Founded at Belfast’s Oh Yeah Music Centre in 2016 as a
spinoff of Ladies Rock Camp, Girls Rock is a summer music camp that gives girls
and non-binary youth aged 11-16 the opportunity to learn an instrument from
scratch, form their own bands, write their own songs and cut their teeth as
burgeoning rock stars. Weeks of coaching, merch-making workshops and Q&As
with the province’s leading women musicians lead up to the final showcase where
the new-fangled groups take to the stage to showcase their original material to
a live audience for the first time.
Girls Rock NI was the brainchild of Sister Ghost frontwoman
Shannon O’Neill back when she was a student. After hearing about a similar
Girls Rock Camp in Edinburgh, she spoke to Charlotte Dryden from the Oh Yeah
Centre and the Women’s Work Festival committee about setting up a chapter in
Northern Ireland.
“When I heard about what is was, it just blew my mind that
there was nothing like that here,” she explains. “It started off as a one-day
workshop where I brought my electric guitar, a bass, we borrowed a drum kit and
a couple of mics and people just showed up and tried out instruments for the
first time and just jammed together – the only parameter was that they
identified as female or non-binary. It just took off from there.
Our first ever rock camp that we did was a three-day one
around Easter 2018. That was a huge moment because it was the first time that
we were able to engage with girls. Prior to that, it had always been the Ladies
Rock! adult camps. The youngest was about nine, so that was really cool seeing
them get on stage. There was one girl doing death metal growls!” she laughs.
“At that age they’re fearless, they’re less scared to take up space.”
Far from only honing girls’ music skills, the camp has a
huge focus on self-esteem building. Shannon believes many campers come to Girls
Rock! at a crucial age where self-consciousness is starting to creep in and
that childhood pluckiness starts to waver.
“There’s something that happens when they hit puberty, from about 12-16, where they drop out of music class. There’s a confidence drop. That’s why at our last summer camp, we specifically engaged with 11-16 year-olds to focus on that. Instead of just being about music, we do stuff about wellbeing and positive body image and confidence building, communications skills, concepts like consent and having body hair. You get to meet these girls maybe the summer before they go to high school and start judging themselves - you can get them at that point before. So if that happens to them in the school or the world outside of camp, they can remember, ‘but at Girls Rock, I was taught that it’s okay to be myself’. Beyond music – writing badass songs and having stage presence - that’s the most important role that Girls Rock plays.”
On International Women’s Day last year, campers performed at Stormont and Belfast City Hall. For Shannon, the image of these young girls performing and taking up space in important public places is symbolic. Organised by the Green Party’s Clare Bailey, the girls performed a “raw but fun” version of ‘Rebel Girl’ by Bikini Kill and ‘Alternative Ulster’ on the steps of the government building. “It was very powerful to see these young women – and such a diverse group of them as well – on the steps of our government building and shouting out a song like ‘Rebel Girl’”.
Girls Rock School were fortunate to have their 2020 public showcases
before the onset of the pandemic in March. The shift to online workshops has
been an unexpectedly fruitful experience for campers and counsellors alike.
Thanks to an Arts Council grant, the school were able to host virtual open mic
nights over the summer and invite graduates of Girls Rock School back as
interns. ‘Wild and Free (Play It Loud!)’, an original GRS track written and
recorded entirely online by campers from across the UK and Ireland, is a
melodic grunge number and has even been picked up by radio stations in London. “It
did really well and it showed us that things can be done virtually,” Shannon
beams. “It helped the community to stay together but also grow – we’ve met new
people who found us through Instagram, it’s crazy things like this you wouldn’t
have thought about before.
We’re in our fifth year now and it’s been humbling to see
that there’s more of a presence of female-identified, non-binary and queer
musicians in the scene. In 2016 and prior to that – I started Sister Ghost in
2014 – I was in the only all-female band in NI [Vanilla Gloom] and it was
bizarre to perform in that scene. Even the all-Ireland scene, there was only us
and September Girls and maybe one other band.”
Shannon sees the success of Dublin all-woman quartet Pillow
Queens (including a slot on the Late Late Show in the US last month) and Derry
singer and radio presenter Gemma Bradley as an indicator of an evolving scene.
“That was one of the motivations for me when I learned about what Girls Rock
was. We needed that here, something needed to be done to make the scene more
diverse. That’s something GRS tries to address in some way. We try to engage
with the BAME youth and refugees and asylum seekers as well, marginalised
groups.”
Would the GRS NI founder herself have benefitted from
something like this when she was younger?
“I think about this all the time,” she sighs with a mixture
of pride at her creation and a twinge of sadness in her voice. “God, it would
have been so much better to have had that experience of learning things, like
it’s okay to have body hair, it’s okay to be bisexual or gay or whatever. Those
are the things that I struggled with as a teenager; if I’d have had an
intervention à la going to a Girls Rock Camp,
I wouldn’t have waited until 26 to come out. After camp ends, all the adults on
our team are like, I wish I had this when we were wee! It’s a universally
agreed thing.
In my experience growing up playing guitar, a formative
experience of being different because of my gender was at a camp at the Nerve
Centre in Derry. I remember being the only female guitarist in a room or fourteen
or fifteen guys – looking round the room it just kinda hit me, like fuck,
there’s not a lot of us doing this, why? It’s class at 28 to be able to look at
things now. It’s not like we weren’t there, it’s hidden history.”
