24 years of
YWMP

Roots

In the early 1990s, a series of workshops were held with the aim of empowering women in all aspects of playing in bands. As part of this, musician Sammy Hurden was asked to start a choir for women in Salisbury, called Brilliant Birthdays. A few people would drive up with Sammy from Dorset to take part in the choir, including Kate Garrett, Abbie Lathe, and Polly Harvey.

It was at this time also that Kate, Abbie, and Sammy started singing as Trio Hysteria. Sammy also began hosting workshops and gigs and become involved with a Women’s Music Festival that had started up in Chard, Somerset. Sammy took Brilliant Birthdays and Trio Hysteria to Somerset and at one point was asked to do a series of workshops with young women at the festival. Sammy was unavailable so she suggested Kate Garrett take on the workshops.

As the nineties passed, Kate held a few workshops for young women at Bridport Arts Centre in Dorset and they were a resounding success. After the millennium, she began working at the Ark T studio in Oxford, where the Young Women’s Band Project (YWBP) was formed.

Empowerment

At the YWBP sessions, the young women would write and record music together and meet female leaders in the music industry, such as session musicians, sound engineers, and touring musicians. One of the attendees, Zahra Haji Fath Ali Tehrani, began to work with Kate as a trainee, and together they ran workshops and worked towards releasing Spark, a compilation of music by the young women and other female musicians across Oxfordshire.

The success of YWBP continued to grow as the group released more compilations, named Spark 2 and Spark 3. The CDs were released with events coordinated at the institutions Modern Art Oxford and the O2 Academy Oxford. As well as increasing visibility of women in the Oxford music scene itself, Zahra and Kate also ran workshops that allowed women to question the unequal position of women in the music industry. One activity was analysis of popular music magazines, whereby the young women would count how many pages you read until you saw a woman, see how she was represented, and the implications of this. Kate and Zahra continued their aim to challenge the status quo of the music industry, and in 2006, through the Arts Council, YWBP filmed and produced a documentary with Film Oxford called Young Women Rock. 

In the late 2000s, Kate was diagnosed with breast cancer but continued to write, perform and work with young women over the two years she was battling the disease. Before her death, Kate and Zahra discussed the future of the project and how it should continue the work that Kate had started. Kate died in 2009, leaving Zahra the project and a legacy that gave girls the support, time and resources to discover and develop their musical talents.

Representation

Zahra returned to Ark T to continue running the workshops with the view to include more genres of music in the project. Zahra had been working with increasing numbers of rappers and singers, and had noticed a lack of representation of this music and diversity in the Oxford music scene. She changed the name of the project to the Young Women’s Music Project (YWMP).

As Zahra became an independent practitioner she moved her work around various studios in Oxford, including Safehouse Studio, Studio Blanco and various others. The workshops increased in frequency to twice monthly and were hosted on occasion by prominent female musicians from all different genres of music, such as Yarah Bravo, Viv Albertine, NoLay, and Sabrina Chap. Recording, fundraising performances at festivals, visits to studios and discussions about feminism are some of many activities undertaken by YWMP that provide the young women with knowledge, skills and confidence to enter the music industry. YWMP has also performed outreach work to hospitals and schools across Oxford to provide services to women whose voices have been lacking in the music industry and wider society.

Change

After Operation Bullfinch made visible the systematic and large-scale sexual abuse of young people in Oxfordshire, Zahra helped to organize WO-MAN-ITY festival as a means to support and guide young women in a society where violence against women is repressed and female voices ignored. The event provided self-defence classes and discussion surrounding sexual violence as well as performances and workshops.

This was the beginning of YWMP hosting a number of events in order to encourage women and hip hop artists to be heard in Oxfordshire and beyond. Events were held at Central Saint Martins and the Ashmolean Museum, allowing young people to take control of a place that was seen as inaccessible or hostile to them. 

YWMP continues to expand on previous work by involving all members of the community, encouraging people to talk about their feelings, address gender imbalance and reclaim space.  The second WO-MAN-ITY festival was held at Modern Art Oxford this year, with talks about repressive language, consent, education, and inequality preceding performances by attendees and established musicians.  

In 2015, the Young Women’s Music Project became a registered charity, growing in scope and ambition while also continuing what it set out to do from the outset: provide an inclusive and supportive space for young women to make music together, helping them to learn new skills, express themselves, and grow in confidence. It is testament to the work of the project that YWMP has inspired generations of women with the ability to make music and also the belief that society can be changed for the better. 

Growth

In 2019, YWMP launched the Sisterhood Project with the support of the Logan Foundation: hiring and supporting the development of three new members of staff-- all young women, with both Session Assistants having participated in the project themselves as teenagers. The project has continued growing with the new team, reaching more young people and preparing for YWMP’s biggest year yet: 20 events to celebrate 20 years of YWMP in 2020! 

2021 was the year YWMP launched WINGS - a project supporting people who menstruate or have young children and cannot access sanitary products or nappies in Oxford. We believe that no one should have to go without these essentials and that they must be free and easily accessible to everyone.

Re-Visioning

In 2024 Young Women’s Music Project changed its name to YWMP – we removed all the words associated with the past project to not exclude trans or non-binary people. Following 2 years of consultation with our community we made the decision to better reflect the participants we support currently and capture the changes in language that are more inclusive around gender.

Kate’s Story

There was something indescribably vital about Kate Garrett. Her very existence was a challenge to embrace life. She would hold your gaze with an unswerving intensity, make you feel that, at that moment, you were the only other person in the world and dare you to meet her on her terms.Born in Dorset in the final dimming days of 1971 she was a daughter of the English countryside, a product of its rhythms and cadences. Then, moving to Oxford in the early 90s, she put on her city skin and, like an urban fox, made it her home.

Having played in a duo as a teenager with Polly Harvey, her musical path took her through the alternative rock of The Mystics, the wayward acapella of Trio Hysteria and finally to The Kate Garrett Band where her own music finally took centre stage. On the way she made an indelible impression on those she gave her time to, especially through the Young Women's Music Project in Oxford.

On her final EP, the first three tracks, Maid of the Wave, The Leaving and Diamonds are a reminder of the molten-glass quality of her voice. At once one can hear echoes of some of Britain’s greatest songwriters and yet it’s wholly Kate, every bit their equal, every inch herself. They were recorded in late 2008 at the home she shared with her husband and musical collaborator Barney Morse-Brown in Cumnor.

Kate recorded the last of the four, The Rest Will Follow, at her final concert, in Cumnor outside Oxford, on 21st February 2009 (other voices were added later for this EP). That clarity has gone. She is struggling to sing. ‘Let go. The rest must follow. ‘Cos I’m in heaven now.’ Kate died almost exactly three months later, on 22nd May, taken by breast cancer. And yet somehow she never left. Play this EP and she’s right back with us, challenging us to live without fear, without compromise. By doing so we make space for a little piece of her to live on in us all.

https://kategarrett.co.uk/