Most festival organisers might panic upon discovering their headliner has Covid. But if the news that Rachel Aggs now can’t close the second night of Decolonise Fest shakes the confidence of Stephanie Phillips, it doesn’t show as she calmly multitasks finding a replacement and welcoming the volunteers staffing the event at this east London taproom later tonight. Phillips founded the DIY festival in 2017 to “foster a community of like-minded people” and centre “the experiences of punx of colour”. The show must go on. “The festival is necessary, it’s needed in the scene,” she says, with characteristic quiet determination.
Decolonise Fest is but one string to Phillips’ bow. A journalist and author, she’s also singer and guitarist in Big Joanie, the punk group she formed almost a decade ago with drummer Chardine Taylor-Stone. The pair first met at Imkaan, a Black feminist organisation. “Young women were engaging with feminism again,” says Taylor-Stone later at Haggerston’s Signature Brew, “but the mainstream was very white. I wanted to find Black feminist spaces, and discuss writers like Audre Lorde and bell hooks.” At Imkaan, she rubbed shoulders with author Reni Eddo-Lodge and journalist Lola Okolosie. But it was Phillips, the Wolverhampton-raised woman with a tote bag celebrating post-punks the Raincoats, who made the deepest impression.
