Category: Raincoats

A guest posting by Chaval

One of the last shows I saw before Covid lockdown put an end to live music for a couple of years was a low-key affair in a cool little theatre in Hackney. It was November 2019 and The Raincoats had reconvened to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their debut album.

It was a warm and nostalgic night, with an audience that seemed predominantly made up of survivors of the late 70s West London squat scene that had created a richly creative post-punk music environment. When the Raincoats introduced an old friend from back in the day to provide a short support set in the interval, it turned out to be Green of Scritti Politti (playing the hits).

The founding members of The Raincoats were Portuguese singer and guitarist Ana da Silva and English singer and bass player Gina Birch, Hornsey Art School teens who met in 1977. They were joined in 1979 by Vicky Aspinall whose distinctive violin-playing became a key element of their unique sound.

Their own set that night at Hackney was a reminder of the strange beauty of their music, mesmerising rhythms meshing with abrasive guitar, vocals that combined harsh atonality with melodic grace, sometimes in a single chorus, and visceral, emotive lyrics tackling some unsettling subject matter.

Kurt Cobain famously adored The Raincoats, although it’s difficult to see much musical common ground with Nirvana, and actually a bit irritating to think that such an original and distinctive band need any validation from a US rock star. Man had taste though. (Even with his endorsement, their profile remains low-key. If you Google the band, be prepared to wade through a lot of ads offering outdoor wear for the wet season).

Theirs is a music that traces a willingness to challenge the parameters of post-punk, that anticipated the “world music” trend, is of its time and timeless. Their first three albums, The Raincoats, Odyshape and Moving, were each very different works, singularly compelling. They reformed to make another record in 1996, but it was not in the same league, and does not feature here. Gina Birch’s solo work and her Hangovers project were OK, but still not comparable to the mercurial genius of the Raincoats.

OK, just want to say, let’s have some music now, yeah?

No Side To Fall In.

Let’s start with a tester, first track, debut album. Haphazard bleeps, clicks, squeaks, meandering bass, scratchy violin, a bit of sax, sighing, harmonic chant vocals – all the Raincoats’ bizarre appeal wrapped up in a squally melody in one minute 46. It gets easier.

No One’s Little Girl.

The title of this 1982 single b-side might promise strident feminism, but it’s not quite that, more a beautiful assertion of the new gender realities delivered over an enchantingly elegant bass and percussion line. The rhythmic inventiveness and gentle but provocative vocal offer a kind of arch riposte to Scritti’s ‘Sweetest Girl’ from the previous year. What’s the feminist word for ‘masterpiece’?

Only Loved At Night

From Odyshape, the Raincoats’ second and most out-there experimental LP. This song is built around a startling combination of drone guitar and kalimba (an African thumb piano – me neither) embellished with a mesmeric clockwork rhythm that seems borrowed from the soundtrack of an intense European psychological thriller. Da Silva’s sinuous vocal keeps things unsettling.

Running Away

There was a lot of soft jazz pop around in 1982, and this cover of the Sly and The Family Stone track was as close as The Raincoats got to mainstream (number 47 in the charts, apparently). Again the clattery percussion sets it on a path away from pop smoothness, although the trumpet keeps dragging it back with that blissful melody.

In Love

A standout from the debut LP. Now I always thought the chorus to this was “in love is so fucked up”, but the written lyric suggests “in love is so tough on my emotions”. Seriously? The lurching, anguished, exhausted vocal supports my thesis. With atonal guitar and Cale-Velvets style violent violin, this is the most harshly realist love song ever, brutally honest about the debilitating and alarming effects of romantic obsession. The last minute is gloriously horrible.

Honey Mad Woman

The full 12” version on the B-side of the Animal Rhapsody single from 1983 blends another one of those off-kilter rhythms with fluid African guitar. There is an enchanting mish-mash of female and male vocals and a lyric that draws on Levi-Strauss’s work on women in primitive societies occupying a borderland between culture and nature. A Rough Trade recording contract came with a library ticket in those days.

Shouting Out Loud

The opening track on Odyshape has a subtle, whispered intimacy at odds with its title, starting off sedate, becoming anguished and desperate with a lyric awash with paranoia, vulnerability and anxiety The percussion, nagging rhythm and tension on the two minute coda to this track are astoundingly effective.

Ooh Ooh La La La

Yes, the worse song title ever, but the first track from the Moving LP is partly a loping singalong, with an inviting bassline, sax stabs and a chorus chant of those title noises that occasionally suggests an alternative universe Bananarama. Except great, obviously.

