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.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 