The reason why this is important to Jayne Casey, Big in Japan and the re-creation of Liverpool as music capital is that Deaf School trickled down their money, equipment and know-how to the new generation. A tendency that would soon be swept away by the same punk that would, almost accidentally, sweep away our Deaf School too. “a cast of fabulous characters that made the tendency of most bands then still to turn up, denim-clad, plug in, mumble and jam for hours look simply dull. Ronnie Hughes, a student at the time, describes the first Deaf School as Melody Maker adored them Warners Records signed them up as a possible Next Big Thing. Some of the 13 people who formed that legendary theatrical performance refined themselves into the band Deaf School. The college Christmas event took the principle that ‘anyone can get up and do it’ instead of booking the usual rock band. There’s an argument that elements of punk rock originated in 1973 with the art rock performance crowd at Liverpool School of Art. “In the 70’s a lot of the shops still had 60’s swag, so I used to buy Beatles jeans and go to London and sell it on the King’s Road, and I met Don Letts and I’d buy my clothes from SEX before coming back to Liverpool.” Jayne set up a clothes stall – Aunt Twacky’s at O’Halligan’s Warehouse – which was a good way to meet other alternative and arty people in Liverpool at that time: So, I shaved my head and I guess I was the first punk in the city … Shaving my hair off was about getting rid of a lot of my femininity it gave me more of an equal playing field.” Photo by Keith Bleasdale I felt like I’d been abused by the mainstream and I wanted to create a new world. “I was really sweet and lovely, so it was a bad attitude in terms of I wasn’t interested in the mainstream. When I arrived at a new children’s home the first thing I’d look for was a record player.”īy 1976, Jayne was showing her strong visual style. “ I travelled the children’s homes with my records under my arm. At a young age, Jayne’s mother died leaving her with an alcoholic abusive father and Jayne later went into care: Members of Big in Japan came together from difficult/different backgrounds. I wanted to find a different expression that was very female without being typically sexually female, do you know what I mean? I’ve always had difficulty with that, I think women still do.” Back to the seventies Because you’re either a pretty girl, or you can go down a rock line, which was never what I wanted to do. I always found that very difficult to do from an artistic point of view, because the culture of rock & roll has been male, and I’ve found it difficult to slot myself in. I wanted to find something that expressed my thing as a woman. The women who did break through, like Patti Smith, were taking the male formula and doing it very well, because they were women, they were making it very successfully. “I’ve always felt that as a woman I wanted to break some new ground, and I wanted to express female things, and that was quite an isolating thing, because you know, it was never really accepted. Interviewed in 1993, Jayne Casey explains how self-expression as a woman was always her key aim:
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