As she approached her 60th birthday, Cathy Loughead made a short list. She wanted to learn a new skill, and go on an adventure. But deciding what sort of adventure was tricky. She imagined something physical – “a mountain somewhere”.
One day, a friend shared a post on Facebook for Unglamorous Music, a project calling for women of all ages in Leicester, where she lives, to start playing instruments and form bands. The meeting was on a Sunday afternoon. “I thought: ‘It will get me out of the house,’” she says.
In the wake of Covid, she worked (as a project manager in the NHS) mostly from the home she shares with her husband, Steve. “I was getting really conscious that I was spending a lot of my day not seeing other people,” she says. “It just wasn’t fulfilling.”
Loughead would never normally have entered the Stayfree music studio by the canal in Leicester. When she arrived for the introductory session, there were “young lads in black hanging out on the steps”.
Inside, all the instruments provided were electric. “I hadn’t realised it was about being in a rock band,” she says. She gravitated to a keyboard: as a student she had bought a piano for £14 in a jumble sale and “tinkled” on it. She joined the “absolute beginners” group. “It didn’t matter that I didn’t know anything,” she says. “It felt good.”
She went back the following week, and the next. When the organiser spotted Loughead playing chords, she moved her into a different room, with a drummer and three guitarists. “Right, you’ve got a keyboard player now,” they were told. Loughead was suddenly in a band, with a gig lined up for International Women’s Day. She gasps at the memory. The band – they quickly came up with the name Velvet Crisis – had 66 days to get ready.
Loughead had grown up in Liverpool, working-class, she says. Her dad worked as a printer, and loved opera. She preferred house, funk and rap. Now, at 60, she was keyboardist and a vocalist in a garage punk band. But then, “with all music, you use it to tell a story or to say something”. She has written songs against capitalism, and about her son and daughter leaving home.
Garage punk is “incredibly forgiving … If you’re thrashing it out, nobody knows that you’re pressing a G instead of an A.” Velvet Crisis have performed six gigs so far, at bars and pubs, and the Chainmakers festival in Cradley Heath. At their last show, Loughead says: “People were saying to us: ‘Have you got any merch?’”
Her four bandmates range in age from their 30s to 70. Loughead sports purple nail polish. She wouldn’t have worn that before, she says. These days, when she tours the charity shops for new clothes, she’s thinking: “Will that look good on stage?” She is drawn to “more Doc Marteny styles … I’m being more adventurous,” she says.
It sounds as if she found what she was looking for. “It was perfect,” she says. “Getting some affirmation, learning something new, being with a really diverse group of women. It’s given me a confidence that I didn’t have before.”
She remembers being called “ugly” as a child. The hurtful comment stuck with her and made her think: “I’m not attractive because I’m not pretty, and also I’m big.”
“For me to be on a stage – singing, for goodness sake!” she says. “And have people look at me, and for that not to be crushing, or for me to walk away.”
Loughead takes singing lessons now. She and her bandmates have acquired their own instruments, “our own amps and bits of kit”. They have a gig next month at the Soundhouse, Leicester, and are recording two of their songs for an Unglamorous Music EP.
“We practise, we play, we sing … It gives me absolute freedom from anything else that’s going on in my life,” she says. “I come out of the studio, and I am always buzzing and elated.”
As she says: “The adventure doesn’t have to be on the other side of the world. It can be just around the corner.”
