Take The Power Back

These women not only claimed their rightful place in the music industry, they shaped the careers of some of the most iconic artistes the world ever saw.

- Sam Lal

Although it is not really etched all that clearly on what are often referred to as the sands of time, it was somewhere around the time when the Seventies were about to give way to the Eighties that rock ’n’ roll stopped being equal opportunity entertainment and became an unabashed boys’ club.

Not withstanding the fact that women like Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks and countless others had arrived at the forefront of mainstream reckoning through sheer force of talent and perseverance, they all seemed to be going the way of the dodo by the time Van Halen declared they were “Hot for Teacher.”

The Eighties were mind-numbingly downhill for the female rocker who seemed completely shut out of the scene, unless, of course, it was to play a scantily-clad siren in a music video that revelled in all its testosterone glory. Sure, there was a Madonna and there was a Cyndi Lauper but they were ‘pop,’ a slightly derisive category at a time when stadiums reverberated with chants like “Bad boys running wild.”

Of course, it had to change sooner or later and the re-emergence of oestrogen in rock music coincides with the time that the glam rock bandwagon went pear-shaped. The Nineties were a complete antithesis of everything that went before them in terms of the sound of rock and the attendant philosophy that defined it. This was the time rockers wore their hair short and their shorts long and women began reclaiming the spotlight after at least one full decade out in the cold.