Punk Mum n Eco Warrior, A Working-Class Baller
It's Ellese
“We are the women
that fight for ourselves,
protect our health,
and we will take back
all of our wealth”
Warrior by MADALDN (Ellese’s music project)
It’s difficult to summarise what Ellese is and does in a few words.
So, I’m going to tell you all the things I’ve learnt about her in the five years I’ve known her.
Ellese is a punk musician, music producer, activist, artist and working-class single mother of two boys living in South East London. Both lucky souls were home educated by Ellese until very recently. Originally from Essex, and the eldest of six siblings, Ellese was homeless at fifteen years-old with no GCSEs. It’s been a helluva journey to get where she is today.
Talking about class is an important aspect of Ellese’s work as an artist. Ellese is vocal about the barriers she has experienced because of her class and gender, but continuously and spectacularly shows the world what she is capable of. It’s clear that Ellese gives everything to her art, though without the hyper-capitalist, “look at how productive I am” swagger. She advocates for mothers, self-education in nature and health, and an anarchist ideology that promotes social justice and collectivised knowledge. But Ellese definitely has swagger.
When we got to know each other Ellese was pregnant with her second son. She wanted to start an all-women punk band and I wanted to learn to play the guitar. She was in south London and I was north-east, so we suffered from the same problem as all Londoners living on either side of the river. It took me two hours to get to hers. The project was doomed. But when I moved down south to Deptford we took advantage of our relative proximity and met up as much as we could to sing songs and play music together.
We would often meet in the huge community garden beside my flats. Heavily pregnant, Ellese would strum on her guitar as we sang vocal arrangements of popular songs. We had intended to busk in Greenwich, but were never able to realise the plan. It was not long after I left Deptford that these community gardens, full of wildlife and wonder, a safe space for local people to congregate, were bulldozed during a violent repossession by the (Labour) council.
From a young age, Ellese witnessed violence in her home and at the age of thirteen was subjected to continuous sexual violence at the hands of local gangs. Nowadays she is mostly estranged from her family, although has worked on repairing her relationship with her mother. Ellese now lives with a condition that causes her to have frequent seizures. When diagnosed with conversion disorder and dissociative seizures, the doctors told her that her seizures were a result of early-life trauma. Ellese was told that her seizures were exclusively psychological. The old adage that so many of us are familiar with: “it’s all in your head”.
Whilst Ellese agreed that trauma was undeniably a catalyst for her disability, she vehemently disagreed that the disorder was not physical. It denied her own lived experience, leaving her with scant resources to treat the disorder. Never one to shy away from a difficult conversation, Ellesse tackled it head-on, completing an MSc in the Philosophy of Mental Disorder (you can read her thesis about it here). Due to her research in the area, she was requested as a speaker at St Thomas’ Hospital London, and she delivered talks to junior doctors training as General Practitioners. Ellese tells me that she trained them to reconceptualise dissociative seizures, helping them understand that if trauma impacts one’s neurological patterning, than necessarily the outcome will be physiological.
Despite the huge challenges Ellese faced she focused on “being the change she wanted to see”
For many years Ellese was part of the anarchist group ANAL (lol, it stands for Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians). This was a protest group that opened up huge empty buildings opposite Buckingham Palace for homeless people to occupy. Later, Ellese retired from these activities, turning her hand to growing food and forming communities, starting with an allotment. She travelled with her kids, creating child friendly spaces in open communities she discovered around Europe.
Despite Ellese’s passion and ingenuity she speaks of the frustration and isolation she faces as a single mum without family to support her. Her mother lives in Devon and her best mates are scattered around London, located over an hour’s journey away, with rising transport costs another barrier to contend with. During the pandemic, Ellese combated extreme isolation by working on her allotment. She used the opportunity to teach her boys and other children about gardening and plants. The large wooden treehouse she had built on her plot became a safe place for her boys and other kids to while away the difficult hours of social seclusion during the lockdown.
Their garden of earthly delights then became a living hell when she was sexually assaulted by another of the allotment’s tenants. When she complained to Eltham council, they showed no concern, saying she had no proof. The perpetrator then retaliated by making unfounded claims to the council about Ellese and her children’s “unruly” behaviour on the allotment, also citing her tree house (that had stood there for two years) as an obstruction. Shockingly, Eltham council even sided with the perpetrator, evicting Ellese her from the property.
Ellese did not bow down, appealing the undeniably discriminatory eviction notice. In a bid to drum up support and advice from friends and colleagues Ellese published the correspondence with Eltham council online. I remember following it whilst the situation was unfolding and being appalled by the responses from the Labour councillor, who was a woman. When Ellese pointed out that the allotment had become a vital source of well-being for her kids during the confinement, and that it had helped her with her own mental health disorder, the councillor suggested she sought therapy, or that she took her kids to a public park.
