Avril Silk

Transcript by Jayde Stevenson

I happened to be singing with a friend of mine- a guitarist called Ivor- at the youth and community centre in Taunton at some… special party- I can’t remember the ins and outs of the party, but anyway- I was singing one of my songs which was called ‘Madonna Whore’ and it was about the way that women are always being… they’re either being put on pedestals or vilified, and it just so happened that one of the leading lights of Just Women… umm… uh… uh… a researcher and arts specialist called Sue Tate now- she’s called Sue Tate- was at that event and she heard me sing and she said ‘ooh you’ve got to join us’, and I was really excited about that. So, in the second issue my song was reproduced with the music and the um and the lyrics. And that began my relationship with the amazing group of women who were producing the magazine and it was a ten… well I say it was- it was a ten year… nearly ten year relationship with the magazine and those friendships have endured until right up until now.

It was… I think was really well thought of and it was well supported when I…when you look at the opening… the first page of the magazine, it says umm, the women who were involved in that particular issue and I’m looking there and there’s fifteen/ sixteen women. And we operated as a… a feminist cooperative, and that was really important to… to us. The ethos- and this is something which I’ve been talking about with the new group of women who are looking at the special issue this year- that the ethos of cooperation was really important. We were lucky I think, in that a lot of us were around with young children and either no jobs or part time work and we were in a very different position to young women now, so we had the time to gather in each other’s houses and… and pro… it was a kitchen table venture really.

Having started with the… with my song, um, which was… which was reproduced in the second issue- having started there I then started submitted articles… I wrote one about um misogyny in religion cus I had a bit of a bee in my bonnet at the time, and the way that most sacred texts have something embedded in them which does women down… and just used as a… as… as a springboard for any misogynist who wants to go back and repress women. Unfortunately, those sacred texts- they’re always there, and… there can be liberal interpretation of them right up to the point when someone wants to put women back in their place- whatever that might be. So, I had a… I… I was angry about the fact that all… almost every religion had something in it to women’s detriment- um dangerously so in some cases. So, I wrote about that, umm… I wrote… I wrote… I wrote quite a lot of serious articles, but I started writing funny quizzes as well and then I got a regular column called Royal Silk, which I… I um… which I wrote about my chaotic life you know- kids, cars and credit I think was my… was my byline, and uh… cos it was chaotic at the time, it was in absolute shambles and I tried to sort of deal with it but turning it into something… funny.