Hello everyone and welcome to the leading note podcast, an open and safe space for discussion driven by the need to raise awareness, deconstruct stigmas and nurture support, collaboration and wellness within the music industry. In the first episode of our brand-new podcast, The Leading Note, we’ll be joined by the wonderful, boundary-pushing Mothers in Music network. Mothers in Music are a free network bringing together mothers across the music industry to discuss the barriers, opportunities and changes to their art, work and creative practice while raising children. Ahead of our upcoming series of daylight concerts, Lightime Music, we sat down with Mothers in Music Founder, Alice Ballantine Dykes, and Bristol musicians Rachael Dadd and Beth Rowley to talk about matrescence, the need for change and what daylight programming can bring to the industry.

You can listen to the full episode and more coming soon from The Leading Note on Spotify.

You can also watch the full conversation on YouTube.

Alice Ballentine Dykes: We’ve known each other and been working with each other for a year, maybe more than that now, but I want to take us back to when we first met. I was thinking of gathering a group of mothers who are musicians from in and around Bristol and I had you two in mind because I knew you were both mothers but I was worried about making contact with you. You were people I thought probably wouldn’t want to engage in that kind of conversation about motherhood. I remember reaching out to both of you and being so delighted when both of you said yes—that you really wanted and needed to have that conversation. So, I wonder if I could ask you both: when we first met, what was it like being asked about being a mother in your industry and in the music world?

Beth Rowley: I think it was a huge relief. I don’t think I could really string a sentence together about what I was feeling at that point because I felt so disconnected with that previous chapter of my life. In those first few meetings, I was just so emotional like a big weight had been lifted, just in talking about this other version of myself that I’d been working on for about twenty-five years. I’d been doing it for all that time and then the handbrake goes on when you have a kid—or for me, at least, it did because I decided to stop for a while. But it’s just so all-consuming and full of joy—such opposites every day—and there was no time in my brain for music. So, to finally have the chance to speak to other women and have a laugh—I could be totally free. All the really bad stuff that I couldn’t say to anyone else—how much at times I was hating it and how much I missed my other life, times when I wondered if it was the worst decision I ever made—but also how much I loved it. It was just perfect timing.

Rachael Dadd: It gave me such an opportunity to put things into words because I’d been really struggling throughout lockdown with single parenting, total disconnection—it felt like a rupture losing all of my gigs. Then post lockdown, squeezing out an album, squeezing out a tour, whilst also being a single mum, I’d experienced some deep ruptures of disconnection and inner conflict and it gave me a wonderful, safe, nurturing space and connection with people who knew exactly what I was talking about. To be able to voice all of that was a real turning point. When you can voice something confidently—saying the bad bits too(!)—and be seen and be heard and receive empathy, it felt from that very first meeting we were all creating an amazing flower bud and chucking out a bunch of new seed to grow a new way, a new possibility of creating something in our community collectively and the potential in that. And now we’re watching all of these new seeds growing. So now me and Beth have shared where we came from and what brought us together, I’d love to hear about the initial sparks and what brought you to set up the Mothers in Music network.

A: It seemed like an obvious next step. I’d worked with lots of creative mothers as a coach and I’d also had a life as a performing musician myself and I had noticed that along the way there was just a very strong expectation that that life of being a performer, well, obviously that was going to have to end when I became a mother—those two things seemed totally incompatible. I’d noticed during lockdown especially that I’d been really craving more creative practice and more connection to other musicians and wanting to play more but I couldn’t work out how to make it work. So, I started interviewing different mothers from across different arts disciplines just to find out how they were making it work because it doesn’t seem possible and they shared the challenges with me, but also what appeared to be structural and common problems which were outside of themselves. It wasn’t just about what changed inside, but also what was holding them back structurally—we expect to watch music at nighttime and it felt really hard to go out and gig at night. We expect to leave our children behind when we go to consume art as adults. There are lots of expectations about what the arts world looks like and it felt like there were lots of structural and universally experienced challenges that a lot of these mothers were describing. 