And Then It’s OK

From the Odyshape LP, this is a stream of consciousness expressing random domestic anxiety (the lyric was written by Caroline Scott) where the disjointed rhythmic swerve of the music and murmured vocal are at odds, summoning up a disturbing, edgy atmosphere. The title is fooling nobody.

Lola

Yes, that Kinks song of gender confusion and cherry cola. The vocal manages to be both strident and vulnerable, and the levels of gender fluidity take on extra complexity with a female vocal masquerading as a male encountering a male masquerading as a female . . . A 60s cover that was ahead of its time, paradoxically.

chaval

 

JC adds………………..

chaval put this piece together more than six months ago, but for some reason or other it never reached the TVV inbox, but he assumed I’d decided not to run with it for some spurious reason or other.  It was only after reading Fraser‘s recent piece on an EP by The Raincoats that chaval got in touch to ask after the missing/unpublished ICA.

I just want to take the opportunity to thank chaval for his patience while, between us, we sorted things out…..and to also remind everyone that I never turn down guest offerings;  so if you’ve ever submitted something that hasn’t appeared, then please get back in touch, and you should hear back from me within a few days or so. (allow a week!!!!).

It might be the case (as it was with chaval) that the emails aren’t getting through to the TVV hotmail address for some strange reason or other, in which instance, leave a comment behind at a relevant post, and I’ll pick things up from there.

Cheers.

 

A guest series by Fraser Pettigrew (aka our New Zealand correspondent)

#10: The Raincoats – Extended Play (1994)

The role of women in punk and post-punk is an aptly diverse one. If you accept the era’s defining principle as the breaking of moulds, then you can find female musicians taking a hammer to them in various ways, as well as being unwillingly pigeonholed as sex symbols.

Vocalists such as Siouxsie Sioux, Pauline Murray and Poly Styrene did their damnedest to reject the cliché of glamorous girl singer and brought their originality to the front of the stage. Bassist Gaye Advert bucked the trend by working in the traditionally unglamorous rhythm section. Una Baines was a founding member of The Fall, playing keyboards in the back line. Debbie Harry was at the conventional end of the spectrum, despite being old enough to be the mother of most of the adolescent boys drooling over her pin-up.

Then along came The Slits. Inspired by the Sex Pistols and The Clash, The Slits broke two moulds at the same time, insisting that a bunch of women could form a vital punk group and they also didn’t need to use sex as a selling point. Their inexpert musical ability helped them create a unique sound, and their pioneering existence quickly proved inspirational to others in turn.

Prime amongst the inspired were The Raincoats. After seeing The Slits in early 1977 Ana da Silva and Gina Birch suddenly felt that they had been ‘given permission’ to be in a band too. “It never occurred to me that I could be in a band. Girls didn’t do that. But when I saw The Slits doing it, I thought, ‘This is me. This is mine,’” said Birch.

A year after their formation, The Raincoats became an all-female band with the arrival of violinist Vicky Aspinall and former Slits drummer Palmolive. Like The Slits, their varied levels of musical experience contributed to a sound on their first self-titled album (1979) that was sometimes ramshackle, always startlingly original and definitely Marmite to the critics.

Second album Odyshape (1981) is one of my all-time favourite records. Its blend of influences is so unique, like a musical spice market where you are assailed with tantalising scents that you can’t quite place but the overall stimulus is nothing but delightful. Palmolive had departed and the percussion on the album was handled by several people: Palmolive’s brief replacement Ingrid Weiss, Robert Wyatt, former 101ers and PiL drummer Richard Dudanski, and This Heat’s Charles Hayward. Various others contribute parts on a diversity of unusual instruments like kalimba, shruti box, shenai and balophone.

Far from fracturing its consistency, this cavalcade of collaborators and instruments wends its way through the album like a multicultural festival that projects a unified aura of harmony. It’s a triumph of gentle eclecticism that the band would never surpass.

There was a hiatus of three years after Odyshape, an eternity in those days, and consequently I missed out entirely on their third album, 1984’s Movement. It was a decade later that I came across it on CD, and shortly afterwards spotted this lovely little 10” EP with a big lemon on the cover.

