



Long before she was an international pop star, Lauren Mayberry was a feminist. Her interest in gender issues was initially sparked by a youthful viewing of the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, a 1999 reimagining of The Taming of the Shrew starring Julia Stiles that was peppered with references to books like The Feminist Mystique and The Bell Jar. The heroine’s love of Bikini Kill even inspired the young Mayberry to look up the seminal riot grrl band, which she would later cite as one of her musical inspirations. “I remember watching that movie and being like, if she’s the shrew, then the shrew is the coolest one,” says Mayberry.



Born and raised in Scotland, she earned a law degree and Masters degree in journalism before teaming up with musicians Iain Cook and Martin Doherty to form the band CHVRCHES (pronounced “churches”) in 2011. An almost mythical success story ensued: after releasing several songs online, they quickly rocketed to international pop stardom and got signed to a major record label. Within a year, they’d released the EP Recover and their full-length debut The Bones of What You Believe, full of gorgeous, infectious songs like “The Mother We Share” and “Gun.” After experiencing the virulent sexism so often directed at women both in the media spotlight and online, Mayberry has also spoken up again and again about the misogyny that women face in the music world, on the internet, and in all walks of life. In the midst of the tour for the second CHVRCHES album, Every Open Eye, she talked to FREQ about imposter syndrome, what she still loves about social media, and finding the delicate balance between fighting back against harassment and finding balance for yourself.





Interview by Anita Sarkeesian

FREQ: I saw your stage show recently, and it was just incredible. You have a very strong presence, and the physical setup and the performance all work together in an amazing way. It was the first time I’ve seen the band perform and you seemed like you were really in a groove. Lauren Mayberry: I actually used to get quite bad performance anxiety, on the second album especially. For this record, I made a more concerted effort to do the performance stuff that doesn’t necessarily come authentically to me. We want to write things that feel personal to us, but it’s helpful for me in terms of the show to disconnect a little from your actual self. That’s where a lot of the anxiety came from… I’d been in bands for a long time [before CHVRCHES] but I’d never been a professional musician. As much as it was something I’d hoped for, I never thought it would be a reality for me. Then the band took off, which was really incredible, but in the moment people are constantly wanting things from you. I wanted to protect myself but I didn’t know how to do it property. There’s a certain responsibility that comes with fronting a band, and I just felt like I wasn’t equipped to do that effectively and that went into a spiral of feeling like I was letting people down.

FREQ: That’s the core of imposter syndrome. I’ve had similar conversations with a lot of friends and successful people, and it’s really common for successful people to feel as though they don’t know what they’re doing or they wonder if they’re good enough to be doing it. LM: Yeah, I got to a point where I felt incredibly lucky to get to do what I do, but also had a massive imposter complex. Feeling like you’re being constantly critiqued and criticized when you’re already in a negative mindset, you can get into a really horrible spiral. Once you get in that tailspin it’s hard to get out of it. Now at least we’ve done it once, and we’ve had a moment to step back and realize this is our real life. Rather than feeling like you’re constantly fighting in your corner and defending yourself, to come out in front of it and do it the way you feel comfortable doing it, that feels less terrifying… I think having a stage persona, just a slightly tougher version of who you are can also be very helpful. Finding the balance is tricky. Even in terms of the aesthetic of the second record, there were a lot more “don’t fuck with me” parts of it because I wanted to feel like I was coming from a position of strength rather than being pushed down. This is a persona, this is a front; this isn’t how I am every moment of the day. But it’s helpful when you need to get certain things done. I watched the Amy Cuddy TED talk where she talked about about how body language influences your emotions, and how emotions influence body language… how doing certain power poses will trick you into feeling confident. If I pretend to be tougher generally then people will fuck with me less.





