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 RAINCOATS - ODYSHAPE @ 40

 

Released on June 1st, 1981, The Raincoats sophomore album, Odyshape, is celebrating 40 years since its release. Though the Raincoats had already set themselves in a league of their own with their debut album, they somehow managed to step outside their own self-delineated sphere with this followup.

Just about every aspect of the record sets it outside the colouring lines of punk, post-punk, alternative or folk music, though it touches on all of these genres and more. The instrumentation, performances, compositions and arrangements all defy classification and refuse to adhere to any kind of established norms. Like The Shaggs before them, The Raincoats managed to reinvent music for their own purposes, though in this case they actually had some formal skills to build upon, albeit they pushed each and every technique to the brink of being unrecognizable.

The band were flying somewhat “without a net” when conceiving this album as original drummer, Palmolive, had departed and her replacement, Ingrid Weiss, bailed just as they began working on the album. As such, they began the compositional process mostly without a drummer and it seems that what might have been a constraint actually turned into a source of liberation as the resulting songs all manage to find their way in the most fluid manner, unhindered by concerns for strict tempos and consistent beats. Once they had their landscape somewhat laid out, they brought in a number of drummers and percussionists to ride along their roads and find their way through the organic musical countryside they’d cultivated. These included Richard Dudanski, who had played with Joe Strummer’s 101ers and contributed to PiL’s Metal Box on a few tracks, Charles Hayward (This Heat) and Robert Wyatt (Soft Machine).

The results of these unfettered efforts also opened the floodgates for the girls to express themselves vocally in a manner that exposed their fragility and intimacy in ways rarely heard on record. The honesty and vulnerability that was laid bare in these songs made them feel like listening to them was an invasion of privacy. There’s simply no holding back the emotions here and they took full advantage of their position to explore subjects and attitudes that were distinctly female, yet universally comprehensible.

The fact that the girls all swapped roles and instruments also helped to bring out the unexpected and the intangibly spontaneous in each piece. You never know where a song is going to go from one moment to another. There’s no sense of “verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus” structure here. No “beginning” or “end”. Songs and sounds manifest like a wild garden, growing up from the soil and then receding into the distance as the listener moves along in their journey.

I remember being drawn to The Raincoats after reading somewhere that they were the only band John Lydon would admit to liking. After hearing their first album with it’s raw primitiveness, I was intrigued, but when this second came along, I remember being completely blown away by it. It was an album that stood its own ground, separate from every other genre and trend happening then or since. It remains self-contained and inviolable in its uniqueness and singularity. It still has the power to fascinate and inspire on the deepest emotional levels. It refuses to be subsumed by any categorization and that is why it will remain timeless for the foreseeable future.