily Izen Row
Carys Maloney
Weaving in Purgatory
Aimeé Ruhinda
Tanya White
Misty Miller
Nina Winder-Lind
Hanna Baker Darch
Ella Raphael
Rosie Pike
Ruby Caddick-Lawrence
Jessica Cogan
The next A Woman Becomes A Wolf When She Learns How To Scream will be held at the George Tavern on 16th February 2025 and will feature Harmony Rose-Bremner, Asena Nour, Phoenix Yemi, Ayesha, Kelsey Taylor, Aimeé Ruhinda, Esme Wales, Sally Hernandez, Clare Elliot, Lillith Freeman, Ruby Caddick Lawrence, Emily Izen Row, Angel Maze, Antonia Colletti, Jaqueline Lipman, Hannah Mason, Carys Maloney, Jessica Cogan & Mahala Roberts.
Tickets available here
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