It might seem a bit much that the festival moment I wish I’d witnessed was a bloodied tampon being flung into a baying crowd. But, as anyone who has watched the recent smash-hit series I May Destroy You can attest, the visceral visual of a sanitary product – as natural as it is, but underrepresented in pop culture – stays with you.
It’s likely that I first saw L7’s Reading festival set as a young teenager on one of the VHS mixtapes that my best friend would make me by recording MTV2. I didn’t have cable or the internet, so these videos were a lifeline to the alternative worlds of rock, punk and metal, and the scarce women in them. It’s probable that the footage I watched, sometime in the early 2000s, was in a roundup of “the most shocking festival moments, ever”. But it’s certain that I’d have wanted to be there, devil-horning and ducking the crimson missile.
In grunge folklore, L7’s menstrual moment has gone down as one of the ultimate fuck-yous to the sexism of the male-dominated rock scene. Donita Sparks, Suzi Gardner, Jennifer Finch and Dee Plakas were fiercely feminist LA thrashers who made being in a band look like a hilarious joyride, except when they were being asked for the umpteenth time how it felt to be a woman and play an instrument. They had come from punk, biker gangs and performance art, and their ballsiness made a huge impression amid blokes with frayed knitwear whingeing about alienation.
By 1992, grunge, in the UK at least, had reached its zenith. Sunday at Reading was a who’s who of bands that made music as sludgy as the ground that day: the Melvins, Screaming Trees, Mudhoney. And Nirvana, who by then were a worldwide phenomenon, blighted by gossip over Kurt Cobain’s health and the recent birth of his daughter; a set that would be remembered as the one where journalist Everett True wheeled Cobain out in a wheelchair. Conditions were so bad that the comedy tent had blown away; another stage was threatening to cave in. When L7 took to the stage in the early afternoon, an unruly crowd proceeded to fling mud at them, knocking their instruments out of tune.
Reports are conflicting. One review said that L7 had been pelted “apparently for the crime of not being men” but, according to True, Mudhoney also suffered the same fate (and tried to chuck the mud back). That same review described how L7 had played a “blistering set of infectious political punk-metal”, though the band themselves complained about not having a soundcheck and problems with their monitors.
Either way, it sounded like bloody hell. Sparks, red warpaint smeared across her eyes, dumped a massive clump of mud on her head, shouted “hahahaha” maniacally and then conferred with the other members about what to do. Moments later, out came the offending missile. “Eat my tampon, fuckers,” Sparks yelled as she swung it between her fingers and then flung it into the crowd, shouting: “Watch out for tuberculosis.” They launched into the song Fast and Frightening, whose heroine has “got so much clit she don’t need no balls”.
Reflecting on the prank in the L7 documentary, Pretend We’re Dead, Sparks remembers thinking it would save her from the situation. “I wanted to do something that would amuse me because I wasn’t having a good time,” she said. The only problem was she had duct-taped up her shorts because she didn’t have a belt, which made the removal fairly awkward. (“It was not smooth at all.”) Grimly, someone from the crowd chucked it back and it landed on the monitor ledge, where it would remain for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ performance.
L7 walked off stage feeling deflated, though Sparks was also aware that the moment could make them: “We went into our trailer and there was our publicist, and I said, ‘Get a press release ready.’”
What should have signalled the start of L7’s international breakthrough actually signposted the slow and steady slope towards the end. “We were expecting to keep going up,” Sparks told Rolling Stone. “That show started the plateau.” Two years later, Cobain was dead and grunge had been replaced by the peppy pop-punk of Green Day (and Britpop in the UK). L7 trudged on until 2001. But, until their excellent documentary in 2016, their Reading show had been one of the few reminders of their presence in rock history. They’d been left out of other seminal docs and left off best-musicians lists, their significance as a band of many firsts, way ahead of their time, overlooked.
Understandably, they used to get annoyed that they were always talked about in terms of the Reading festival incident, but it inspired a generation of young rock fans, which Sparks says she’s since recognised. It’s a lurid reminder of the potency of women who refuse to be quiet and not take up space. So the next time your monitors fail, or the crowd is booing, remember that you don’t have to get angry. You can get even.
