Every Song I Love — 5. Daphne & Celeste: You and I Alone
If you’d told me back in 2000, that I would one day be writing a blog series about every good song by anybody, and that one of my first five articles would be about Daphne & Celeste, it’s fair to say I would have been more than a little surprised. (I may also have asked what a blog was, and why you had travelled back in time just to give me this less than crucial information).
Daphne & Celeste were first known for two novelty, playground-chant style singles ‘Ooh Stick You’ and ‘U.G.L.Y’, but they were best known for their performance at the 2000 Reading Festival. Nowadays the Reading Festival has quite an eclectic line-up, and features pop acts like Billie Eilish and Becky Hill, but at that time it was still very much a rock and indie festival, aimed at teenage moshers, grungers & grebos. Pop was anathema to attendees, so much so that in the late nineties and early 2000s, the organisers decided it would be a hilarious idea to add a single pop act to play a short set on the main stage on the Saturday of the festival, primarily for the crowds to take the mickey out of, or at best to enjoy ‘ironically’. Preferably as novelty a pop act as possible, as the better known acts were hardly likely to put themselves up for such a thankless task.
As a young man at this time. I didn’t see anything wrong with this idea. In fact I attended the 2001 Reading Festival, when the act in question were Public Domain, a sort of pop-trance act, best known for their single ‘Bass in the Place, London’. I pottered down to the main stage early on the Saturday to watch them, expecting a good laugh, but ended up raving away to a set that was more memorable than most others I saw that weekend, (Mogwai an honourable exception), so the joke was on me and my snobbery.
Daphne & Celeste were by the far the best known example of these Reading pop performances, but before we talk about them, let’s set a little context. The music industry in the 1990s was a deeply misogynistic place (as before and since, although just maybe things have improved a tiny bit?). If you doubt this, I would strongly recommend reading this book by Miki Berenyi from Lush, or indeed interviews with any women who were in bands at that time.
Music fans were not much better, and festivals were the perfectly place for their misogyny to flourish, especially those where young men were the dominant part of the audience. Away from home, often for the first time, extremely drunk, and able to hide themselves in the crowd, behaviour was often appalling. The most well known example of this was the Woodstock 99 festival in the US, a terribly organised and programmed festival which descended into violence, abuse of the few female performers and cases of rape and sexual assault.
Reading Festival was the closest UK equivalent to this, with the youngest and most male-skewing audience. Whilst there was no single disaster on the scale of Woodstock 99, the behaviour was still awful, as I can report first hand having attended a number times. Reports of sexual assault and rape were frequent. Things were set on fire, including peoples tents. Portaloos were pushed over, sometimes with people inside, which people thought was hilarious, but maybe not so much for the individual concerned, ending up in hospital covered in shit.
So, perhaps not a great idea, in this context, to put on the main stage two teenage girls to act as sacrificial lambs to the baying mob. Sure enough, almost as soon as they came on stage, the audience started to throw things, most dangerously glass bottles, often filled with piss. Some had even come prepared with home made signs, telling them to die, or featuring misogynistic abuse. Even as a young and stupid man, I don’t think I ever felt they deserved this, but my attitude was, unfairly, along the lines of “what did they expect”
The more I thought about it the more awful it seemed though. Any artist on stage should be respected, regardless of how much or little you’re enjoying their music. To throw something on stage, even without intent to injure is unacceptable, but with Daphne and Celeste the aim seemed not just to hurt but humiliate (how else to explain the bottles of piss). The sight of a mob of young men aiming to humiliate and injure these teenage girls was an awful one, and if it’s a leap to link this to gang rape culture, it’s not, I think, a huge one.
Daphne and Celeste stuck it out though, even giving some stick back to the audience, and completed their set at risk to their own safety, ending up being congratulated by bands like Slipknot & Rage Against The Machine backstage, who respected their bravery if not necessarily their music.
Their music careers fizzled out pretty swiftly after that, being dropped by their label in 2001, formally splitting in 2002, and it seemed that was that. Daphne & Celeste were destined to be a minor footnote in pop history, best known for being attacked at their biggest live show. The haters had won?
Except, fast-forward thirteen years and Daphne & Celeste were back. They had befriended electronic music produce Max Tundra over social media, and collaborated on a comeback single ‘You and I Alone’, and unlike their earlier hits it was genuinely brilliant. You and I Alone sits perfectly between sixties girl group and eighties Madonna, with a throughly modern minimal synth production, playing perfectly to Daphne & Celeste’s strengths.
Was ‘You and I Alone’ a massive hit? No. But it deserved to be, and it’s better than anything put out by 90% of the other bands who were on that Reading 2000 line-up with them. It wasn’t a one-off either, with the album that eventually followed having half a dozen other good songs (Sunny Day is another favourite).
There has been no new music since, and it’s possible that there may never be, but whether there is or not, they at least have left a musical legacy greater than being famed for bottled on stage. And it may well be that most people don’t know that they went on to put out a great single, but I know that, and most importantly they know that, and that can only mean that Daphne and Celeste won in the end.
Originally published at http://markjwray.com on February 16, 2024.
