It's a greyish Saturday afternoon in late August, and alongside other street party attenders, I'm watching two flamboyantly dressed women, one clutching a flute, backed by three male musicians while they shout out the lyrics to their new song, Kiddy Ska Party. "I told you about my stitches / I told you about my stitches / Stop talking about my stitches / Stop talking about my stitches," one is yelling. In the front, her almost-two-year-old daughter gestures towards her while an audience of adults, from old blokes with beers to young parents with prams, look alternately elated and amused.
Somewhere near the jerk chicken stall my son runs up and down, having never played on a street without cars before. The scene is one of beautiful, eccentric mayhem. This is postpartum punk, the ethos behind the band Pushy Pushy Pushy, "two fresh mothers and three sound candies", on what they hope is a journey towards the Pyramid stage.
Lead singers Ania Poullain-Majchrzak and Florence Devereux, who play alongside John on drums, Andrew on guitar and George on bass, were making music before they had children, but it was motherhood that liberated them creatively. I spoke to the duo in a pub local to us. "I don't want to swear," Devereux grins a bit sheepishly, as though there are kids listening, "but you give less of a fuck, in a way.
When you become a mum, your tolerance for caring becomes a lot less. So it kind of unleashed us." Considering all the screaming, bodily fluids and late nights, it'.