Ready to Riot
In Riot Women, five middle-aged women come together to form a punk band and discover they have a lot to say. Writer and director Sally Wainwright joins real punk duo ARXX to tell DQ about making the series and producing the show’s original songs.
A teacher, a police officer, a pub landlady, a midwife and a shoplifting freeloader walk into a bar… Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – but in the hands of Sally Wainwright, the chances are you haven’t.
The Bafta-winning writer and director is best known for police drama Happy Valley, period series Gentleman Jack and comedy-drama Last Tango in Halifax. She now brings her own blend of humour and emotion to the story of a group of middle-aged women who form a punk rock band in the back room of their local pub, with an ambition to take part in a local talent contest.
Set and filmed in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, the music drama introduces teacher Beth (Joanna Scanlan), police officer Holly (Tamzin Grieg), landlady Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne), midwife Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore) and shoplifter Kitty (Rosalie Craig), who come together to start a band. But rather than performing covers, they quickly find their own voices and discover they have a lot to say.
Over the course of the six-part BBC and BritBox series, which is packed with a punchy playlist and four original songs performed by the band, Beth and Kitty also discover a surprising, heartbreaking connection, while the women all face issues relating to their parents and their children.
The cast also includes Taj Atwal, Chandeep Uppal and Macy Seelochan as Nisha, Kam and Miranda, the band’s riotous backing singers
“I hope that people like being told a good story, irrespective of gender or age or anything like that,” Wainwright tells DQ. “I’m just hoping people get that it’s got a lot to offer, and the fact that it’s about women at my age forming a rock band is hopefully not a turn-off because I wanted to try and find a way to write about women going through things like the menopause. When you get to my age, you just get a lot of pressure on you.
“It started for me when my mother developed dementia, and I had to deal with that. I had a lot of pressure at work, family life. You get to a certain age where you feel like you’re juggling a lot of stuff and it doesn’t revolve around you. You’re the one juggling it, and you’re the one disappearing in the middle of it all. That’s how I felt – and with the menopause, you do change physically, because you’re losing those hormones that have given you a lot of energy. I wanted to find an interesting way of writing about that that wouldn’t be a turn-off.”
The idea behind Riot Women has been percolating over the last decade, but Wainwright didn’t start work on it until she completed seasons of Gentleman Jack, Happy Valley and her fantastical historical series Renegade Nell.
But her ambitions to write a music drama date back even further, to the time she first watched 1970s British series Rock Follies of 77 as a 13-year-old. “It changed my life,” she says. “It was one of those things where you just go, ‘Oh, that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna make telly like that.’ It was a real, definite moment in my life, and ever since then, I’ve wanted to write about a female rock band. Then it just seemed a great opportunity to combine it with the things I was talking about. So rather than writing about young people in a rock band, it’s writing about women who are just as angry as young people.”
With five central characters, Wainwright challenged herself to construct five very different women who could be sufficiently varied while all having different strengths of friendship between them. Beth and Jess were at school together, Beth doesn’t know Holly, and Jess knows Holly because the police officer is often called to the pub when things get rowdy.
“And nobody knows Yvonne, because she’s Holly’s annoying sister,” Wainwright says. “So it was just working out all those dynamics and relationships. That was quite a conscious construction process.”
Then, when the writer realised “there was a layer missing,” the solution arrived in the form of Kitty, after hearing an anecdote about a badly behaved woman and wondering what causes people to behave in a way that is considered bad. “It’s usually that they’re damaged in some way, so that made me start the process of working out who Kitty was. It came from thinking about how do people end up really fucked up and behave erratically, and hurt other people as a result.”
But signing up for Riot Women, the cast didn’t just take on an acting role. They also had to become the band, with Beth on keys, Holly and Yvonne playing guitar and Jess on drums, all behind lead singer Kitty.
“They were all pretty keen to come do it,” says Wainwright about the actors, who spent six months learning how to play their instruments and then recorded the show’s music together as a real band. “The interesting one was Kitty, because we had to get somebody who could sing. A lot of actors do sing, but we needed somebody who could really, really belt. I wanted Rosalie to come in because I’d seen her in the West End.
“We saw three people, and when she auditioned, I was just gobsmacked. She came in and just owned the part so thoroughly. It’s like she was going, ‘This is mine. I’m having it.’ She might as well have said that. It’s the best audition I’ve ever seen by quite a long way. It was kind of mind-blowing.”
Wainwright had hoped to have the band playing together on set during filming but was soon dissuaded by the complexities of recording a live performance that would have been usable in the final cut. “It was just a massive learning curve,” she admits. “But the point is, it is them. They did learn to play those instruments, and they have really become a band.
“I hate it when you see people miming. You can see they’re not really playing. For me, it instantly takes me out of the drama. I don’t want people to doubt that they’re playing.”
With the band in place, Wainwright then needed to consider how the show’s original music would feature in the series. “Early on in the process, I did wonder if it should be a musical where they do just randomly burst into song,” she says. In the end, she chose not to follow that approach, so when they do play together, “it is an organic part of the drama. Nothing feels wedged in.”