So, it felt useful as a coach to recognize the problems and look for ways we could change it and it brought about this campaigning zeal in me to want to do something. So, just bringing people together in that same space and being a mother, being a musician—not just as a performer but also everyone who works in the industry and have that common experience of motherhood. But we need to start to look into and understand what it would look like if it was working for you as a mother and that’s a very open question. The idea of trying to make it work rather than seeming unable to proceed. You were beginning to share Rachael about the seed that got thrown out and the fertile ground and I think that was born from that question of ‘what can we do? What would it look like if it was working better for you?’ We had a number of people who were coming to the network who were either pregnant or who had super young babies and we started talking about daytime programming. Something that would be really useful would be to create an audience for whom daytime programming was the norm. Beth, would you like to talk about the Saturday matinees that you’ve been a part of and experienced?

B: That was one of the main restrictions for me—to do music and engage with it. It’s what I’d been doing and what I was used to and I was reluctant at first to leave concerts behind. And then we talked about bringing kids into it and what it would look like to do both at the same time—to keep doing night time gigs and how I could reengage with that when the time was right and find agents and find industry and business support.

So, in terms of night time, a tour could be booked of predominantly night time gigs but also maybe a handful of day time gigs as well and that’s just standard. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do night time gigs anymore and I was really excited to get back to that but the idea of daylight gigs came from there and there really wasn’t much available. I knew how to put a gig on—I’ve been doing it for so long. The Saturday gigs and matinees—we’ve done four or five of them so far—are in a local church just two minutes from my house. My other half is completely on board so he has the children or his parents will come—it was made possible by everyone joining in. It was just such a learning curve. I wanted to charge normal ticket fees so we could entice and attract artists and performers who were used to that and have it as professional as possible. It’s very open, kids are free to include everybody in a family environment.

A: But what have you noticed about your audiences?

B: It’s very varied. The Christmas gig—which was the first one and a bit of a gamble two days before Christmas—was so busy and there were a lot of kids.

A: And the music is for adults?

A: We’re going to come back to the series and collaboration with St George’s in a minute but Rachael, can I ask you about the things that you’ve been developing because the Saturday matinees will feature in our programme with St George’s Bristol and the gig that you’re going to be producing as part of that programme is a project that you’re going to be developing called Grove. So can you tell us a little about those activities that you’ve been creating?

R: Well, on the back of everything you were just saying Beth, it really made me think about the model in Japan. I was in Japan and played a lot of day time gigs as part of their very successful model. I spent a lot of time living in Japan—my children are half Japanese—and over there, there’s a lot of vibrant creativity accessible to all ages in the culture. It’s almost as if they eat food, they consume art and they introduce their children to music. It’s almost like they live and breathe it and the creativity is like glue for the community. In Japan, it’s a collective culture and because of that and their value systems that they have over there, they really rate family experiences and experiencing something as a collective group. Care and nurture are embedded in their value systems so there were lots of opportunities to put on successful daytime events.

A: It’s expected and what you come to expect as an audience.

R: Yeah exactly. But in the gigs themselves, there is generally quiet—they’ve cultivated this atmosphere where the children will be quiet. There’s usually food as well. So, they’re eating, they’re consuming. It’s all of these experiences coming together and creating this really lovely atmosphere. And I felt that same atmosphere when I put on my show at The Mount Without. There were people sitting on the floor with their babies enjoying music. The magic of that!

A: It was beautiful wasn’t it?

R: It’s just such a lovely experience and to be able to partake in that as a parent—being able to breastfeed and enjoy some electronic music is amazing.

B: It’s not kids music—it’s proper, professional touring musicians—it’s not curated for kids in any way apart from the fact that there are brownies!

A: Also, thinking of the location and being able to take kids out when they’re being a bit noisy. It’s about thinking about the audience and trying to facilitate parents. But I’ve also spotted quite a few older people at the gigs and people who wouldn’t normally come to music in the evening. So you’re building an audience would is more diverse and allows an artist to connect with a different kind of audience.

B: I know it takes a while for things to bed and come along but it seems such a mystery as to why this is such a new thing because there’s such a market there. It definitely feels like a missed opportunity to me because there’s a huge market.

