Madison teaching a vinyl workshop. Pic: Cornelia Falknäs.

It’s early on a Thursday evening, and in the dimly lit basement of Dalston Superstore, vinyl DJ Auntie Maureen is talking about clearing out men from her record collection. Upstairs, female, non-binary and transgender vinyl DJs are spinning records one after another, already making people dance. It’s the first anniversary of Vinyl Bitch, a community on a mission to empower FLINTA (Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Nonbinary, Trans and Agender) turntable DJs of all skill levels, and just like this night is just starting, so is their fight for inclusion in the world of vinyl DJing.

For the past year, Vinyl Bitch has been hosting monthly open decks at the queer venue Dalston Superstore on Kingsland High Street, but also workshops, record shop crawls and parties. Since they started, vinyl sales in the UK have hit the highest levels since 1990, and with over 15 record shops, their home borough Hackney is something of a hotspot for what’s now commonly referred to as the “vinyl revival”. Against this backdrop, Vinyl Bitch’s efforts to democratise vinyl DJ scene is riding the zeitgeist.

“I think the timing of the resurgence of vinyl, and also the MeToo movement and kind of these continued discussions on making spaces more inclusive, and you know, FLINTA-focused spaces, I think just like… it’s time!” says founder Madison True, also known by her DJ alias MADDØG.

She started Vinyl Bitch after encountering “gatekeepy” attitudes from male vinyl DJs in Hackney Wick when she had just moved to London. “I hadn’t experienced that in a while, because I’ve been DJing professionally for a long time, so experiencing that as an adult woman, I was like, damn, this sucks. And meanwhile, I’m playing all these open decks, and I’m either the only girl or the only girl playing vinyl. And I get the girlfriends of their boyfriends who are playing being like ‘oh my gosh, I want to learn how to do this, but I could never, it seems so hard, it seems so complicated’. And I’m like, ‘what your boyfriend is doing is not that hard and not that complicated’. So I was just creating the thing that I wish I had when I came here, the FLINTA only open decks, and something that was focused on vinyl in a space that is safe and where people are like-minded and no one’s mansplaining, no one’s watching you.”

In the basement, the vinyl listening session and discussion has turned into a workshop, and a rhythmic one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight from a practice record can be heard over and over as FLINTA beginner DJs are taught how to use the turntables and take turns beat matching.

Meanwhile, the DJ Koast is playing upstairs. She has been DJing professionally for years, and although she considers London generally more diverse and open-minded than many other places, she still thinks the vinyl DJing industry caters mostly to cis men. 

Koast. Pic: Cornelia Falknäs.

“You know, most club owners are cis men, most promoters are cis men, most managers are cis men. Around London, some of the smaller parties are dominated by men, and they have girls in the room but they don’t let them play, it’s the guys that decide who’s going to play, and it’s terrible. I think that’s also why the girls need to support the girls. If you see a girl playing in your local bar, go say hi.” 

Vinyl Bitch, she sees as a light in the darkness: “It makes people feel so welcome, and people are so friendly! Madison has created something beautiful. I want the people to come and join Vinyl Bitch, not to be shy, just come and play for the first time. It’s an ideal place to start playing vinyl because nobody will judge you.”

The music industry is still riddled with misogyny: earlier this year, a House of Commons Committee report exposed problems such as sexual harassment and the limitations women in the music industry face. According to a report from the Jaguar Foundation female and non-binary DJs made up a mere 28% of the DJs booked to UK festivals in 2022. 

Madison thinks that vinyl culture specifically has extra layers of exclusion and misogyny compared to digital DJing. “There’s so many layers of more technical knowledge and gatekeeping, and also record culture of first releases, represses, audio quality, album artwork and produce, because you have this physical format. So then there’s the knowledge around the whole physical format, where with CDJ-DJing, not to knock it, but it’s just an audio file, it’s an MP3. When you have a turntable, there’s so many different components, and there is a lot of history with it too. And it’s the gatekeeping around the knowledge of these systems.” 

And then there’s the record shop – a physical space outside of the club with its own dynamics. Madison says: “A big part of why we do the record crawls is to go dominate those male-dominated spaces and take space up within them, because the majority of record shops are owned by men, ran by men, and it can feel uncomfortable stepping into a record shop and you walk in and you’re an anomaly, and everyone looks at you.” 

When asked what record shops could do to become more inclusive, she says: “I think it is really important when you walk into a shop who you’re seeing there. So I think making sure your staff is inclusive, and then that creates a different dynamic and culture within your shop.”

People dancing at Vinyl Bitch’s anniversary party. Pic: Cornelia Falknäs.

Towards the end of the night, the workshop has finished and everyone has moved upstairs to the now packed dancefloor where DJ Laura Dance is playing the closing set. Laura, a transgender woman says she’s seen both sides of this world. “I wasn’t always a transgender woman, so I have male privilege in the sense of my experience of musical culture, and I have seen DJing from two perspectives, one with maleness and one now from the position of a transgender woman. I think record shops are quite hierarchical anyway, and my experience in both gender roles has been that there are insiders and there are outsiders.. That hierarchy would certainly apply even more so to LGBT people and to women, because of gender or because of sexuality, but it’s there anyway, and that’s just another version to navigate. And I think that’s difficult to navigate, but things like Vinyl Bitch, in fact, really do navigate that.”

Laura Dance. Pic: Cornelia Falknäs.

The night after the anniversary party, Madison has a bad experience with men at a big club in central London.

“There are so many layers to why this initiative is needed, and this is why we’re doing this. Even with the election, I’m American, and with the election we had, this is why we’re doing this. This is why we’re protecting queer folks. This is why we’re protecting trans folks. This is why we’re building community, because we have to in times like these, because that’s all we got, this needs to continue.”