Meet North Yorkshire artist and disability activist Ruth Lyon who is campaigning to make the music industry more accessible

“if I worked in a bank, it would be unbelievable to think that I’d be carried around to get to work,” Ruth Lyon points out.

“But in the music industry it’s almost accepted that for me to get to a venue, I’m going to be. There’s stairs everywhere - to the stage, backstage, stairs to the merch place, stairs to meet the crowd. It’s accepted that someone will carry me around.”

Ruth is a musician, singer-songwriter and disability activist. She advocates for an industry that is more inclusive, including for wheelchair users like herself.

“I think people don’t expect disabled people to be musicians and sometimes that can feel a bit like I’m not welcome,” she says. “I’ve had gigs cancelled because people have said I’m a fire hazard because I wouldn’t be able to get out of a building independently.

“It can be really crushing to see people talking about me not as an asset, or as a musician, not as someone who people are going to buy tickets to see but instead talking about me as a nuisance. I think that is changing slowly but representation is really important. The more disabled artists there are, the less people are going to be able to act like that.”

Ruth, who is an artist ambassador for Attitude Is Everything, a national charity that improves deaf and disabled people’s access to live music, is speaking from her home in Newcastle. Her latest single, a self-produced track entitled Black Hole, has just been released and in little over a week’s time she’s set to make her debut in the US.

The 29-year-old has been invited to perform at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas which celebrates the convergence of tech, film, music and education.

She will also speak as a panellist at festival talk Disability: Is the Future of Music Accessible? which will look at some of the barriers that musicians with disability face in the music industry and the ways that venues, labels and festivals can improve accessibility and representation for disabled artists and audiences.

“Just the fact that South by South West, such a big important industry festival, is thinking this is an important issue and having it as one of their panels, shows it is on people’s minds,” she says.

Ruth has carved out a career in music, despite a number of challenges and setbacks. It is something she dreamt about from being a five-year-old girl, growing up in Yearsley, a small North Yorkshire village close to Easingwold.

She spent her former years scrambling around the countryside of the North York Moors, inheriting a love of the outdoors as well as a sense of melancholia from the landscape, that is instilled in the music she creates today.

“It was lonely,” she says. “There was only about 15 houses and there was no other kids growing up...But I think that’s what encouraged me to have a great love of the outdoors and of music because it’s the kind of thing you can do on your own to entertain yourself. I became a kid with a big imagination - out of boredom probably.”

When she was first shown a selection of instruments at primary school aged five, Ruth was drawn to the fiddle. “My mum is Scottish so I’ve always been into cèilidh music and traditional Scottish music with my family and that’s probably why I went to the fiddle. I terrorised my parents for years before I sounded any good.”

At nine, she was writing songs for a ‘band’ of friends and would perform them in the playground and by the time her teenage years begun, she had learnt to play her family’s piano and was writing music to perform at school functions.

She started private music lessons with Yorkshire Young Musicians shortly afterwards and by 14, was wholeheartedly focused on her ambition to go to music college and become a classical violinist.

But things suddenly changed when Ruth began suffering from aches and pains all over her body. She was struggling to use her hands and had to start using a walking stick. She was hospitalised and diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis at 15, becoming physically disabled. Six years later, she began using a wheelchair.

“I couldn’t really use my hands very much for a couple of years, which meant that I couldn’t write or type or play instruments or do really anything with my hands,” Ruth recalls. “I then really started to focus on the singing as it was the only music I could do. I’d never thought about singing that seriously before, it was always piano, clarinet, violin, a classical focus.”

“It was quite a lonely time,” she continues. “Music was something I could do to express myself, work through my feelings and almost create a little fantasy world for myself. Even if I couldn’t play, I could write lyrics, I could sing, I could come up with harmonies and melodies. It was a really tough time and it took me a while to come to terms with things.”

When she was 18, on medication and starting rehabilitation, Ruth picked up her instruments again. But she’d gone from practicing five hours a day to only managing ten minutes at a time.

Her hands no longer had the stamina to be playing for hours a day to train as a classical musician, so she turned to one of her other interests - fashion. She undertook a foundation course at Warwickshire College before studying a degree in fashion design at Northumbria University.

Whilst at the former, Ruth met her bandmates for Holy Moly & The Crackers, a rock band she has fronted for the best part of a decade. They moved with her to Newcastle and after graduating, she invested her energy into the group, touring nationally and internationally and selling out shows in the likes of London, Munich and South Italy.

In 2018, she took part in a residency led by the North-East artist Nadine Shah which prompted the start of a solo career, running alongside her continuing role in Holy Moly.

When the Covid-19 pandemic began, Ruth was deemed to be vulnerable and at high risk, but she used the time to create an accessible home-studio with her husband and in 2020, released two singles, following her solo debut in 2019. Last year saw her live debut at Latitude festival and the release of her first EP Nothing’s Perfect.

After SXSW, her focus for 2022 will be on recording a new album with Holy Moly and a solo EP with producer John Parish, as well as a UK tour.

When she looks back on that childhood dream to enter the music industry, she’s emotional. “Music was always something that I wanted to do...When I was 15, I felt like my whole world had fallen apart because I couldn’t do pretty much anything let alone play music.”

“I’ve taken a bit of a different trajectory,” she continues, “but I still have a career in music. It feels like there’s been so many obstacles but it’s amazing to be here and be doing it. It’s nice to look back and think that I made it anyway.”

Visit www.ruthlyonmusic.com

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