A: And it’s not rocket science! Other artists and sectors have managed to do it—like the matinee in the theatre world—it’s a complete norm. So we’re just shifting the norm, I hope, towards something like you would experience in Japan and, as you say, that’s going to require the audience to expect something a little different and to everyone to teach and learn from each other and with our children about what being a reverent audience looks like. And that’s exciting! It feels like a really exciting cultural shift. Can I just mention the audience at The Mount Without gig? You could see people’s faces beaming. I remember particularly one woman with an eight-week old baby in a sling and a pint of beer and she just looked so happy! It’s that feeling of ‘I’m in this space and it’s totally designed for me and I don’t have to worry about anything.’ To be able to have a drink, look after your baby and enjoy the act—it feels radical but it doesn’t need to be.

Why don’t we talk about the programme we’ve curated? The network is really dedicated to people who work in the industry but what we’re doing with this programme is to build a daytime audience and a culture of putting on music in the day that allows performers in our network to be able to perform—because they can’t do that without an audience and the knowledge that there’s a thirst for it. So we’re trying to create this visibility for mothers. A lot of people come into the network conversation saying ‘I feel completely invisible now, both as a mother and an artist,’ especially when you take a break in this fast-paced, competitive industry.

R: It’s not only taking a break, your values shift and you write songs with a nurturing spirit and those values don’t always feel like they’re in alignment with the patriarchal values of at least a section of the industry. It can feel isolating and disconnecting and can shatter your confidence

A: But that means that motherhood can not get written about and so the question of care and the question of caring for others is not expressed enough. So what we’ve heard repeatedly is that you have to hide your pregnancy or you don’t talk about motherhood—you basically have to exist as if you’re not a mother, whereas, as you were just saying, it can actually be such a rich part of your practice. So there’s something about visibility and creating that platform for the people in our network which feels very much part of this programme that we’re creating with St George’s. We’ll talk about some of the artists who will be a part of the programme, a lot of whom have written about the motherhood experience.

R: You’re right—it is changing. There are lots of songs now being written about matrescence and motherhood.

A: Why don’t we mention some of those artists? So, the programme we’ve curated includes four gigs at St George’s and Bristol residents may know some of these names—I’m sitting next to two of them—Beth and Rachael. But we’ve also got Sam Lindo playing and she’s just produced this absolutely glorious album which is about her ancestral history and family with her new baby in mind and what being an ancestor for her looks like. So, she’s already bringing in that question of legacy and parenting into her story. We also have an incredible welsh artist Angharad who’s coming from Swansea to play at one of our Satellite gigs—these won’t be happening at St George’s but in one of our local communities during the week. 

So, it’s not just weekend programming we’re putting on—we’re also trying to create opportunities for people to access music during the day and also after school. Pick your kids up from school, bring a picnic, and we’ll bring the culture that you would normally not experience in the daylight. It’s an after-school activity that you can enjoy with your children. And it’s not just for parents—these gigs are also for people who just don’t want to go out for any reason in the evening or find it hard to go out in the evening.

R: It feels really important to emphasise that these gigs aren’t just for mothers. When we first made the poster for Mothers in Music gigs, I had so many people ask if they could come. So it’s really important that we emphasise that we are thinking of the experience for people coming in wheelchairs, the elderly, carers—that we are thinking of everyone and of how wonderful it is to bring so many people from the community together.

A: At the Mount Without gig, it proved there was a thirst for a daytime programme. Being a parent doesn’t just mean that you can’t get out at night because you’ve got children to put to bed, but it’s also really expensive getting a babysitter, you’re also exhausted and don’t have that energy. There are lots of other reasons that you might not want to go out in the evening, so this is designed for you. But just to go back to the programme and who is performing. I just wanted to highlight Angharad because she’s written an album about motherhood and we’ve got two other artists who have really focused on their matrescence as the rich seam that they focus their creativity on. I particularly also want to mention Angelica who plays under My Midnight Heart—she’s an incredible American artist who has come to Bristol and joined our community to meet new people. I went to see her perform at the Saffron summer party—a Bristol-based record label who supports women and non-binary artists—and she has been on their artist development programme and her whole set was about her matrescence. I said to her at the time that I was so pleased that she played and talked about matrescence—even used that word because it’s not a word that is often recognized—and she said how nervous she was about how it would be received.

R: It’s so true—it’s not even in the dictionary… Shall we say what it is now?

