THE RAINCOATS @ 45

Marking its 45th anniversary today is the debut eponymous LP from post-punk's most renown girl group, The Raincoats, which was released on November 21st, 1979. Following hot on the heels of The Slits, The Raincoats took the music of the punk scene and gave it a distinctive stamp that earned them the reputation as one of the UK's most innovative new bands in the late 1970s. While Johnny Rotten was notoriously tight-lipped at the time, when it came to praising other bands, he made a notable exception for these girls, stating, "The Raincoats offered a completely different way of doing things, ...and all the books about punk have failed to realize that these women were involved for no other reason than that they were good and original".

The origin of the group goes back to 1977. Ana Da Silva and Gina Birch were inspired to start a band after they saw the Slits perform live earlier that year. Birch stated in an interview with She Shreds magazine, "It was as if suddenly I was given permission. 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.’” For the band's first concert on 9 November 1977 at The Tabernacle, the line-up included Birch, da Silva, Ross Crighton (guitar) and Nick Turner (drums). Guitarist Kate Korus (from the Slits and later the Mo-dettes) joined briefly but was replaced by Jeremie Frank. Nick Turner left to form the Barracudas, and Richard Dudanski (ex–the 101ers and later Public Image Ltd.) sat in on drums, while filmmaker Patrick Keiller replaced Frank on guitar.

Late in 1978, the Raincoats became an all female band as they were joined by the ex-Slits drummer, Palmolive, and the classically trained violinist Vicky Aspinall, with this line-up making their live debut at Acklam Hall in London on 4 January 1979. Geoff Travis, the founder of Rough Trade Records, recruited Mayo Thompson of the Red Krayola to produce the band at this time. They suggested that Aspinall approach her violin in the style of the Velvet Underground. Managed by Shirley O'Loughlin, the band went on their first UK tour with Swiss female band Kleenex, in May 1979 after Rough Trade released their first single, "Fairytale in the Supermarket".

With the release of their debut album, the group were something of a best kept secret, though their impact would be significant in later years, winning cult followers like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. "An all-time great", The Raincoats LP is seen as a landmark in indie pop, new wave, and post-punk music, as well as one of post-punk's best albums. Charles Ubaghs, in articles for The Quietus and Tiny Mix Tapes, lauded the band and their album as exemplars of new musical exploration in the wake of the late-'70s punk movement. He dubbed it "a passionate new sound that screamed of possibility", noting the band's fusion of "oddball rhythms", use of the violin, and more that lead to "forward-thinking" music. Their cover of The Kinks, Lola, took a song that already tied the listener up in gender-defying knots and pulled a double reversal on it, twisting its gender-bending right back around on itself. Kind of a neat trick to play on a song that's already playing a trick on the listener. And this decades before anyone ever mentioned anything about "personal pronouns"!

THE SLITS - CUT @ 45

Celebrating its 45th anniversary today is the debut LP by The Slits, Cut, which was released on September 7th, 1979. It's an album that would highlight the core of the "girl power" substrata inherent in the punk and post-punk scenes of the era, with a collection of distinctive and innovative songs, influenced and infused by dub reggae and underlined by the DIY idiosyncrasies of the culture.

The band originally came together in late 1976 after founding members Viv Albertine and Palmolive had a stint earlier that year in the mythical Flowers of Romance, a band that never performed live or recorded, but which had a revolving door of notable members who included the likes of Keith Levene (The Clash, Public Image Ltd), Sid Vicious, Marco Pirroni (Adam & the Ants, Siouxsie and the Banshees) and Kenny Morris (also a Banshees member). The impetus for The Slits formation was an October 1976 Patti Smith gig attended by Ari Up, Palmolive and early member, Kate Korus. Ari had got into an argument with her mum, future wife of John Lydon, Nora Foster, before being approached by Palmolive and Kora with the idea to form a band. After an initial lineup shuffle, the principal early lineup stabilized with Ari, Viv, Palmolive and Tessa Pollit.

This configuration of the group spent the next couple of years performing and touring, mostly as a support act, often with bands like The Clash, Buzzcocks or The Jam as headliners. Their early sound was characterized by the dominance of Palmolive's primal, tribal aggressive drumming style. However, after she left the group late in 1978, joining The Raincoats by January of 1979, the addition of future Banshees drummer, Budgie, had a profound effect on the band's sound. His style helped to push them into the more refined, bass heavy dub reggae influenced sound that would be their calling card by the time they got to recording their debut LP.

Recorded at Ridge Farm Studios in Rusper and produced by Dennis Bovell, the album was a proper fusion of punk and reggae, two musical styles which had intertwined throughout the previous few years, without being a case of cultural appropriation. What the group took as influence was a sincere hybridization, rather than a case of white people ripping off black music. It had its own originality and distinction that was completely idiosyncratic to The Slits. Provocatively packaged in a cover showing the band's female members topless, covered in mud and sporting loincloths, it was a thumb in the eye to the concept of sexual exploitation and, rather, was a proclamation of female empowerment, with the album's title, as it was, being but one letter shy of obscenity. These girls weren't anyone's playthings or victims, and were in complete control of their creative process and what it manifested.

Cut's mark has been noted on several musical movements. The Guardian's Lindesay Irvine saw the album explore "adventurous" sonics while maintaining a "defiant" attitude. This included a full embrace of Jamaican music influences, with which he credited the Slits as one of the first bands to do so. Indeed, PopMatters felt that Cut spoke to post-punk's appropriation of dub and reggae clearer than any other of the genre's records. While only modestly successful at its release, it has become enshrined as one of the essential albums to have come from the UK punk scene of the late 1970s. It may have taken some time for the band to get a record on the shelves, but it sure was worth waiting for.