The Bad Mothers are making a concept album about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the UK in 1955, after she shot her lover David Blakely. Recording live in the scuzzy Sinners Club, they’re led by a tough, glamorous frontwoman who rather identifies with Ellis, who was a nightclub manager.
Lucy Rivers, who wrote the show, carries it as that enigmatic frontwoman – one who’s also engaged in a testy battle of wills with the album’s producer. His name? David.
‘Sinners Club’ uses rock’n’roll as both a seedy, smoky, sexy backdrop and vehicle for its storytelling; big numbers swing or saunter, but bass growls ominously between tracks, cymbals hiss. Rivers’s voice is gorgeous. Performed by Gagglebabble, the gig component is tight. The storytelling in Titas Halder's production, however, is less effective – and if over 90 minutes we get plenty of music, I was left wanting more about both Ellis and the singer.
It does paint a vivid picture of a woman screwed over, repeatedly, by men: Ellis's lover during the war turns out to have family back home, the bastard; her husband George is a ‘mad dentist’ who beats her; David is a cheating rat. But other biographical details – and quotes from the trial and interviews – are slung in without much context. Rivers also includes an allegorical tale of a bird losing its wings, and briefly swerves into the story of the Stephen Ward case; for those not familiar with Ellis’s life, there’s a danger you lose the central thread rather working out how these strands tie together.
The show is obviously a deliberately slippery thing, with a sliding elision between Ellis and Rivers’s character. But even the framework of the album recording feels quite artificial; I never got much sense of who the ‘real’ singer was, how and why she related to Ellis. And while the piece picks at the scabs of power dynamics between men and women, suggesting equivalence between Ellis and a singer dealing with a slightly grumpy producer is a tad queasy.
It’s an atmospheric evening, powered by a darkly glittering performance from Rivers. I just wished she’d given us more to grasp hold of.