A: The word matrescence ‘to become a mother’ and it was coined in the 1970s by an academic whose name I have forgotten but more recently it was written extensively about by Lucy Jones in her book Matrescence and it’s a word that needs to be explored. When you type it into a Word document, you get a red squiggly line under it and people don’t understand that it’s a process in exactly the same way as adolescence. But back to the artists, Angharad will be playing in November at one of our satellite after-school gigs in Easton and Angelica who’s playing as My Midnight Heart at The Tobacco Factory in January. But we’ve also got Jenny Lindfors who plays under the name Sailing Stones—

R: She’s amazing!

A: She is and she’s just finished producing an album which is all about her matrescence, the colours, the varied experience and the huge emotional fluctuation when we become a parent and she is launching that album as part of the programme here at St George’s so I’m really excited to that as well. Importantly, all of the artists in this programme are mothers but I hope one day that it won’t be a case of creating a platform for the mothers in our network and beyond it. I hope it will be for any artist who wants to access and produce music in the daytime and they have an audience then who is excited about them coming to town to play. So it’s a real win-win scenario here. Some of the other artists we have playing—we have the Vilk Collective who are a really exciting and experimental group. Roxana Vilk sings in her mother tongue and is encouraging a whole new language of music, particularly around nursery rhymes and she’s running a beautiful project with parents around nursery rhymes and connecting to the mother tongue. So there’s a lovely opportunity to see the Vilk Collective at St George’s Bristol in December. We also have JMA joining My Midnight Heart in the new year—an incredible electronic artist. She played at our Mount Without gig—she kicked off the event—and she was one of the mothers in our network who said very explicitly, ‘in this space, I can be both mother and artist simultaneously. I don’t have to separate those two roles and pretend I’m not one when I need to be the other.’

R: She’s also an electronic musician and that world is also quite male-dominated. She had been really struggling with not even being able to mention that she was a mother.

A: It’s amazing how many people have to hide it and lie about it. Angharad has also said to me that she feels it will really shift her audience and maybe her label or management would worry about that. But you’re also really shifting at that stage in your career so maybe it’s only natural that your audience shifts with you. So the idea that we’re building an audience who would be so receptive around the question of what it is to be a mother is very exciting.

Beth, would you like to talk about your gig? Have you got any surprises up your sleeve?

B: This is actually long-awaited. I’ve finally got another live agent and this is the person I’ve really missed in the team and I’ve felt completely adrift. There have been times when I haven’t had a manager and that has been really fine but not having an agent had a really big effect on me. Essentially, when I was pregnant—I’d not long had my first little boy—and the agent I was with decided it wasn’t the best time to keep me on the books. It was just the worst timing for me—it was such an awful place to be. Confidence went down, especially because I was in the house all the time. I just felt like I was cut off from that world completely.

A: Therefore, cut off from your ability to connect with it and generate an income. At a very basic level, you weren’t able to do your job.

B: For sure. I was doing session work and performing with a few different people. The Jools Holland band was amazing because he was really supportive—with both of my pregnancies, I was doing gigs with him at six or seven months. So, for me, getting an agent after all this time was great because it connects me with the network of venues.

A: The music industry is huge and complex—it’s not just a manager and a venue—there are a lot of moving parts in the industry and it’s hugely commercial. It’s got to work with a financial bottom line—it’s a business. However, it is trying to support people who have come to making music because they are naturally gifted—as you both are—but they have a desire to express themselves through their art and through music and that makes up a huge part of our economy so there’s an economic reason to keep people afloat. You mentioned lockdown, Rachael, and how the industry was decimated in so many ways, particularly live performance and you’ve had to claw your way back into that and I want to talk about how it’s going to be necessary for different elements of the industry to understand what the differing needs are of mothers as they return back to their job—for someone who is breast feeding, they might need somewhere to do that, for someone who is touring, they might need to bring their family or care-givers with them. I remember, Rachael, that story you told about going to sound check in a pub and they wouldn’t let your baby in.

R: Yeah, and my sister had to take him to the all-you-can-eat Indian for about three hours.

A: But you didn’t know that was going to be a problem until you were confronted with that.

R: It hadn’t been a problem anywhere else so it was a shock!