Extended Play consists of the band’s third session for John Peel, recorded on 29 March 1994 and broadcast on 16 April, less than two weeks after the death of Kurt Cobain, whose love of The Raincoats was effectively responsible for their reunion and renewed activity at that time. The story of Cobain wandering into the Rough Trade shop in Covent Garden and his redirection to Ana Da Silva’s antiques shop round the corner is as well-worn as Cobain’s copy of their first album that led him there in the first place.

Largely thanks to Cobain, the three albums were reissued on CD in 1993 by the David Geffen label, the Peel session was recorded in March 1994, and the band were scheduled to open for Nirvana on several dates in 1994, until tragedy intervened.

The EP carries a dedication to Cobain on the inner sleeve. “Kurt Cobain gave so much life, inspiration and liberation in his music, and he gave us a new life. This session would probably not have existed without his love and enthusiasm, and we dedicate it to him.”

Peel sessions perfectly matched the EP format – around 15 minutes of airtime, more often than not yielding four tracks, showcasing new material or unsigned bands. Many Peel recordings ended up on vinyl, either at the time or subsequently on the Strange Fruit label that was set up specifically to release the show’s extensive archive. Curiously, however, this Raincoats EP is the only disc in my Four Track Mind series that comes from this source.

Although it was common for bands to use a Peel session to preview unreleased music, two of the four songs here are new and two are old. The reason for including two decade-old songs probably lies in the unplanned circumstances of The Raincoats reunion, as described above. Side one has the new songs, Don’t Be Mean and We Smile. Side two has versions of Odyshape opener Shouting Out Loud, and No One’s Little Girl, which first appeared on a 1982 single. Another version of Don’t Be Mean later appeared on the band’s fourth album Looking In The Shadows.

Only Birch and Da Silva survived from the previous lineups. Anne Wood comes in on violin where once Vicky Aspinall stood, and the drummer’s seat was occupied by Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth (Kim Gordon was another celebrity fan). Despite the lack of supplementary musicians and instruments that had enriched Odyshape, the version of Shouting Out Loud compares very favourably with the original, not in any way suffering from the almost-live demands of the BBC recording session. Similarly, No One’s Little Girl is faithful to the 1982 version.

The new songs slot comfortably into the Raincoats canon, not marking any radical advance in style, but perhaps reaffirming for Birch and Da Silva that their approach to music had been right all along. After Moving, Birch and Aspinall had spent a couple of years in their ‘total pop’ vehicle Dorothy, releasing a clutch of singles unsuccessfully targeting the same kind of chart-friendly subterfuge as Scritti Politti, ABC and others. This deliberate engagement with the mainstream music business proved a self-confessed nightmare, both in chasing success and also over-refining and over-producing the music. Returning to the intuitive and unrestricted method of The Raincoats must have been a relief.

Looking In The Shadows eventuated in 1996, but once again I managed to miss it and only picked up a copy relatively recently. While it was great to hear new Raincoats material, the album lacked a certain spark for me, and perhaps it did for them too. It was another big music biz experience (with Geffen), produced by former Psychedelic Fur Ed Buller who had previously shaped albums by Suede, Pulp and the Boo Radleys.

I don’t know what influence Buller had on the arrangements but sometimes it sounds almost too conventional, too much like the ‘rock’ music The Raincoats had pretty consciously striven to avoid. While most of the songs are as idiosyncratic as ever, there’s a presence of studio, production, and budget like never before, and a few guitar riffs that stick out like a hippy at an Exploited gig. The comparison between the two versions of Don’t Be Mean is instructive, with the EP take sounding very much more immediate and authentic.

The moment of their second coming faded, and they went their separate ways once again. There have been periodic reunions and both Birch and Da Silva have released solo material of widely differing character.

The Raincoats sang about women and their lives, about the expectations heaped on them, by others and by themselves. It’s definitely a feminist perspective, but not of the strident ‘all men are rapists’ variety (it’s not all about you, you know). They marked out a unique territory for their music, not quite ever one thing or another, not susceptible to the standard rock and pop tropes, the sex and drugs, or the big social and political themes in a sloganeering way.

Their songs engaged at a very personal level, rooted in their own experience, avoiding generalisations, describing the world of inequality through an individual’s thoughts and feelings. Each song feels like a small slice of personal testimony to the unfairness and difficulty of the world, and the music always keeps to a human scale, never reaching for grandiose effects or epic statements, yet often reaching great levels of emotional impact, and the liberating pleasure of something unique and indefinable.

Don’t Be Mean

We Smile

No One’s Little Girl

Shouting Out Loud

 

 

Fraser