Planet Slop rounds off Pride Week with an extensive playlist celebrating the greatest past, present and future queer artists.

Well…what a week that was!

If you haven’t been paying attention, we’ve been celebrating Liverpool Pride all week by exploring various aspects of queer culture, speaking to and hearing from queer people from different backgrounds – or at least as much as we could fit in five days.

Of course, the celebrations are about to leave the internet and make their way onto the streets of Liverpool for the entire weekend – and Planet Slop will be around, so make sure you come over and say hi!

But when it came to ending this week of content, we weren’t sure what we wanted to do.

We could have done another in-depth piece but, to be honest, it’s Friday and who really wants to read something that long today?

So, we thought we’d end with a little party of our own.

We started going through our favourite queer artists today, but the more we thought about it, the more we went back and revisited important artists from the history of hip pop rock & soul.

We went back, far back, to the very beginnings of rock & roll; Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a queer woman and one of the greatest influences on the very formation of rock & roll. Little Richard, a queer man who further laid the foundation for rock & roll.

It was at this point that we decided to put together a list of 100 songs by 100 queer artists, stretching back from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, right up the the plethora of queer artists working both underground and in the pop mainstream all over the world today.

What we’ve come out with is a playlist that shows the influence LGBTQ+ people have had on popular music of all forms.

Obviously, it isn’t a complete list – there will be many glaring omissions – and in some cases there may be a group with only one key queer member (such as Nona Hendryx in Patti LaBelle & The Bluebelles), and some were not outed until either later in life, or in the case of Luther Vandross after their death.

We did, of course, want to keep flying the pink flag for queer Liverpool, so not only did we make sure to include legendary figures such as Pete Burns and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but also queer artists working out of the city today; Queen Zee, Amique, Claire Welles, Qfolk.

In the middle of it all, we hope we have at least given you a little taste of the queer history of modern music.