Ellese also spoke about the isolation of her living circumstances and the incredible efforts she had put into improving and regenerating the allotment. The frequent trips she took on the bus to the nearest shopping centre, purchasing bags of soil for the plot, transporting them back and forth in her buggy with two young kids in tow. It is incredible that during a time of extreme social deprivation, Eltham council chose not only to silence Ellese’s sexual harassment complaint, but also exclude her from accessing land she had worked so hard to cultivate and share with friends and neighbours.
Despite hostility and resistance from the council, Ellese persevered with her campaign, raising awareness of the situation through petitions. She began to make some headway, but it was a hollow victory. Eventually her kids were too disturbed by the hostile attitudes pervading the allotment, and Ellese gave up fighting for a community that no longer nourished her.
By making these issues visible, Ellese is highlighting discrimination that working-class people face constantly, further doubled down by the fact that she is a woman and a single mother. It synthesises the extreme disadvantage one faces as a working-class artist. The inaccessibility of art goes beyond not having money for art materials, or not being able to afford art school. It’s about more than cultural capital, a term defined and coined by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron in the essay "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction". It extends to your access to community, the difficulty of being supported and advocated for in the face of structural inequality. As Ellese says:
“Despite my intelligence and determination I remain in a one bedroom council flat with my two boys, with cupboards doors hanging on by a thread. I have experienced classism from the elite educated minds, who judged me and commented on my chav appearance and way of speaking.”
When many people would give up, perhaps losing themselves in addiction, blocking out the pain of injustice, whether through Netflix, drugs, or alcohol, Ellese doesn’t stop fighting. Through her music, creativity and anti-capitalist entrepreneurial spirit, she has started up and participated in various projects to combat classism in the arts.
One of these was a think tank commissioned by the Mayor of London, Sadik Khan, to help improve job conditions for creative freelancers in London. Unsurprisingly, Ellese found that there was little to no conversation on class politics in the arts. She decided to take drastic measures. Ellese describes hijacking the stage at the Barbican’s annual arts conference, which was attended by the London Lord Mayor. She wore a t-shirt saying, “we are the voices of the unheard”, made further poignant by the fact that she was then silenced, and told that no one was listening to her.
It was at this point Ellese decided to start her own project to dismantle classism in the arts.
Introducing That is Class. That Is Class platforms the work of working-class artists, selling NFTs to raise money for the project. Ellese gives consultations to arts organisation dominated by middle and upper-class people to dismantle working-class barriers. She also works for PYE (Positive Youth Education), teaching conscious rap to kids who are facing social problems from living in London — a problem Ellese knows only too well.
Another fantastic Ellese-motivated project is The Forest Sounds, which teaches women and gender non-conforming people to produce their own music. Ellese was inspired to begin this project when she realised that only two percent of music producers were women. She had already been experiencing her own struggles in music production. In her own words:
“I attempted to record my music at home, but as a single mother of two, I struggled to get my songs recorded and produced. I literally played my guitar, sang and screamed at my computer. So PuNk I know. The sound quality of my music was not great. Music production didn’t even occur to me.”
After being awarded an initial round of funding to get the project started, The Forest Sounds is looking for more funds to increase its reach. If you’d like to support, the crowdfunding page is below.
Ellese also raps, producing her own music under the pseudonym MADALDN. She is the lead vocalist and guitarist of emerging punk band Bang Bang Bunny. In both projects she raps about class, drawing from her own personal experience, bringing hope to others also facing marginalisation and social injustice.
Ellese is a busy woman. When I propose some dates to interview her, she asks me just to call when I can as organising zoom calls is almost impossible with two young kids. I call her one night at 10 o’clock, after her kids had gone to bed. Ellese and I hadn’t talked properly for about three years and the chat reminds me of why I rate her so much. I start the call feeling a bit blue, but Ellese makes me laugh continuously throughout the chat. I fail to pin her down about anything in particular she is doing, but I am so amused and heartened by her wry, humorous take on the art and music scene that I don’t care.
What I find refreshing is that Ellese is always open and matter-of-fact about her trials and tribulations on social media. She is frank about how she balances single motherhood with her endless projects and ideas. It stands out amongst the cleverly-crafted words and whimsical reels that curate and over-idealise motherhood and life as an artist. Recently, I was really pleased to learn she’d been funded by Arts Council England to learn Scottish Gaelic, which she would then make into punk rap.
