Forget the dot and cross. Forget the afternoons spent complaining about the weather and regrowth. And, above all, forget the idea that after 50 life takes the emergency exit. In Wales there is a group of women who are doing exactly the opposite.
They, six women between fifty and sixty years old, formed NaNaz and decided that, if you really have to grow old, you might as well do it with an electric guitar in your hand, an amplifier and a healthy dose of anger against everything that makes life a little more complicated: unfair pensions, menopause, sexism, prohibitively expensive retirement homes and even those damned recycling bins that “seem like they were designed by someone with an obvious sense of humour”.
That’s right: there is a punk band that sings about recycling. And it works.
It’s a short step from the geriatrics ward to the mosh pit
Before taking to the stage, these women did something completely different. There was the nurse, the foster mother, the theater performer, the traveling ice cream seller, the actors’ agent. None had plans to become the new heroine of punk over 50.
Everything comes from the laboratories “Nana Punk“, open to women over middle age without any musical experience. In short, the motto is: you don’t need to know how to play, you don’t need to have an instrument, just the desire to try is enough.
One of them shows up thinking of spending a different Sunday. Another is looking for a way out of a dark period. Yet another simply wants to do something that is not yet another commitment to caring for others. Moral? After a few months, they find themselves writing songs, recording singles and filling festivals.
Not exactly the classic creative DIY course, in short.
Menopause? Let’s make a hit
NaNaz have understood one fundamental thing: if life gives you hot flashes, insomnia and mood swings, you can always turn them into a punk song. Thus are born songs that talk about the WASPI campaign on British women’s pensions, the sudden anger that accompanies menopause, being invisible after a certain age and all those small daily abuses that seem normal until someone decides to shout them with a microphone.
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Because punk, after all, is for exactly this: taking what makes you angry and giving it back to the world with three agreements and zero diplomacy.
And the most surprising thing is not that these women sound good, but that their audience is full of twenty-somethings. According to the band members, younger girls see in them something that is increasingly rare on social media: imperfect people who make mistakes, laugh at mistakes and continue to have fun without the anxiety of looking flawless. A kind of living antidote to the Instagram filter epidemic.
The real message
NaNaz don’t want to become rock stars, but their goal is much more subversive. After every concert they hope that someone goes home thinking: “Wait… but then I can do it too“.
Open a group. Write a song. Learning an instrument in your sixties. Changing your life at fifty. Starting again at forty. Or just stop asking permission. And this is perhaps the most punk thing of all. Don’t you think so?
