Altered Zones

[Left to right: Ana da Silva & Gina Birch of The Raincoats; photo by Shirley O'Loughlin]

By Jenn Pelly

The Raincoats: "Shouting Out Loud"

It's a damp Thursday afternoon in Brooklyn when I meet Ana da Silva and Gina Birch at the Knitting Factory in Williamsburg, where they have been practicing with their sometimes-drummer, Vice Cooler, for two days. Founding members of the British post-punk band The Raincoats, Ana and Gina, both Londoners, are prepping for a short string of tour dates in support of Odyshape-- their recently remastered 1981 sophomore album, which they reissued on their own We ThRee imprint earlier this month. Meeting your musical heroes is hard. But with their humility and easy laughter, the Raincoats made it easy.

"If there were one hundred female bands doing something interesting, maybe we wouldn't be here," Ana half-jokes, sitting on stage at the empty Knitting Factory. Her Portuguese accent recalls the sing-shout verses that date back to their earliest singles, like "Fairytale In The Supermarket." There is a refreshing, clear-headed quality to The Raincoats' ideas about defiance, and their live performance remains full of hopeful energy.

After meeting at art school in London in 1976, Gina and Ana (who hails from Portugal, and is eight years Birch's senior) formed The Raincoats and became one of the first bands to sign to Rough Trade Records. "I didn't see the music business as something I related to," Ana tells me, "but Rough Trade was very much-- you do what you want."

The band's four records eschewed technical proficiency for strange structures and an overarching feminist ethos. As self-described "art musicians," they used portable cassette players and small, rudimentary studios to record their unconventional protest songs. But while their rock-oriented 1979 debut, The Raincoats, is now considered a definitive post-punk record, the serenely peculiar Odyshape is noteworthy for its skeletal, avant-gardist approach. It is particularly fitting that The Raincoats, dubbed "The Godmothers of Grunge" by Kurt Cobain, should land on American turf in 2011, amid the Kurtmania of Nevermind’s twentieth birthday and the recent historicizing of Riot Grrrl's inaugural Summer. The Raincoats exerted significant influence over both musical moments.

We cannot blame Ana and Gina for being unfamiliar with Altered Zones-- Ana still thinks of recording on computers as a "futuristic" idea. But when I briefly explain that the site covers "weird DIY music," Birch brightens: "That sounds perfect for us!" Below, we discuss their current projects, the story of Odyshape, and a recent performance the Raincoats call "the pinnacle" of their career.

AZ: The band was born in 1977, and first reunited in the mid-'90s. How often have you toured since then?

Gina: We're interested in playing a few weeks each year. We haven't got plans to do new recording; we're happy where we are. This is just a nice thing to do, and people seem really interested and keen to see us play.

AZ: What are your lives like nowadays?

Gina: I have two daughters who are 11 and 9, so that's pretty full-on. I've got another project called The Gluts with two women artists and we do crazy performance art, music, and videos. And I make films. I made a music video for Pete Astor recently. All sorts of things! I'm doing painting.

AZ: Are your daughters into music?

Gina: They like the charts. It's funny: for the first time since I was around 14, I know what's in the Top Ten. Kind of irritating, but I grow to like some of them. I like Jesse J [laughs].

AZ: Can you tell me more about the Raincoats film you're making?

Gina: It's been an organic process. It's a documentary in the first person; about us, by us, with lots of live footage. It's just a matter of working out what should be in. I have quite short days because to pick my kids up at school, I have to leave at 3. Then I hang out with them and perhaps do a bit more work after they've gone to bed.

AZ: Ana, what about you?

Ana: I don't do as many things as Gina. I think she should slow down [laughs]. I'm trying to finish a solo album; I released one four or five years ago. I've been drawing and painting more than I did for a long time. We [are] doing a Raincoats exhibition at the Pop Montreal Festival.

AZ: What kind of stuff are you working on for the exhibit?

Ana: This is our first exhibition together; we tried to keep it a bit Raincoats-related. My drawings are bits of lyrics with an object.

Gina: I had this idea to do the history of the Raincoats-- in shoes. They became personal little stories. There was a time after the Raincoats finished and I'd been working with Red Crayola in Germany. I came back to London and was like, what on Earth am I gonna do? I went and did a 15-week in shorthand and typing. It was pretty disastrous, really, but I learned how to type, and got a job at Rough Trade. I went to this old fashioned college where you weren't allowed to wear trousers-- only dresses. Pittman's College for Young Ladies. I bought a dress I never normally would have bought, and a pair of court shoes. Someone thought I was a man in drag because I couldn't walk in these shoes. So one of my pieces is about these court shoes.

