Rockabilly: girls in frocks and boys behind the decks, right? Well at Brighton’s newest girl-friendly, gay-friendly club night, Frockabilly, founder and lady DJ Lonesome M (right, with Becky Bad Luck) is taking over the tunes too . . .
Serena: Hi Lonesome M! So what exactly do you play on your wheels of steel?
Lonesome M: I don’t only play rockabilly at Frockabilly; I play rock’n'roll and rhythm & blues too. I sometimes even veer towards a bit of skiffle or even jazz when I DJ. The only restriction is that any music I play has to have been recorded between 1950 and 1959.
S: What draws you to this kind of music?
LM: It’s the whole 1950s ‘thing’ that I love; not just rockabilly (although that’s a big part of it). I like the films, clothes, books and designs of the period, both British and American.
My love of the music began in my teens. I hung around with a few people who would probably have described themselves as psychobillies or rockabillies. I also remember going to see a band called Terry and Gerry in the mid-80s. They were a left-wing skiffle revival band (yes, really!) who wrote songs about the miner’s strike and UK housing policy in a 1950s style. They were much-championed by Morrissey (another person who contributed to my love of 1950s style) and I thought they were great.
I continued to love the 1950s crooners and rock’n'roll stars throughout my life but then embraced the scene whole-heartedly again in the past couple of years, particularly after I learned to jive.
S: What’s with the DJ name?
LM: Thinking up the DJ name took a lot more effort than pretty much 
everything else. I purposely went for something that didn’t give away my gender, partly because of the sexist nature of the scene. I didn’t want to be dismissed out of hand.
I trawled rockabilly song lyrics and ‘lonesome’ seemed a recurring theme. At the time I was single and, if the truth be told, a little lonesome, so it seemed to fit!
S: I remember one Elvis song that goes: “I’d rather see you dead little girl than be with another man”, how do you feel about the somewhat retrograde sexual politics in rockabilly lyrics?
LM: Yes, some of the lyrics are sexist. Little changes, I guess, and the 1950s was not a particularly liberated era. I would have found it very hard to live then. Some of the tunes have such sexist lyrics that I can’t even bear to play them. But many of the songs are about love and excitement, particularly for the ‘newly defined’ teenage crowd, and the sentiments they convey are much the same today, if a little more innocent.
And I make a conscious effort to play more of the female vocalists that are not heard as often on the mainstream rockabilly scene.
S: How did you get into DJing?
LM: Purely by accident. I had started hanging out on the rockabilly scene in Brighton. Although it’s a thriving scene with some really good club nights it is (almost) overwhelmingly dominated by straight men. In June 2009 I went to a rockabilly weekender at Camber Sands and, although I enjoyed it, I felt very much alone as a lesbian in a very, very heterosexual world. I knew that a lot of women I knew, and a lot of queers, had learned to jive and loved the music but who never went out on the scene. The idea for Frockabilly was born.
I wanted to set up a night that, although certainly not exclusively for gay people, would reject the macho, unreconstructed nature of some other parts of the scene, and create a fun, inclusive environment where everyone could feel comfortable to enjoy the music.
I located a venue fairly quickly but the only rockabilly DJs I knew were straight men. Nice straight men, but straight men all the same. I decided that if I wanted to do something different I needed it to be altogether different. So, having never DJed before, I bought myself some decks and thought, “how hard can this be?” (It turned out to be quite hard, but I’m getting more used to it now!)
S: Who comes to Frockabilly?
LM: The crowds are mixed gay & straight, mixed gender and mixed ages, which is exactly what I wanted to achieve. There’s also a mixture of people who are really into the scene and those who just like to dip a toe into it from time to time. If anything, there are more women than men at Frockabilly, which is great, but sometimes means there’s a lack of leads for dancing.
I suspect that the male rockabilly DJs in Brighton were slightly threatened by a woman starting up a new night, but on the whole they’ve been overwhelmingly helpful and supportive. They certainly don’t intentionally set out to exclude certain groups of people from their events, and they’ve been willing to talk to me about what I’m trying to do. Now that Frockabilly is up and running it’s clear that we attract a quite different crowd to the mainstream rockabilly scene, so I hope I’m not seen as a threat anymore.
However, I was not surprised to find that homophobia is still alive and kicking – at the first Frockabilly one punter was upset to find that there were “too many queers” there. Thankfully he left and has not returned.
On a slightly different note, I’ve been amazed how many women (both straight and lesbian) have come forward to help and support Frockabilly to get off the ground. I’ve had women giving their design skills, their photography, their promotional skills, accountancy skills and their help on the night, all for free, to make the event a success.
S: What are your five favourite tunes to get people on the dancefloor?
LM: They change all the time, but today they are:
Wynona Carr – “Ding Dong Daddy”
Thurston Harris & The Sharps – “Little Bitty Pretty One”
Billy Lee Riley – “Red Hot”
The Collins Kids – “Hoy Hoy”
Eddie Cochran – “Somethin’ Else”
Frockabilly is every other month at the Latest Music Bar, Manchester Street, Brighton. The next two dates are February 5th and April 9th (10pm-2am).