To help create those songs – Just Like Your Mother, Shitting Pineapples, Seeing Red and Riot Women – Wainwright partnered with Brighton punk duo Hanni Pidduck and Clara Townsend, better known on stage as ARXX. The writer would give them some ideas for the songs, odd lyrics and even a drum beat (Wainwright also learned to play the drums in preparation for the show). Then it was over to vocalist and guitarist Pidduck and drummer Townsend to do the rest.
“We gave them the ingredients and then they came back with a song, and they’ve just done a wonderful job,” Wainwright says. “All four songs are just really splendid. I’m really pleased with it. They got my humour straight away, so it does feel seamless. It doesn’t feel like, ‘Oh, suddenly there’s a song.’ It all blends together really nicely.”
ARXX were initially called in to demo for a mysterious project. “We thought it was a scam,” reveals Pidduck. Then they didn’t think much of it – until they were offered a meeting with Wainwright, who spent the day with them discussing favourite bands, the types of pedals the guitarists would be using and the types of things musicians wouldn’t want to see in a music show. Wainwright even went to one of their shows.
“I was so impressed by how much she was willing to take information from people who do it in their profession,” Pidduck continues. “She’s not proud in the sense that she thinks she knows everything. She’s so open to taking on other ideas, which really strengthens her script so much.”
With the sound of Riot Women described as “middle-aged, menopausal and invisible,” ARXX used their own experience of starting a band from scratch to imagine how Kitty, Beth and the group might write their own songs. Those two characters work together to compose Just Like Your Mother in episode two.
“It’s normally always the first thing that you came up with was the right thing,” Townsend says. “If you try to complicate it too much, then it doesn’t become punk. You go more into the polished rock genre. We had to really restrain ourselves.”
“The music side of it was really freeing,” says Pidduck, “because ultimately, in punk, it’s about having a message. It’s not about how you deliver it, in a way. So the lyrics were the thing that we scrutinised over, and then everything else, we just went for it.”
The duo would often start with a chorus, the words and the melody and build around that with either a guitar part from Pidduck or a drum beat from Townsend. “With Seeing Red, I was like, ‘Oh, it should go, ‘And I’m seeing red, red, red,’ and then you’re like, ‘OK, what chord is that?’ Then the song tumbles from there,” Pidduck says.
The full demo would then be written in their practice studio, before producer Steven Ansell helped to build up the song. That Riot Women features five people, rather than two, presented somewhat of a challenge, however, as Pidduck had to write a keyboard part especially for Beth to play in the show.
One song in particular stands out: the childbirth-themed Shitting Pineapples. “It is incredibly wordy, so trying to figure that one out was maybe trickier than the rest of them,” Pidduck states, “but it was just fun to write. Just Like Your Mother was the first demo we did, and I never felt any pressure during the whole thing. Everybody’s been so lovely and chill and trusting in what we’ve been doing.”
“We wrote them in the practice studio and we were just laughing,” Townsend remembers, “because when we were playing the songs, we were like, ‘What are the bands next door thinking?’ We were just singing, ‘Shitting pineapples…’ It was quite funny singing those lyrics in a public space where no one else knows the context. Sally really wanted it to be humorous, so we got free rein.”
Wainwright also stepped behind the camera as the show’s lead director, to ensure she established the right tone for the series, which is produced by Drama Republic and distributed by Mediawan Rights.
“This was a big learning curve for all of us. None of us have done anything quite like this before,” she says. “With the music It’s a whole layer of stuff that you don’t normally have to contend with. But weirdly, it’s given it a fabulous energy and it really brought the women together.
“When they were rehearsing together, they really bonded. The first time they played Seeing Red together in the studio where we were rehearsing, they were just ecstatic when they got to the end of it. It had a real effect on them. They were really pleased with themselves. It was quite a moment. It was just joyous.”
With the series launching on BBC One and BBC iPlayer this Sunday – and soon in the US and Canada on BritBox – perhaps it’s not too far-fetched to imagine a Riot Women tour in the future.
“They could,” Wainwright adds. “I hope they’re still practising in case we get a second season.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Girls5Eva: Four women in a faded 90s girl group reunite decades later after their only hit is sampled by a current pop star, and stumbling into hilarious and heartfelt attempts at reclaiming their musical dreams while navigating middle age.
Daisy Jones & The Six: In 1970s LA, a charistmatic but turbulent rock band finds unexpected fame as personal dramas and romantic entanglements threaten to implode their success, all captured through a documentary format.
We Are Lady Parts: An anarchic and irreverent music comedy about a Muslim female punk band who are on a mission to find a lead guitarist and maybe get a proper gig.
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tagged in: Amelia Bullmore, BBC, Britbox, Gentleman Jack, Happy Valley, Joanna Scanlan, Last Tango in Halifax, Lorraine Ashbourne, Riot Women, Rosalie Craig, Sally Wainwright, Tamzin Grieg