The Nanaz: Punk Rock Grandmas

So I love your name, The Nanas.

Like, how did you come up with that?

It grew out of Nanapunk.

And Nanapunk was a series of workshops, music workshops for women who could play or not play.

So one week it would be like bass guitar and another week drums and then guitar.

So you took a workshop on how to be punk rock stars.

So I think Millennium Centre.

Yeah.

So in Wales, we got a big theatre, the Wales Millennium Centre, and somebody called Eva Supertramp, who's a lovely, really supportive mentor of ours.

And another woman called Jude Price got some funding and put these free workshops in the community for older women because they realised older women weren't being represented enough.

in music and especially in punk music.

And also that lots of the punks are now 60, 65, 70 years of age.

So yeah, they offered these fantastic resources to us all.

So you could go into Newport, go into Cardiff and spend a Sunday afternoon learning an instrument or playing things you'd never played or meeting these really cool mentors.

So why did you choose punk and not, did they have like other routes you could have taken? No, just punk, just punk.

How did you identify like punk is like the need?

I think the whole thing with punk and when it originated, you know, in the 70s is it was very DIY.

Anyone could do it.

So you can just play one note or, you know, two notes is good.

Three notes, you can get complicated.

You're a superstar.

So it's just coming back to that ethos, I think, of just the simplicity, but also the attitude that then gets injected into that simple, not just the note, but the rhythm.

And the energy and the vibe.

And I think it was to do with community involvement.

So I think the fund originally was to do with community.