Back in 2017, I got an email from Grace Ambrose, founder of one-woman punk label and micropublisher Thrilling Living, asking if I would be interested in translating ‹The Diary of Marlene Marder›. Originally published in 1986 (my birthyear, incidentally), the hefty compendium has the full title: ‹Kleenex/LiLiPUT: The Diary of the Guitarist Marlene Marder – A chronicle of the life of the first all-women band in Zurich›, and charts the course of the seminal all-women punk bands Kleenex and LiLiPUT from Spring 1978 until Spring 1984. It comprises interviews, reviews, essays, flyers and artwork relating to the bands, with the diary of founding member and guitarist of both groups Marlene Marder running through its core. Ambrose, as a huge fan of both bands, founded Thrilling Living with the express intention of publishing this book in translation in an adapted form. The book in English is already highly anticipated due to the bands’ international cult following, and plans are already in the works for multiple events to mark its release.
It would make sense for me to be the book’s translator, Ambrose reasoned, what with me being both a woman who plays in DIY punk bands and a professional literary translator from German. Though I couldn’t call myself a fan of the bands, I knew from experience that fandom wasn’t necessarily a prerequisite of translating a book (I’ve translated a smoking memoir having never been a smoker) and I saw it as an opportunity to meld my two passions in a moment of feminist translation activism. I would be aiding in the dissemination of the history of women in punk, something wildly underexplored, and it seemed so fitting to have punks translating punks being published by punks.
I’d not actively listened to Kleenex or LiLiPUT, even though they were often discussed with great admiration in the same breath as women-fronted rock and punk bands like Bikini Kill or Elastica or Electrelane, because I’d filed them in my mind under «punk bands with women in that men keep telling me to listen to». If I said I played in a band, men (always men) would ask if it sounded like Kleenex or one of these other bands, which I found alienating and jarring. A woman once berated me at a party when I said that I’d never listened to any of the above, and furiously told me it was shameful to be a woman in punk and not be a fan of them. It’s a pity that these negative associations unfairly removed Kleenex and LiLiPUT (and the rest) from my life when I could have been enjoying them all along. They might have even radically changed my life in my formative years, though I’m sure they’ve changed me now in my early thirties. I first listened to them while translating the book, listening to their records on repeat in my headphones, and I could immediately see what was so genius about them.
As with any time I translate without having read the material first, I was filled with anticipation at what I would find in the reading-translating of the book. I was pleasantly and unpleasantly surprised by how much of Marder’s experiences I could recognise and relate to. There’s her hilarious documentation of the absurd banality of life in a band – it was cathartic to read her repetitive missives on waiting around, sandwiches, obsessing over sleeping arrangements and coffee and breakfast and beer, sandwiches, loading gear in and out, more waiting, her truncated reviews of shows once they’re over after huge build-ups, and more sandwiches. There were the infuriating sexist reviews that had me cursing the lives of the men who had written them, and Marder’s accounts of herself and other band members being harassed and assaulted by men inside and outside shows that were all too familiar. There was the fraught band dynamics and passionate camaraderie, and the peculiar experience of travelling abroad to play shows to people who, inexplicably, miraculously, are fans of your little band.
It felt satisfying to relive the pivotal moment Kleenex knew they wanted to be a DIY punk band rather than a manufactured one. They’d been taken on by a talent agency that wanted to capitalise on the novelty of a band made up only of women, making them have an awkward photo shoot in matching outfits, but the agency is shocked that Kleenex have opinions about how they want to be depicted. After realising that autonomy is key to their existence, they reject the agency, along with a free practice space and recording sessions, to go it alone, dress how they want, and play what they want, where they want.
But that was easier said than done. Excluding Club Hey, places to play were scarce in the band’s early days. In the summer of 1978, they organise their own show in a room at the Hotel Rössli in Lachen for them and a young band they befriend. All the Zurich punks show up and the gig soon turns into a wild party, much to the dismay of the owners and the waiting staff, and the hotel never let them put on a show there again. There’s a cringe-worthy part of the book where the band, desperate to just be able to have the chance to play, end up getting booked as minor entertainment in a down and out bar solely to get people in the door to buy expensive drinks on three consecutive nights, and they vow never to do it again.
Fast forward a few years, and the youth movement has hit Zurich. In an interview in SPEX magazine from May 1981 with LiLiPUT, bass player Klaudia Schiff and Marder report that the opportunity to play in Zurich had much improved since they both started playing in Kleenex. Christoph Herzog, the saxophonist in the new line up, and Schiff credit the youth movement in Zurich at the time for inspiring the band’s evolution in sound. When asked how the band relates to the youth movement, Marder confirms that they feel part of it, but clarifies that they’re not like bands that formed directly from it, seeing as they pre-date the movement. Herzog contradicts this as a newer member, stating that he personally feels that his performance is a direct product of the movement: «The energy that I give out comes from it. If I didn’t do it then I’d be smashing windows. But I can transform it. There’s a lot of people who can’t do that».
