Martin Aston

15 records by unsung LGBTQ+ pioneers

In 2015, I wrote about Jackie Shane for my book, Breaking Down the Walls Of Heartache: How Music Came Out, about the LGBTQ+ pioneers of popular music. I tried to talk to her at the time, but she hadn’t been interviewed for almost 50 years, and had disappeared from view at the start of the 1970s,  Our go-between was trying to set up reissuing her R&B-slanted recordings for the first time, and he managed to get me a couple of quotes for the book. Fast forward to Oct 2017; my book is out, and now so is Shane’s compilation, Any Other Way, named after her most famous track. To celebrate Shane, and her pioneering LGBT+ peers, my underground history of some of music’s most courageous, trailblazing performers, from 1921 to the present day, for The Vinyl Factory, can be found here.