During their set at the Byron Bay leg of this years Falls Festival, Melbourne band Camp Cope played their latest single The Opener, which criticises gender bias in the industry, to a tent packed full of bodies. For this particular performance, lead-singer Georgia Maq altered the lyrics to say “It’s another man telling us we can’t fill up a tent, it’s another fucking festival booking only nine women.”
Camp Cope posted footage of the performance to Instagram with the caption “it’s another festival saying we can’t play a main stage…”
Camp Cope are sick of the music industry bullshit, and they’re calling it out. Straight to its face.
After the video was posted, many Aussie musicians supported Camp Cope’s statement, with Jen Cloher and Julia Jacklin providing their accounts of the festival via Facebook.
“We watched them play at 3:30pm in Lorne, to a tent that was so full it was spilling out to the sides. I wondered why they weren’t playing the main stage, which I might add, didn’t have a single non-male artist scheduled that day,” Cloher wrote.
Sydney singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin wrote: “whether or not we realise it at the time, that lack of representation chips away at our belief that we can do this and it chips away at the audiences belief that we can too.”
Falls Festival released an official statement on the issue, saying:
“Whilst we have a very conscious and strong agenda to book female talent, it isn’t always available to us at that headline level. We have a long term strategy, which is present on this year’s Falls line up, of giving opportunities to new and middle range female Australian artists, to nurture and grow the future pool of female headline options.”
Camp Cope then took aim at another issue faced by female festival goers, by calling on fellow artists to take a stand against sexual assault in the music industry.
The band made a run of T-shirts reading “The person wearing this shirt stands against sexual assault and demands a change.”
“Be brave and wear this on stage. come & find us over the weekend at falls, we’ll be the one’s everyone is hiding from,” Camp Cope wrote via Facebook to their fellow festival performers.
Artists seen wearing the shirt include Alex Lahey, Luca Brasi, DZ Deathrays, Ecca Vandal, Total Giovanni, Bad Dreems, Wet Lips, Winston Surfshirt and Thundamentals.
