THE RAINCOATS HEAR THE MUSIC INSIDE
Inspired by the spirit of ’76 but outside it, ANA DA SILVA and GINA BIRCH’s stereotype-busting resistance cell took full possession of punk’s DIY/do-as-thou-wilt challenge. Combining bracing dissonance, exploratory charge and female energy, their 1979 sel
THE RAINCOATS
The post-punk fem-warriors’ debut album is 40 years young. “We didn’t conform to punk,” says Gina Birch. “I’d be sitting backstage knitting.”
Gina Birch: I was doing foundation art in Nottingham and went to London to look at art colleges for my degree, when the Sex Pistols played St Martins [on November 6, 1975]. I’d never seen anything like it. It felt bud-like, like revolution was in the air. I started studying at Hornsey College of Art [in September 1976] and moved into a squat in Bayswater with Neal Brown, who was in The Vincent Units and later The Tesco Bombers. Richard Dudanski, who’d been in The 101’ers with Joe Strummer, and his wife who was [Slits drummer] Palmolive’s sister, lived next door. Punk was happening and it felt exciting, and then I met Ana on the art course.
Ana Da Silva: I came to London from Lisbon in 1974. I saw Patti Smith at [London’s] Roundhouse in 1976. That had a big impact,
but I didn’t think I could start a band. She seemed like a demi-god. Then I saw The Slits and it felt possible.
GB: I remember being in the front row of The Slits’ first show and my jaw dropped. Suddenly there was me represented in performance, lyrics, looks, sound, joy, fury, rage, everything. I was blushingly shy but I bought a £30 brown Gibson copy bass and learned to play along to Toots And The Maytals’ Funky Kingston.
AdS: I could play basic chords on the guitar. I knew some Dylan and Beatles songs and Gina said, “Shall we start a band?” We rehearsed in my living room and in Gina’s basement. At first it was just a racket, everyone lashing out on their instruments and singing over one another. We only had these little practice amps and we put the vocals, bass, guitar through them. But then we started to work out what we wanted to do. We felt it should be a democracy, with Gina and I both writing songs and singing.
GB: Our first gig was [on November 9, 1977] supporting Tymon Dogg at The Tabernacle. We played with our backs to the audience but we got booked again, and by our third gig at the Chippenham this international performance art festival curator turned up and asked us to perform in Warsaw. By the time we played there, we’d already had three different line-ups. It wasn’t until Palmolive [Paloma McLardy], who’d been kicked out of The Slits, and Vicky [Aspinall] joined that we glued together.
Paloma McLardy: With The Slits, it just happened, we formed, we shaped ourselves. With The Raincoats, I came into something that was already there but their attitude was unique. They said, “Let’s create together”, and I had this vision. I loved their rawness but I thought it would be really interesting to have this uplifting violin on top of the sound. I put an ad in the Compendium bookshop [in Camden]. Vicky saw it and took it down, so no one else could apply but her.
GB: Vicky had been in Jam Today who had been a part of the women’s movement, and she really made us more aware of feminist ideas, and how we fitted in as women doing our own thing and being ourselves. We played our first gig together at Acklam Hall [on January 4, 1979] and we really connected.
Geoff Travis: Ana worked in the Rough Trade shop and I went to see them and thought they were brilliant. They were doing something different and it was still unusual to see an all-female group. We asked them if they wanted to record a single. We went to Spaceward, a basement studio in Cambridge. Mayo Thompson, who’d been in The Red Crayola and was ingrained at Rough Trade, and I produced. We had no skill but we were encouraging, enthusiastic and knew what we liked.
GB: We did [1979 debut 45] Fairytale In The Supermarket which was Ana’s song, Adventures Close To Home, which Palmolive had brought from The Slits, and In Love, which was mine. I was so naive, I was listening to a lot of reggae and wanted to create the repeat effect on In Love, so I did my own repeat with my voice, not realising there was a button that could do that. Then the echoes I did started to become more like yelps, and then I go into the barely audible freakout bit where I’m going, “I don’t know what to do. What should I do?” over and over… I remember Adam [Kidron] the engineer said Chic should cover the song, then it would be brilliant. But we were thrilled, I was so excited when I saw the test pressing.