FREQ: I feel like it’s a double-edged sword for women, because if you’re too soft and docile you’ll get trampled over. But if you’re too tough and brash and bold, you get told that you’re a huge bitch. LM: I get the two different ends of the spectrum. People say, oh, she’s so cute and tiny and adorable. Or they say, she a heinous bitch! Maybe there’s something in the middle of those things that is true! Especially online, you can only be one or the other. There’s no crossover. I’m not a hugely angry person. I feel like I’m just being assertive and making calls about what i want to do and how i want to do it. It’s interesting how female assertiveness is viewed completely different from male assertiveness, and female anger is viewed completely differently from male anger… You know that that thing where people raise an eyebrow and act like you’re about to go off the handle, when all you said was that you didn’t want to do something. People view me as emotional, but then somehow men being angry isn’t emotion. Guys will say, “I’m not emotional,” right after shouting and punching things. That’s an emotion!

FREQ: You’ve talked a lot about the harassment you’ve experienced in the band. How have the negative responses to you been different from your male bandmates? LM: No one ever threatens to kill [my male bandmates] if they don’t like the album, and the stuff that gets directed at me is aggressive and specifically gender-based… I think it’s about taking up space. They don’t like the idea that a woman is occupying a certain space, or they don’t like her acting a certain way in that space. So then you get the rape threats and the death threats. If you want to undercut a woman, you threaten her with aggression.

FREQ: It’s really frustrating how we have to constantly have these conversations about how women are disproportionately targeted, when it’s a statistical fact. And your situation makes it really apparent: You’re being targeted over your bandmates in a way that’s super cut and dry. LM: It’s been an interesting social study for all of us. Iain and Martin had never been in bands with a woman before. I remember being very worried about [misogyny] early on. We’d all been in bands since were teenagers, and you get a certain amount of that just playing an alternative rock band in a club. I knew what that was like on a smaller level, and so as CHVRCHES was getting bigger I was like, this is what it’s going to be like. The guys were supportive at the time but they probably thought I might be overreacting. But unfortunately, it turns out that I was right. For thoughtful, open-minded guys, it was horrifying for them to see that this actually is a reality. It’s also interesting to look at three people who are equal parts of a project, to see how differently we are valued. We used to get a lot of, “Martin how do you write the songs? Lauren, what kind of tour diet do you go on?”… In reviews, people talk about how I look, about my girlish voice and my pixie-esque demeanor, but they don’t talk about how the guys look.





FREQ: There was a video circulating online a while back where you stood up to a heckler at a show who was yelling “marry me” at you. I really appreciated your response. LM: That one bit me in the ass, didn’t it! [laughs] Most people didn’t appreciate my response. It was an interesting lesson in perspective. When that video was put online it seemed like that guy said one thing and that I just went off on him. But he had been constantly shouting during the show. When you’re the front person, you’re in control of the show to an extent. At this point, it was kind of my job to deal with him, because he had been doing this for 20 minutes and ruining the show for everybody. I tried to do it in a humorous way and move on. But when a snippet of that got put on the internet, i got a lot of people saying, “Why are you such an uptight bitch?” or “You should be grateful for your fans!” What they also don’t see is the night after that we played in Philadelphia and someone threw a jockstrap on stage with a roll of condoms inside of them. When people are upset that I told the “marry me” guy to shut up, they don’t have the rest of the context… Also, in that moment it was meant to be tongue in cheek and reasonably funny, but at the same time if someone said that to me when I was walking down the street i’d tell them to go fuck themselves. If someone said that to a friend when I was walking down the street, I would tell them to go fuck themselves. Why would I defend myself less than I’d defend someone else in that situation?