Shannon grew up around music with the radio always on. “My
mammy would always be listening to Phil Collins-era Genesis, Fleetwood Mac, R.E.M.
Then my brothers had Nirvana’s Unplugged
in New York on CD and they would play that all the time, so my earliest kinda
‘cool’ song that I remember is ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, the David Bowie
cover. I remember trying to work it out on my brother’s acoustic guitar too.”
She may have been raised on a healthy diet of the classics,
but like any child of the noughties, we discuss the merits of Busted, Liberty X
and Let Go-era Avril Lavigne.
Shannon jokes that she got into music professionally as it
was the only GCSE she got an A* in, but it’s clear that music is much more of
an integral part of her identity than good grades. She kept up guitar-playing
and was always in bands with friends whilst studying film at uni, but something
didn’t feel right and she found herself longing to be in the music building.
Eventually, she switched to an HND in music at Belfast Met and went on to
finish her degree at Queen’s.
“[My first band] Vanilla Gloom were doing pretty well; we
supported ASIWYFA and toured Scotland when I was 19 or 20. Then I started
Sister Ghost – you just keep at it and cool things happen. I was in the first
band when I was 12 and now I’m 28 and I’m only just coming up now to possibly
putting out an album. For me, it’s not happened overnight. It’s is an obsession
to the point you can’t split it from your own identity. Songwriting is best way
for me to express myself, to get over trauma, express joy and take up space.
It’s like being high.”
In spite of, or perhaps because of the circumstances, the
past year has provided fertile creative ground for Shannon. She launched the
Sister Ghost podcast, tested her production chops working on friends’ projects,
released a GRS fundraising mixtape Samhain
and even breathed new life into a sewing machine inherited from her granny. Oh,
and there’s the small matter of having written up to twenty new songs.
“We do have songs for this release we’ve been working on,”
she shares. “If it takes until 2022, then I’m happy to wait because it’ll be
worth it.” Fans can expect some old favourites and some brand new tracks,
touching on the experiences of coming out and growing older in the liminal space
between being a teenager and an adult.
“There’s some lyrics on it that I wrote years ago and I’m
choosing to put on it now because I want it to capture that time period. But
there’s also a big ‘fuck you’ song to dickhead exes. We get all the fire and
passion of ‘Fake Friends Run This Country’, but not as politically pointed.
It’s more of a personal album.”
Shannon has been listening to a lot of Soccer Mommy and
Maximo Park recently. She flicks through her records as we chat. “Joni
Mitchell’s been a big influence over the last couple of years – I love her
album Hejira. I also love Kate Bush –
just these women who tell great stories through their songwriting. I think that
has fed into a lot of the newer Sister Ghost songs too, more of a maturity. I’m
being more experimental with concepts, even the point of view of who’s singing
the song. There’s a song that’s really influenced by the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I’m really
influenced by the books I read and films I watch. I like the idea of music, film
and books forming a trio that just feed off each other.”
Over the course of Sister Ghost’s career, ‘Backwards’
remains the song Shannon is proudest of. A brooding and distorted punk anthem,
the 2019 release sounds like it was taken straight out of the nineties.
“I wrote that after finishing a tour in 2017; I wrote and
recorded everything on a wee 8-track in a flat in Belfast and didn’t realise
the song for a full year because I knew it was good and I wanted to have it
done right,” she recounts. “We always love playing that one live too – I
remember a gig in London where people were singing it back by the time we got
to the third chorus – I was like, they’ve just heard this song, that’s cool!
I’d never had that experience before with another song. If not’s broken don’t
fix it, there’s nothing wrong with writing a good pop song like ‘Backwards’. It
good to keep changing it up and challenging yourself too, that’s the only way
you get better.”
Winning Best Live Act at the NI Music Prize last year has
been bittersweet. “That was gutting. We were all geared up for 2020 to be full
of shows. We were booked for shows in England and I was so excited. I want to
get out there and show why we won Best Live Act. It’s a strange poetry that we
won Best Live Act and then weren’t able to show off!” she laughs.
While she can’t be live on stage, Shannon is often live on
the radio. Less than an hour after our call, she is due to host her radio show
The Spooky Jukebox with The 343, playing vintage cuts from the sixties to the
nineties. “I am a nerd about music,” she gushes, “encyclopaedic sometimes!”
Last week’s show played tribute to country stars and unlikely COVID hero Dolly
Parton; she has total freedom on the airwaves, so anything from her friends’
music to her current playlist favourites is on the cards.
Shannon O’Neill has taken what has been an incredibly
difficult year for the creative industry in her stride. Through taking Girls
Rock workshops online, imparting her years of experience to those just starting
out and expanding the Sister Ghost catalogue, she is a force to be reckoned
with in the Northern music scene. “I try not to be too harsh, that’s the only
thing that’s ever stopped me. That’s why it’s taken me so long to get to a
point now, because for so many years I was waiting to hear other people’s opinions…
it’s something’s always stopped me, and it’s mostly been myself.”
To hell with self-doubt. And long live Girls Rock and Sister
Ghost.
This feature originally appeared in print in Dig With It Issue 4, available here. It also appears in Rock n'Heavy here.
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