21st Century Girl Wednesday 1 December 9.30pm BBC 6 MUSIC -promotional feature

Sisters are doing it for themselves!
But thankfully they’re not keeping it to themselves, as 6 Music highlights in 21st Century Girl, a look at some of the most innovative and exciting musicians around – who just happen to be women.
And who better to present the series than Justine Frischmann (left) who, with her spiky band Elastica, blazed a trail through Britpop, proving that girls can most definitely rock. Elastica’s eponymous No. 1 debut album in 1995 was the fastest-selling first album ever by a British band and they enjoyed a string of hit singles, including Connection and Waking Up. Judy Leighton talks to Justine about making her mark in a male-dominated world.

“I think the music industry is not a particularly enlightened industry,” says the straight-talking Justine. “It is a predominantly male industry – most of the people who are high up in record companies are men, there is no question of that.You see lots of young women being exploited – their sexuality is sold and it completely overshadows their talent.”

It’s hard, though, to imagine this intelligent, articulate woman standing for that, and in fact her own experience of the music business was much more positive.

“We were lucky enough to be taken fairly seriously for the music,” she says. “I think that’s because of the route we took, which was obviously much more alternative. I never felt I had to exploit my sexuality; I think that mainstream women are much more exploited by the music industry.”

Being part of the mainstream never appealed to Justine, whose upbringing was far from average. Her father, a structural engineer, is a Hungarian refugee and Holocaust survivor and her mother is Russian. She gained much of her languid sophistication from her education at the prestigious St Paul’s School in London and began studying music and writing songs at the age of 11. No surprise then that her own musical heroines are true one-offs.

“The first one was Joni Mitchell, then Patti Smith; more recently PJ Harvey and even more recently Peaches.They are all female warriors, they all inspire courage and they just sound like they’re doing their own thing and they couldn’t really give a damn what anyone thinks of it.”

Justine cites Polly Harvey – who features in the programme – as the artist who inspired her more than anyone to start her own band.“I was listening to [her album] Dry when I was at college and it just made me think well, if a girl can stand up with a guitar and sound like this then I’m sure I can do something too. She just sounded like she was getting on with it and it inspired something in me.”

Initially, Justine got together with some fellow students from her architecture course to form a band that became Suede. Justine, though, frustrated at her lack of input in the band, left before they became successful.

“There were a lot of egos and opinions in that band and there wasn’t the space for any more,” she says wryly.“They treated me respectfully though – it was interesting and I learnt a lot from their process.

“I definitely felt I should keep my mouth shut and let the boys make the decisions, though.Any influencing I did was sort of done behind closed doors, but I had a sneaking suspicion that – certainly in the studio – I had more of an idea how to do it than they did at the time and that if I got a go then I could probably do something quite good.”

Tired of waiting for Messrs Anderson and Butler to give her a go with Suede, she left them to form her own band. Despite that experience, she wasn’t particularly looking for other women to work with, though as it turned out, Elastica was three-quarters female. “I was definitely attracted to the idea of having another female guitar player because it seemed to me that male guitar players were more ego-driven than female guitar players,” Justine explains.“Annie Holland came along and I thought she was one of the best bass players I’d ever heard. I certainly wasn’t looking for a female lineup but, when it became obvious that that was the way it was going to go, I was happy about it.” And it turned out to have unexpected benefits.

“It was treated as a selling-point for us and it was really only an advantage, because people didn’t really expect girls to be able to play as well as we could,” she says.Especially the boys… “I think boys definitely treat guitars and drums and things as their toys and it’s annoying for them when girls get hold of them,” Justine remarks a tad scathingly.

She recalls her experience in Elastica as a positive one, and that she was well respected and well treated by the industry – except for one thing. At the height of Britpop she was going out with Blur’s Damon Albarn; the pair were dubbed “the “It was frustrating at the time, but I guess that was really the only annoying factor,” she says.

In America, however, it was Damon who was “the boyfriend of”, as Elastica were much hotter property than Blur at the time.The climate over the pond, though, was somewhat different to Britain.

“At the point that we went to the States there was a big post-feminist movement going on in rock, and I was never that comfortable being included in it – I felt it was a step backwards making a big deal out of it,” says Justine, who never really felt as though she belonged to a musical sisterhood.

“There wasn’t really a sisterhood,” she recalls.“Certainly in Britain it was quite a bitchy time – the music press encouraged people to bitch about each other, and because there were quite a few women, we were all set up against each other at the time, which doesn’t really lead to great feelings of warmth. It just seemed that there were quite a lot of girl fights going on, and squabbles and things, so I can’t say that I really felt there was a warm sisterhood particularly.

Elastica finally split in 2001 and, since then, Justine, now in her mid-thirties, has kept a low musical profile and says she’s lost interest in getting up on stage herself, preferring to write for and produce other artists, including the much-touted MIA.

“I wrote the beat for and I was involved inthe production on her next single, Galang, and I’ve been working on production with some new bands including White Rose, and DJing and doing bits and pieces.”

She’s also been presenting both on TV – including BBC Three’s architecture series Dream Spaces and a South Bank Show – and on radio, especially 6 Music. , I absolutely love radio – it’s saved my life several times. I’m a huge fan of the World Service and Radio 4, I’d say that probably would be my favourite radio station, and now John Peel is sadly gone, I think Radio 4 would probably be my favourite full stop.”

So don’t be surprised if she pops up on there too, especially as she cites arts radio and TV as particularly interesting areas for her. But first she’s working on a project about artists.“We’re doing it guerrilla-style – making a pilot to get people interested,” she says.

It’s a typically imaginative move from a woman who’s always been determined to do things her way on her terms.

She shrugs. “I think if you’re a smart woman you can do whatever a man can do and there’s no reason why a woman should be less musical.Why make a big deal out of it?”

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