MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Herstory of a socialist feminist choir
The lasting influence of Velvet Fist to be marked on February 18
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
FROM their beginnings in the 1980s, the Velvet Fist acapella women’s choir sang songs of peace, resistance and solidarity in support of struggles in Britain and beyond.
Known for their beautiful performances and innovative arrangements, the choir performed a huge range of material about people past and present and their struggle for liberation, from historical folk numbers to ballads of British feminist and trade-union struggle such as No Going Back by Sandra Kerr, which explored the impact of the 1984-85 miners’ strike on women, to songs of solidarity with struggles around the world like the South African traditional freedom song Senzenina.
Emerging in the 1980s from the Artery Choir, the group later became women-only and changed its name to Velvet Fist.
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