Andy Gill: I was good friends with The Raincoats and Gang Of Four played with them, and I loved that first single and album. They were the complete opposite of Gang Of Four. They weren’t interested in tightness, they actively pursued a looser sound, they didn’t care about the bass hitting exactly with the kick drum. We talked about the differences and I found it fascinating as an idea – was it a gender thing? Was it ‘too male’? They challenged me to think how we constructed and architected our sound, how I put together drum beats and guitar and bass.
Alison Statton: The Raincoats gave
“IN A WAY THE ALBUM IS OUR MANIFESTO.” Gina Birch
me the confidence to pick up a bass, and being on the same label as them with the Young Marble Giants was amazing. If I’d been given the chance I’d have run away and joined them because it just seemed like such good fun. The way the bass, guitar and violin came together was fascinating. It was like a sonic cat’s cradle with this one loop making these shapes that kept changing but were all interconnected and made this intriguing pattern.
GB: After the single, we went on tour with [Swiss post punk band] Kleenex and Spizzenergi. There was no glamour, it was three bands and road crew all squashed in a tiny van.
Shirley O’Loughlin: There were good and bad things on the road. There was a rolling headline with all three bands which was fun and over the five weeks we got to see how the audience started to grow, by the end of it we’d gone from Acklam Hall to the Electric Ballroom. But there were also tensions with Spizz and the road crew. When it was Vicky’s birthday, they put some porn on her amp. Then Palmolive decided she was going to leave.
PM: I had a lot of questions and the music culture wasn’t providing answers. I didn’t find it very healthy and I felt I needed to move on. I’m very much like, I’ll be interested in this 100 per cent now, and then, I’m not interested and I’m gone. But I’m so glad they said, “Let’s put something down on record” before I did go and that we have a document of that time.
GT: It was just, get the album done and make it sound as good as possible when they came back from the tour. We went into [London’s] Berry Street Studio. I thought voices were really important and I loved the way Gina and Ana’s voices interplayed together. I also wanted to emphasise the musicality, Palmolive’s drumming was so unique, it was an outrageous, joyous clatter. No one else was playing like that and Mayo captured Vicky’s violin, he made it edgy, probably more edgy than she wanted. It was trebly, like John Cale’s viola, and had a droney edge.
SO’L: Mayo really gave a lot to Vicky stylistically, freeing her up, and watching the group work in the studio together, it was like they were having a conversation and really relating to each other, and that seemed very different to other bands I’d seen who had a lead singer, guitarist, a hierarchy. They were all sparking off each other. It was raw, but in a tender way.
GB: I said we should have a manifesto and Ana said “I’m sick of manifestos.” She wanted the album to be a piece of art, and in a way the album is our manifesto. We did a cover of [The Kinks’] Lola. For me punk was a very asexual time, you could dress as you wished, and when we dressed in our woolly jumpers and put sugar in our hair to make it more mussy, it upset a lot of people. Why weren’t we conforming to a stereotypical female look? At the same time, we didn’t conform to punk. I’d be sitting backstage knitting and humming songs from The Sound Of Music and that annoyed people too, that I didn’t take on a more male identity as I was in a band. So Lola fitted in with all this. I remember we played with transsexuals at the Pyramid Club in New York, they were six-foot and wearing stilettos so were then even taller and they had on glamorous dresses and full make-up. They looked incredible and there was us, these raggedy girls. It was a great combination.
GT: It was a real joy to do that first album because the four of them were just so good, not in terms of being virtuosos, but in the noise they made together, which was joyful.
SO’L: The album sold around 25,000 copies and the response to it was really strong, but it was a bit weird. Everyone was sad that Palmolive was leaving and we didn’t really celebrate, we just had a beer and a curry.
AdS: Because we never did huge tours that lasted for months, we never got bored of the songs and we never overplayed them. When we play them now, they still sound fresh, as if they were written today. It’s still fun.
The Raincoats play UK dates in November. A clear vinyl edition of The Raincoats will be available in September.