A: I just want to reference the fact that this industry is beginning to change. We have artists who actually have very supportive managers who understand what their touring schedule is going to look like but there needs to be growing awareness of the challenges mothers face which, until this point, have been quite hidden. Mothers haven’t wanted to say when something is difficult for them because they feel like they’re going to be passed over and not be able to remain visible in their industry. They’ve kept quiet about what the challenges are and what they need to sustain their careers. So, we’re going to need to have slightly more open conversations with PR agencies and venues and managers. Across the board, the industry is going to need to be open to a conversation about these challenges so that mothers can sustain their careers. But you’ve also mentioned, Rachael, the way that motherhood has resulted in a shift in your career. Do you want to talk a little about that?

R: Motherhood has not only brought a shift in my career and a shift in my values and I’ve spent a long time sitting with it and having coaching sessions with you—what is it that I ultimately love about music? For me, it’s connection. Before, I would be connecting with my band and connecting with audiences far away and then coming home to my four walls and being a mum. I really felt that disconnect. So, I decided that I wanted to grow community where I lived and shift my musical activity from being centre-stage to holding space for people and making wellbeing the primary element—not only for the people I’m holding space for, but for me. When my cup gets emptied—and it kept getting emptied and I kept getting burnt out—then I’m not being the best mum. Now my priority is keeping my cup full and I’ve spent a year holding choirs, running inter-generational singing groups, singing with people with disabilities, joining the Dovetail refugee orchestra and setting up MMILK, the letters of which stand for Musician Mothers In Loving Kinship, where we meet and improvise together. We build friendships and it’s a safe space for people to try out different ways of being new instruments and ways of expressing themselves in safety—there are no mistakes.

A: You’re building a lot of confidence in me, knowing I can come and practice, improvise and try something out. It’s the early stages of maybe building up my confidence to perform again. But that space is really unusual and really valued.

R: It’s about growing friendship and community which are at the top of my values. I want friends, guys! I want to play music with friends! I know, when I’m performing, I sometimes like being the centre of attention but it’s not the top of my values anymore. So, growing community and growing diverse community—that’s why I started these different groups—and I’m really excited to be a part of this new programme with St George’s and combining it with my idea of cultivating diverse community at a daytime, regular event called the Grove where my choirs come to sing, we collaborate with the refugee orchestra, my intergenerational group come to sing a song with everybody and MMILK will be there. The eclecticism in there with different genres, people from different backgrounds—this is filling my cup until it’s brimming over! I used to get that momentarily with my band but then we wouldn’t see each other for two months, so it’s the continuation of seeing these friends each week and building something together.

A: I think that’s true. I’ve never felt more connected to my musician self than by being in that room with other people making music and having conversations who are musicians too and I’d say it exceeds what I’d experienced before as someone who just toured with a band. So, this feels like a completely different chapter—partly because of this community that is being built. I think it’s important that we all share that common experience of what it means to have those two hours a week. It can be really difficult to find and carve out that time in your creative practice. I meet it routinely in my coaching space when people are really struggling to justify it and give permission for it but as you’ve just described, by understanding how your values have shifted, you’ve understood that creative outlet and that ability to express yourself creatively is filling you up and allowing you to do everything else you do in life from a better perspective.

Let’s take a moment to reset and talk about what audiences might expect from our programme. I’m so excited about the full programme because it represents a broad range of genres and different ages of mothers. It’s building a platform for us to perform but it’s also building an audience of people who want to access music at a different time of day. We’re also very lucky that St George’s Bristol have offered us this opportunity to collaborate with them. You’ve mentioned the promotional element and how hard it is to get out there. What we’re doing here is bringing together what you’re doing with your Saturday matinees and Grove and the potential of that growing and we’re bringing it together under a banner which St George’s and us are working together on called Lightime Music. As it suggests, it’s happening in the daylight hours—which in the winter months are going to be shorter and it might not be quite daytime (!)—but what we’re trying to do is build on practices that already exist. Daylight Music in London has been a programme that you’ve enjoyed and performed at before and the Daylight Collective down in Exeter—organisations are really helping to instill the normality of daytime programming and it’s encouraging people to come out of the woodwork and say they want to do that too. But there are going to be a few differences and we’re going to experiment slightly with how we programme an event. People with younger children around will have a shorter attention span so we’re looking at how we programme artists. What’s your experience of the Saturday matinees? What do you think we could expect?

B: It’s very new ground. I think the main takeaway is just that people feel really welcome. I’ve really tried to think of everything—even down to the food—it’s not expensive stuff but I make them look really pretty! Kids need something to eat, I need something to eat because I run around setting it all up and then get up and perform—

A: I don’t know a mum without a snack in her pocket!