AZ: How have you both seen the meaning of "do it yourself" evolve over the past 30 years?

Gina: In those early days, we needed recording studios, and we had engineers. I never quite felt "D.I.Y." We worked in very small, lo-fi studios.

Ana: For me, a computer still feels futuristic. I remember trying to record songs with two tape recorders-- to record on one tape recorder, then put that playing and recording on the other one. By the end you sound awful.

Gina: No! Great reverb! It's interesting: you move forward in one respect, and that impacts something else. It's never just an improvement.

AZ: I've read that the name "Odyshape" refers at once to a kind of odyssey of the body and to societal expectations of what the female body should look like. What triggered that way of thinking?

Gina: It was a word I made up. As art students, and punk rockers, we didn't conform to the stereotype of how a girl should look. There's a mixed part of me that felt quite feisty about that, and pleased. I liked wearing great big shoes and having really skinny legs and big jumpers and messy hair. It was very liberating. But it's not just straightforward, I suppose. It wasn't so much about me, but the idea that a lot of women feel they do have to conform to this thing.

The Raincoats: "Only Loved at Night"

AZ: I really liked the new song you played at MoMa-- the "Feminist Song." What inspired that?

Gina: I was reading in the paper, and somebody asked, "Are you a feminist?" And a woman said, "Why the hell wouldn't I be?" And I thought, "Yeah! Right!" But it's not all about being a feminist; it's just defiant. I think feminism is back in fashion, so it doesn't feel as radical, but I like the idea of being able to say, "Yeah, fuck you. I am. This is what I believe in." We all feel those things. Well, we don't all feel that we are feminists…

Ana: Any woman who wants to do something with her life outside of being in the house is a feminist. They are because they want to do things that traditionally a woman isn't allowed to do.

AZ: How did that show come about?

Gina: It was out of the blue. They had two shows going on-- one of women's photography, and one about "The Kitchen." Of course, we have spent a lot of time in the kitchen, in our pinnies, cooking and cleaning [laughs]. I think they had a committee and someone suggested The Raincoats, and suddenly we got invited. That was the pinnacle of our career.

Ana: Just like, "Oh my god! We’ve come up!"

Gina: It was like playing Madison Square Garden

Ana: But better.

Gina: It was a big highlight. Another highlight was when we got invited to go play in Poland in '77.

Ana: That was very special because we had only done three or four gigs then.

Gina: We were totally new to this: it was pre-Palmolive, pre-Vicky. It was me and Ana with a woman called Jeremy on guitar who wore high-heeled green snakeskin boots, and a boy called Nick on drums. Then we did our first 28-date tour, which I really didn't enjoy…

Ana: I enjoyed it.

Gina: Each time something new happens, it's very exciting. Making the first single was incredibly exciting. And making the first album.

Ana: It was a serious thing, to have an album. You listen to music all your life, and you look at these albums. And then you've got an album. It felt amazing.

AZ: If there were one thing you'd want young bands to learn from your story, what would it be?

Ana: To believe in themselves, because you have to risk falling down to do something interesting.

Gina: When we started, we were very open-minded in one way, and very closed-minded in another. Like, The Stranglers… people called them punk, but they were completely unacceptable. There's no way we would go to a Stranglers gig, or buy a Stranglers record. When you're in your early 20s, an essential part of growing is to be discriminating and say, "This is okay; this is NOT okay."

AZ: Do you feel like there was much feminist music in the late '70s?

Ana: No. They would do a photo shoot of the bands that had women in them-- like, 30 women. There was The Slits, there was us, there was Delta 5. You couldn't do that with men! It would be the whole of London. Those bands were very inspiring, but it was not enough.

Gina: Riot Grrrl came out of a political meeting of minds, from writing and a decision to be supportive of one other. Whereas in our era [laughs], we were very separate. The press would put us all together. But we were like, "No! We're different!"

Odyshape reissue is available now in LP and CD fomats via We ThRee/The Raincoats. The Raincoats will perform their self-titled debut in its entirety at All Tomorrow's Parties, curated by Jeff Mangum, in December