Birch album celebrates ‘growing into yourself ’
Her instrument also lauded in Raincoats bassist’s solo debut
In 1978, shortly after
Gina Birch first moved to London to attend the Hornsey College of Art, she often found herself wanting to scream.
In her more provincial Nottingham hometown, she had always been confident, but London made her feel naive and lonely. Then 22, Birch lived in a squat without hot water, where the dirty dishes piled perpetually in the sink. Art was her salvation.
She had just begun writing off-kilter songs with her classmate Ana da Silva in their newly formed and soon to be influential postpunk band the Raincoats. Filmmaker Derek Jarman had recently screened his hallucinatory Super 8 shorts at Hornsey, and Birch was inspired.
So, one day, she stepped in front of her camera, framed her face in a tight close-up, and for the entire three-minute duration of a Super 8 cartridge, she simply screamed.
More than four decades later, that sound is still echoing. The short will appear as part of the exhibition “Women in Revolt!” at the Tate Britain later this year. A riotous painting based on one of its stills, which she titled “Loneliness,” hung in Gallery 46 in London as a part of her inaugural solo show as a painter in October. Now, it is also the cover art for her spirited LP “I Play My Bass Loud” — her debut solo album, which she recently released at age 67.
“I feel very amazed and grateful for it,” Birch said of her late-career burst of creativity, speaking from her home in North London, where she lives with her husband, Mike Holdsworth, who works in the music industry. (Their two daughters are away at college.) “But a lot of the time I’ve been building toward this, because I’ve just been doing. I’m a doer.”
“Once Gina gets into her stride, there’s no stopping her,” said producer Martin Glover, known as Youth, a founding member of Killing Joke who worked on “I Play My Bass Loud.”
Youth has collaborated with an impressive array of British artists throughout his career — including Paul Mccartney, with whom he formed the duo the Fireman in 1993 — and considers Birch “up there with the best.” In a recent interview, Youth praised her “open-wound honesty and complete fearlessness in expressing herself, and her failings of herself. I’ve rarely seen that so close up before.”
Birch sings, writes and plays bass like someone who cannot help but be herself, and her distinct, sometimes contradictory personality oozes out of every track. She’s silly but also dead serious; she can be self-deprecating in one breath and thrillingly self-assured the next. Her solo songs likewise represent a tonal and thematic hodgepodge. “Digging Down” is a dub-inspired screed against — among other urban disruptions — construction noise. “I Am Rage” is an ode to female anger sung in a lilting, ironic whisper.
The abstract “And Then It Happened” and the bouncy single “Wish I Was You” represent two completely different sonic approaches to one of the album’s central concerns: the hard-won and sometimes ecstatic self-acceptance that comes with age.
Still, Birch and her bandmates in the Raincoats always had a certain unassuming chutzpah, even when they were just starting out. “There’d been articles going, ‘The Raincoats say they rehearse,’ ” she said. “But we did rehearse! We just didn’t rehearse in the way that people thought rehearsal should be. We weren’t sergeant majors playing to a metronome. We were feeling our way through in an organic way, and embracing the mistakes as we went along.”
The Raincoats telegraphed an infectious, doit-yourself ethos. “What we wore was odd,” Birch said, recalling their “messy hair and our inside-out clothes and our spots with stripes.” She added, “What we sounded like was difficult. We were not pandering to a common taste. We were trying to do our own thing. But we had a hard-core fan base who got us.”
Although the group was most active from the late 1970s to its first breakup in the mid-1980s, that fan base has grown exponentially over time. Bikini Kill, Sleater-kinney and Angel Olsen have all cited them as formative influences.
When Birch first picked up the bass, it was a practical decision. “It was one of those things where it seemed that the drum kit was too big, the guitar was too hard, and I didn’t want to be the main singer,” she said with a laugh.
She soon found it was a more powerful and versatile instrument than she had ever realized.
“If you’re listening to a lot of rock records, the bass isn’t something that is foregrounded, necessarily,” she said. “And yet in reggae and jazz, it’s the spine of the music. It provides different functions in different music, and as you get more into it, you realize its strengths and its gorgeousness.”
As its title suggests, “I Play My Bass Loud” is a celebration of an often underappreciated instrument. Birch has an especially melodic way of playing, and her slinky, fluid grooves seem to relish their role in the spotlight. But she’s happy to share that spotlight, too: The title track features five female bassists, including Jane Crockford from the British post-punk group the Mo-dettes and Emily Elhaj, who plays in Angel Olsen’s band.
“Feminist Song,” one of the album’s most striking tracks, is a poetic and anthemic statement of self that Birch has been playing live for at least a decade. Its chorus finds Birch honoring the plurality of her identity, her refusal to be boxed in: “I’m a fighter, I’m a believer,” she sings defiantly, “I’m a mother, I’m a cleaner, I’m an artist, and I’m yours.”
That sense of multiplicity extends to her other artistic expressions, too. Her paintings have an almost musical quality about them, in the way that they experiment with extremes of dissonance and harmony. “What I like about painting is you can make your own world,” Birch said. “You can make anything any size you want, any color, any depth. The world that you create is a world that you want to create.”
In her recent return to painting — another medium in which she first dabbled in art school — Birch has once again come full circle, standing face-to-face with that 20-something version of herself. Her solo album is a celebration of that, too.
“I suppose it is about growing into yourself,” she said, “or growing into the person you want to become or have become. If you can grow into a person that you like or are happy with, that’s pretty great. And I feel I’ve done quite well at that.”