B: I think the main thing is that people feel they’ve been thought of. You can’t please everybody all the time but we always think of accessibility, if you need somewhere to go to be quiet, if you need to come in late—there’s no judgement. It’s still presented as professionally as possible but at the same time, we approach it with care—it’s a community thing. We’re trying to get people out of their houses to come and enjoy music who maybe haven’t been out in a while, which also includes having a sliding scale for ticket pricing sometimes.

R: For inclusivity.

B: People feel seen and heard and then come and have their spirits lifted because the people we have performing are really amazing.

A: I think when you become a parent, your sense of purpose and drive changes—that’s what I routinely talk about with mothers in my coaching space. When you’re seeing someone persevere with a career which is hard enough anyway and then making it work as you’ve all described—it’s important to you and your family but it’s also important to our cultural scene. I want to talk a little more about the partnership with St George’s because you mentioned earlier about promotion being essential in making this work. St George’s obviously has a huge reach but they’ve seen it as an opportunity for them and their audience and also to pay attention to the audience development that they feel is their responsibility as a big and established venue in Bristol. So, I want to really celebrate that partnership because without it, we wouldn’t be able to make this programme work. It’s very rare for an organisation like St George’s to be prepared to make this programme and promote it as widely as they’re doing. And to have us on this podcast and in the room to be able to talk about the value of such a network and such a platform for the artists that we are meeting in our conversations. I want to celebrate that and invite others to get involved in this model of developing an audience for daytime programming—it can only be win-win—I don’t see that anyone misses out. The venue gets another audience, audiences get another opportunity to see artists play and artists get an opportunity to perform in a way that works for them or more than once. What we’re doing is creating quite a lot of wisdom in this programme. We’re gathering an understanding of what it’s like to be an artist in these environments, we’re gathering an understanding about what venues need to do differently to facilitate and support mothers at this point in their careers and we’re also understanding and going to be collecting views from the audience about how it works for them. We’re building this lovely case study and we want to encourage other venues to take part in this and build this model for them. Then we’re building a network of touring opportunities for artists—all artists.

B: Yes! It’s for everybody. It just needs to be a part of our daily fabric of touring which I would now be able to benefit from at this stage but also that a past version of me would love! If I’m in Manchester in the afternoon on tour, I would normally be charity shopping but let’s do another gig!

A: So what we’re also gathering wisdom about is how we’re going to promote it—from a PR and marketing perspective, there’s a lot of wisdom that we’re gathering and a huge shoutout to Ben Spencer for really picking it up and running with it as an idea. I just want to end with the idea that it’s the mothers in the room that have made something happen—we have galvanised ourselves and got together to talk about what we need to make something work for us. We have taken on that mantle, we have taken on that challenge and we are finding that the doors are easier to open once we find out what we want but it is our initial resourcefulness and courage that has done this. I just wanted to big up the mums.

R: It’s the strength in our numbers and I feel we are more than the sum of our parts—it’s the connection that we feel. When you do stuff together, it’s really fun! We’re also holding each other—we take it in turns and can be honest when we feel overwhelmed or have just come on our period.

A: I think that’s something I’m very proud of—producing a gig that really allows us to parent. If there’s another thing we’re doing here is sharing with St George’s Bristol that there is a way of operating that allows us to take care of our children—just understanding what the general needs are and what would work better is allowing St George’s Bristol to understand what those values look like in practice and for them to respond. And so far, when we’ve asked for what we’ve needed, there has been a really positive response. I have a lot of faith that the industry is open and we want to encourage that culture of conversation with positivity and solution that maybe hasn’t existed until quite recently.

B: I’ve been really excited about getting together, coming up with a plan, working out the stepping stones of how you’re going to do that and just doing it. But it’s doing it together and having that support—it feels like connecting to this greater thing.

A: It’s a very simple response to a very entrenched problem that no one until recently have even discussed openly.

Find out more about our Lightime Music concert series, created in collaboration with Mothers in Music and book your tickets now to see the incredible Samantha Lindo and Vilk Collective live in concert over the coming months.

You can listen to the full episode and more coming soon from The Leading Note on Spotify.

You can also watch the full conversation on YouTube.