Janes Plane live at the Ace, Brixton, 1982. Pictured, l to r, Nicola Griffith, Carol Holmes, Jane Lawrence. Once upon a time—42 years ago, on March 8, 1982 to be exact, International Women's Day—I and four other women debuted our band, Janes Plan…
Janes Plane live at the Ace, Brixton, 1982. Pictured, l to r, Nicola Griffith, Carol Holmes, Jane Lawrence.
Once upon a time—42 years ago, on March 8, 1982 to be exact, International Women's Day—I and four other women debuted our band, Janes Plane. (I've written about that many times so won't rehash it here but do feel free to go down the search rabbit hole). It was early March, too, eleven years later, when Ammonite, my first novel, debuted in the UK. And of course it was just ten days after that that I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. For me, IWD is a complicated anniversary.
But today, just because it pleases me to do so, I'll focus on the music. Here are two Janes Plane songs. The first, "Vondel Park," is about the summer I was 19 and me and Carol, my lover (that's what we said back then, lover, not partner or girlfriend) went to Amsterdam, got stranded with no money, starved in a campground for about a week, then finally got some cash and spent it immediately on, first, a Big Mac and fries, and, second, a chunk of red lebanese hash, which we smoked in Vondel Park in the sunshine while hippies played their guitars. I spent four lovely hours hallucinating herds of wild horses running with a 50'-tall Bertie Bassett (a figure made of Liquorice Allsorts—a liquorice sweet/candy). Here's the song, accompanied by a video created from various TV clips of the band edited together by Lou, our bassist.
And here's "Bare Hands." I don't know what the song meant to the rest of the band, but my lyrics are about Hull, a grimy, desperate city in East Yorkshire (so bad you could address a letter to 'Crap Town' and it would get there)1, where I moved after I left Leeds in early summer, 1979 (right before we went to Amsterdam). I lived there with Carol for ten years and always knew it could be a better place, if only people would believe enough to try. I left long before that happened—but it did. So, to me, this is a song about hope.
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