‘It was a proper shebeen, man!’: how Sistermatic blazed a trail for Black queer sound systems

‘The fire in my belly said it’s going to work’ … Yvonne Taylor in 1992. Photograph: Courtesy of Yvonne Taylor

On a February morning in Brixton, old friends Yvonne Taylor and Eddie Lockhart are laughing about their first forays into London’s lesbian nightlife – and how they eventually went on to transform it. In 1984, Taylor moved from Nottingham to London and found the women-only clubs to be “torture”.

“There was a real concentration of women’s bars in Islington,” she recalls. “Islington had a lot of derelict properties and so there were a lot of lesbian community homes set up in them, and as a result there was a surge, certainly from the 70s, of these lesbians’ bars. But they were bars directed to white lesbians and touristy lesbians from the ’burbs.”