The affliction of an accent: Amelia Coburn on various ignorances of north-east accent bias
“I came across Amelia Coburn on the radio this week: sounds pretty good, although the lower class northern accent doesn’t quite fit the style of music.” That’s what a person commented on a post about the north-eastern folk musician’s debut album, Between The Moon and The Milkman. For her, as an artist from the area, and for me as a journalist and music fan from there too, it’s a sentiment we both know all too well as our Teesside accents are rarely heard and mostly slated when they are.
“I remember growing up hearing like Kate Nash and Lily Allen with their accents, but it was always Southern accents in the mainstream industry or on the radio,” Coburn tells me when we hop on a Zoom, her sat in our native Teesside, and I sat in my adopted London. “You don’t really hear the north-east accent, like Newcastle or Teesside. There’s getting to be more Manchester or Liverpool accents in music and TV and film, sure, but I grew up never hearing a Middlesbrough accent unless it was on regional radio or being taken the mick out of.”
We both pause for a second, racking our brains to find examples of representation. “There’s Steph McGovern,” I offer up as the only one, “But she’s spoken about always getting complaints about her accent”. In a separate interview, McGovern said that with her Middlesbrough accent, people would take it as a judge of her intelligence. “They would automatically assume I was there to make the tea or that I’d be thick,” she said. She also told the Sunday Express of one letter that read, “I’m sorry about your terrible affliction. Here’s £20 towards correction therapy,” adding, “The affliction they were talking about was my accent!”
“I remember at school being told to tone our accents down for job interviews to be taken seriously,” Coburn offers up to me on the subject. “I honestly think that’s even why my accent is softer than it should be because I always thought I don’t speak ‘proper’ if I have a strong twang”.
Accent bias is a very real thing. For some places, that works in their favour. Standard English or southern accents are often associated with wealth, education, and ambition. Newcastle gets the benefit of having an accent that’s seen as friendly, social and outgoing. But for less well-known or placeable northern accents, the twang can hold you back. “People do think that speakers in the north of England are less intelligent, less ambitious, less educated and so on, solely from the way they speak,” Dr Robert McKenzie said in his findings for a research project at Northumbria University.
It seems like an odd thing to get annoyed about. Everyone, to some degree, has an accent. But when it then comes to the stereotyped implications of those accents, such as the class comment made towards Coburn or the underestimated skill faced by McGoven, McKenzie found that “These things do have real-world implications,” writing that, “We do find that children with stigmatised accents are less likely to get high marks at school. People are more likely to be found guilty in court. They are less likely to be offered a job after an interview. They are less likely to be given access to social housing.”
“There’s obviously nothing wrong with being working class, but the connection made between my voice or how I speak and my identity or family is based solely on stereotypes,” Coburn said of the whole thing. “You could have a very standard RP voice, but you could be from an underprivileged background. To judge someone to purely a sweeping statement on how they sound is crazy but it happens every day.”
But what does that have to do with music? Well, everything. These biases mean fewer northerners are picked up for mainstream or national media, which means less representation, which breeds less opportunity, which makes the whole process even more challenging for artists like Coburn and the thousands of others making great art in parts of the world where the big industry eyes simply aren’t looking.
“People massively underestimate Teesside in general,” she tells me, preaching to the choir. “When you’re from here, and you go elsewhere, and people are like ‘Middlesbrough? Is that in the middle?’ it’s so annoying. I’m not the best at geography, but how are we ever supposed to get more attention for our cultural scene when people don’t even know we’re here?”
There is more at play here than just accent association, though. The entire topic is a more extensive and more intricate web that includes subtle inequalities and ignorance towards class and gender, too. I can hear you calling out throughout this whole piece, ‘What about Oasis? The ultimate working-class northerners that made it big’ or ‘What about Sam Fender? The north-east’s token star’. Pulp, The Smiths, and Arctic Monkeys; all different acts singing with a distinct northern accent and made it big. Well, they’re all men. Or even on a smaller scale, if you think about acts like The Lathums, The Reytons, Courteeners or any of those cookie-cutter indie bands, it feels like their northerness is their brand, and that’s enough to make them interesting or special.
“Women, generally, when they do music, they always have to be quirky and be like Kate Bush or have cool outfits or a unique voice; there always has to be something different,” Coburn said. “There’s no equivalent of being a Sam Fender or a Liam Gallagher and walking onto stage in jeans and a T-shirt and just singing in a northern accent because people would say it was shit or lazy even if it wasn’t”.
For women, there is a distinct pressure to do something new, stay one step ahead, and be extraordinary. For men, with the whole history of music on their side and overwhelmingly less critique waiting for them, that pressure is looser. “Men can get away with more. A northern accent on a man can be his whole thing, but when mine just pokes through, I’m told it’s off-putting, or I’m hamming it up for attention. I can’t win.”
What bugs Coburn most is the part of the comment that claimed her accent “doesn’t quite fit the style of music”. Through and through, from her first-ever gigs as a ukelele-slinging start-up to her debut record, she is a folk musician, sitting in a lineage of traditional folk greats that, more often than not, had an accent. “Folk music is built on working-class voices singing in their own accent, like Billy Bragg, Kate Rusby or Vin Garbutt, or even more traditional folk has always been regional,” she said. “So when I get comments about my accent being out of place in my music, I don’t understand what they expected me to sing like or what they want from me?”
The reasoning behind the ignorant comment is as obvious as it is groan-worthy. Coburn sums it up perfectly; “I’m only getting these comments because I’m a woman from the north-east. If I were a bloke, people wouldn’t bat an eyelid if I was singing in that accent. And if that accent were any different, it wouldn’t have been an issue to start with.”
But it’s important to note that Coburn doesn’t see her home and the accent it has given her as a hurdle to get over. “I don’t think I’d ever written any of those songs had not been from the area,” she says, gleaming with hometown pride as she chalks her artistic identity up to her roots. “Especially being by the seaside, those maritime metaphors that run through it come directly from being in the north-east and the music scene here. One of the first support slots I ever had was supporting the late Vin Garbutt, a Teesside folk singer who sang in his accent and sang about Middlesbrough. It’s people like that and the places around me that have shaped my music whether I meant it to or not.”
Amelia Coburn, whether you love her accent or not, loves her home. “I think it’s really diverse. There’s lots of different genres,” she says. “It’s obviously very tight-knit just because it’s not a city, it’s a town, but that doesn’t mean it’s not vibrant”. Shouting out the many venues scattered around the place, like the Georgian Theatre, KU Bar and the revamped Globe, or highlighting the great work of Shakk at BBC Introducing, or the fantastic music coming from names like Finn Forester, Marina Josephina, Saint Saviour and beyond – it’s not so grim up north.