As someone with Scottish family originating in Ireland, my family spoke Scots, and before that Irish Gaelic. I have a dream to learn Irish one day and the revival of endangered languages is a topic that interests me. I expected the usual artsy conversation about heritage and mining the rich depths, the de-colonialisation of language etcetera, etcetera, but my pretentious illusions were shattered. She tells me, and this is shared with her permission, that the whole thing was a bit of a pisstake. She had a grandad from Scotland, and she gave the whole spiel about heritage on the application form because she knew that it was what the funders wanted to hear. She tells me that truthfully, she never really felt a strong sense of identity with her family, Scotland, or anywhere else.
The motivation behind applying for the fund had been to diversify her rapping, as Ellese tells me, there’s only so many words you can rhyme in the English language. Basically, like most artists, she wanted to create more interesting musical content. On the other hand, she also wants to raise awareness about the fact that indigenous identities are being homogenised, and this is so often tied to language and dialect. From Ellese’s point of view, English is the language of commerce and monolithic capitalist giants. So if she can be a part of combating that, she’s all for learning Gaelic.
In my opinion, Ellese’s motives are as good as any other, regardless of her personal connection to her heritage. Ellese’s work speaks for itself. It is bizarre that we live in a world run by people like Elon Musk, but the rest of us, and particularly the marginalised, are expected to be paradigms of morality. The cult of self and identity. Everything we do must be for the greater good, and good starts at how worthy the funding bodies or councils deem us to be. Strengthening our own art practice and self-education never seems enough.
This middle-class moralism runs rampant in the arts world.
Grayson Perry explored this through an unexpected lens in his BBC series, All in the Best Possible Taste. I can imagine that in some quarters there would be gasps of horror to learn that an artist is “playing the system to get funding”. Yet I think Ellese’s pragmatic approach is gold. Because, as many artists know, securing funding is a skill in itself. It takes a huge amount of time, and an in-depth knowledge of what the funders are looking for. Truthfully, everyone’s playing the system. And I admire people who are honest about it.
I say to Ellese, “At the end of the day, artists need funding to make their art”. She laughs and replies, “yeah, and we need it to eat.” It’s not an exaggeration, either. One only has to look at the median pay for artists to see how little we earn. Extensive research made for this aptly named project, Structurally F—cked, reveals the shocking reality of the situation.
Ellese tells me a bunch of stories about her escapades that has me in stitches, but are also quite sad. Like how she met the current collaborator of her punk band, Bang Bang Bunny. They met at a festival called Equinox. They were both sad. He was getting over being stabbed by his ex-girlfriend. And Ellese was crying because a woman doing karaoke in one of the tents had told her that she couldn’t sing. Ellese decided to prove her wrong by singing one of her punk songs, and screamed so loud that the sound technician fell over. Nonetheless the woman’s comment stung. Ellese tells me her bandmate has attributed herself and their band for repairing his physical and emotional wounds.
The band has expanded and this year played the main stage at Equinox Festival. Typically, Ellese couldn’t get a babysitter so brought her two boys on stage with her. This is something she has always done. I’ve always thought it was very cool. I exclaim, “Ah that must have been great, playing up there with your boys!”. Ellese retorts that it was actually quite stressful.
I guess I’m just a bit in awe. Ellese really doesn’t let anything hold her back, and it’s something I need to take note of. If she’s got a gig and no babysitter, she turns up anyway, obliging organisers and audience members to babysit. If that fails, she takes her kids onstage with her. I remember a panicked male organiser we both knew calling to ask if I’d babysit at her gig. I told him I was going to be late, so it was up to him to sort out the childcare (whilst rolling my eyes). When I arrived, she did her set whilst her eldest son Michael played on the drums, and we all took turns holding Angelo, then a newly born baby.
I think we can all learn from Ellese. Whilst creating songs, art and punk-inspired projects, she is fully embodying the labels ascribed to her and claimed by her. A working-class hero, warrior woman and punk mum. We’re all in danger of taking ourselves far too seriously. Whilst I think art IS VERY IMPORTANT, and without it I probably wouldn’t be alive, the system we find ourselves in is a fucking joke. There is a huge amount of preciousness, speculation and self-aggrandisement. Artists aren’t messiahs, but they are necessary parts of the fabric of society.
We must fight to be paid and heard, and often have to go very roundabout and creative ways to achieve this. Therefore, yes, it IS important to create communities and unite forces. But we do not have to be morally-superior, perfectly rounded human beings. I’d even argue that artists should be the opposite of this. We should delight and inspire, but also agitate and subvert, take-the-piss. We all need to eat. We all deserve a bit of peace and quiet. And we all need a bit of support.
And art, well it just has to be made, doesn’t it?
Links to Ellesse’s work:
MADALDN’s latest song and video release, produced, edited and performed by Ellese
That is Class
The Forest Sounds
Soundcloud
My News
I recently collaborated on a spoken word song with my pal, Jamie Wardrop. At the end of the video are also snippets of spoken word in Spanish created by my rebel choir in Jerez de la Frontera.