The interviewer asks the band what they think the worst thing to come out of the movement is, and Herzog responds that’s «there’s been an eerie, increased level of surveillance and control» and that «any activity in the street gets dispersed immediately», recounting his own experience of being wrongly arrested. There is the much-feted youth centre («though no social housing» Herzog remarks), but the centre is, in Marder’s words «still an experiment» and «could be closed any day.» Its existence as a space feels hopelessly precarious to the band. When they played there the week before, «people got spooked», Schiff says, worrying that the police were coming and that things might «kick off.» Marder reports the demoralising catch-22: «You put all your energy into it and the next day the whole thing might be destroyed. And if you do nothing then they’ll use it against you too…» Schiff underlines the pessimistic atmosphere around the hard-won space, suggesting that if it were to close after all the movement’s efforts, most people would be «resigned to the fact» that that’s how it had to be and the fight for the centre would completely leave them.
It’s actually the Rote Fabrik, which had opened the previous autumn, that becomes and remains an integral home for the band and their scene. In the book, there is an account by the young journalist turned temporary band member Niklaus Wyss of his time accompanying LiLiPUT on tour around Germany in September 1982:
In Frankfurt, we were taken into the rather run down but atmospheric house of the all-women rock band Strapazen. Petra, Manu and Cindy greeted us warmly – they knew Liliput from other shows, and our tour plan showed that we would play together a couple of days later in Hannover. There was a lot to talk about, the Strapazan women were kind enough to lend us their own PA for our Frankfurt gig. The gig was at Batschkapp. The fridge in the green room was filled with beer and sparkling water, we were looking forward to the show, and I came backstage with the good news that there were loads of people waiting for doors. Unfortunately, Petra appeared shortly after and sullenly reported that far too few people were queuing. Petra could, of course, compare the turn out with the throng at other gigs, especially with their own home shows with their home fans. Petra had hoped there’d be a big crowd for us and didn’t notice that she’d killed the mood with her commiserations. Then suddenly the playful fantasy spread in our minds of what it would be like if on their next tour Liliput brought a whole bus of the people from the Rote Fabrik. Homesickness, perhaps?
I was really struck by this image – of LiLiPUT packing up and taking their local scene with them on tour. It encapsulates, for me, the idea that a band is nothing without its support system, its ecosystem: the people at the shows who come and watch, who document it, who buy the records and the merch, who play in the other bands. And where does everyone congregate and flourish, where do they make their own little imperfect world that they wish they could take with them wherever they go? In a permanent space of their own.
Without cultural spaces – often all-ages, inclusive – there are no collectives, bands, communities, or socio-political organising. Or at least, it makes it harder. A space like a DIY venue or a youth centre is a place to be together, they are laboratories of creative experimentation, it’s where people can take chances and share what they’ve been trying out with likeminded others. They’re places to get out of the house, to make friends and collaborators, and where ideas, promises and pledges are formed. Without wider support and subsidies – which Rote Fabrik had and has – places like these struggle. I can’t comment on what the Zurich punk scene is like now, but there’s a direct parallel with the account of Zurich back in the 1980s with the lack of space for young people to make music in London and much of the UK right now.
Power Lunches, the best and only punk club in East London at the time, had to close five years ago because the rent went up and because the renters who moved in above it – knowing full well that there was a music venue downstairs – complained to the council enough it made it a problem. Volunteer-run venue DIY Space for London opened just a few months before Power Lunches closed, and soon most of the scene I was part of moved there and evolved. Instead of being in the middle of vibrant Dalston, however, it’s part of a warehouse complex in a tricky to reach part of South London, making it less visible and easily accessible. Now, it too is facing rent problems and creeping gentrification, with rumours of a new train station being planned basically on top of it. I hear from friends in New York that the best all-ages venue just closed down. Luxury apartments are sprouting up everywhere all over the world, making their surroundings overly expensive while radiating a clinical, silent, legally enforced forcefield. There is little to no support for spaces like these because the police and local councils don’t trust them, and because they’re not seen as culturally worthwhile because they’re not money-making ventures.
Tourists love going to Camden to see all the retro punk gear and the old punks in full regalia, but they don’t want to have actual contemporary punk scenes anywhere near them. Punks have a bad rep – a hangover from the nihilism, selfishness and rowdiness of the kinds of punks Marder detests in her diary – but DIY punks in my experience are some of the most motivated, creative, open-minded and socially and politically conscious of citizens. I know punks who are doctors, lecturers, social workers; workers in the disability arts, sexual violence, mental health and chronic illness sectors; independent artists and craftspeople; and we’re all brought together by making music that, like Kleenex/LiLiPUT’s, is intrinsically rather than didactically political. DIY punk advocates for the importance of that which is individualistic and «unproductive» and therefore anticapitalistic – passionate self-expression, confident amateurism and the joy of simply «messing about» – always together. But in order to do these things, we need somewhere to play.