FREQ: From when the harassment first started till now, are there particular ways that you’ve learned to cope? LM: I learned a lot about myself in good and bad ways on the first record. I think it brought out some good part of my personality but also some bad parts. I learned that i have a lot of anxiety that could be channeled in quite a negative way. By the time I got to the end of first album campaign, we knew that we couldn’t do that again that same way. It wouldn’t be very healthy. We had 6 months off to make a record so I went and did some cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness counseling. Because if I can push through my discomfort, if I can push through that ceiling then nothing on stage will feel as bad as that. It’s also just trying to get a level of self awareness. I used to think that worrying about yourself was quite selfish. But I think there’s a difference between being self aware and exercising self-care and being a martyr and saying, I don’t need anything, I’m totally fine. I try to have internet break days now; I uninstalled the apps from my phone for a while. Knowing when to step back is important. I used to say I had to favorite things [on social media] so people would know that we cared. But I think it was probably just a coverup for the emotional cutting that is looking at newsfeeds. I suppose that’s what makes us a bit sad sometimes when people talk about the [negative] online aspect of the band, because it has also been really, really positive. In general when we go online it’s people tagging us in in pictures with their cats or wearing CHVRCHES shirts. Maybe that’s the cycle of grief, where I start to get angry because I don’t want to lose that part of what we’re doing because of being intimidated. So we need to figure out how to not be intimidated by people and hold on to that other part. FREQ: It’s tough, because when there’s a group of guys who are just horrible misogynists, everyone suffers for it. While I would never say that people need to toughen up to exist on the internet, that’s exactly what happens to us. In order to keep participating in these spaces, you lose a little bit of your humanity because you have to put up walls to deal with all of the horrible harassment that comes your way. How does that affect creativity and art for people who work in creative fields?



LM: It’s interesting because especially for lyric writing people, they want you to be very sensitive and thoughtful and able to feel so many things, but then you have to be that exact same person and be able to soak up all kinds of horrible shit people have said to you. When people ask about the online harassment stuff now, not that i’m blasé about it, but it affects me less than it used to. It’s kind of sad when you get used to it.

FREQ: In your Guardian piece “I will not accept misogyny,” one of the things I found really valuable was you talking about how your band was birthed on the internet in a lot of ways. I felt a lot of similarities there, because my work at Feminist Frequency would not exist without youtube and twitter. And there’s this tension between using the internet to connect with people and these darker corners that rise up in it. LM: Without a doubt, our band wouldn’t be what it is now without the internet. We put a song on Soundcloud, it got picked up by blogs and we got signed maybe 10 months after that. We were touring in America, which wouldn’t have been possible without cultivating a community online. It’s been really important to the personality of the band. I was on street teams when I was teenager and I like the idea that the internet has operated as our own online street team. It’s nice when you see kids sharing tickets, or sharing rides to show. It’s nice to be a part of community that feels like it means something, and that’s been a very valuable part of what we do. I’ve tried to focus more on that aspect in the last couple years. When we were starting off, I was the one running social media and were keeping things pretty much in house. If you’re constantly confronted with that level of negativity it can be quite draining and quite damaging, But it was also important for me to find a way to reframe what we were doing in a way that felt more positively. There was positivity coming in at that time, but because of the level of negative stuff i think it was difficult to separate them out. That’s why it’s been helpful to disconnect a little more from the idea of band-me and real-life-me.







FREQ: I know you get asked a lot about the spelling of the band’s name, but do people ever ask you why you chose that name in the first place? LM: No, nobody ever really does. We had a long list of words and phrases. We were very into witch house at that time, so we wanted something dark and quite visual and serious. The full phrases we had written down were “wooden churches” and “music for churches.” It was originally going to be Music for Churches, and then we shortened it to Churches. Then we realized when you search “music for churches” with a U, you just find religious music. It wasn’t meant to be sacrilegious, but it wasn’t meant to be overtly religious either. I like the idea of music for churches, because a lot of that kind of music is really beautiful even if I don’t necessarily believe in everything around it.

FREQ: What sort of reaction have you gotten from fans since you’ve started speaking out about misogyny and harassment? LM: From what I’ve gathered it’s an important part of the identity of the band for the community around us, and it’s made it a lot nicer. A lot of [the fanbase] is people we’d get on with or get a beer with. Maybe there’s a slight attrition rate in the people who think I’m an angry, ungrateful bitch, but I don’t really want those people to come to our shows anyway. I’d rather have the ethos of what we’re doing feel authentic to us than the opposite, because maybe you sell more records but I think you’d be pretty miserable doing it.