Punk rock not retirement | DW Documentary

Sewing quilts and playing Scrabble: for pensioner Ruth Miller from Britain, that wasn’t enough. After retiring from her teaching job, she wanted to make punk music again. So she founded her own band. It was a huge success.

Shortly after retiring, Ruth Miller started encouraging other women to play punk on stage despite little musical experience. To date, her ‘unglamorous music’ project has produced 16 female punk bands in the British city of Leicester.

Ruth was everyone’s "Punk Mum”. She organized a big concert for all the city’s female bands. An impressive lineup with Mental Load, Virginia’s Wolves, Venus Ataxx, Velvet Crisis and many others. Dina is a guitarist and vocalist with Virginia’s Wolves. She’s a single mother and had never played in a band before. "That first time on stage changed my life. It finally gave me an identity,” she says. After all, as the mother of small children, your own personality has to take a back seat, she adds. "You don’t even have a name anymore, you the twin’s mum, or Liam’s mum, or whoever.” Now, she performs at least once a month.

Meanwhile, the ‘unglamorous music’ project has grown into a movement. In other cities in Britain and elsewhere, women are coming together to make music. In the spirit of Ruth Miller, who died of cancer shortly after this film was made. Though she has passed, her project lives on.

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