How Feminism Informed Raincoats Co-Founder Gina Birch’s First Solo LP

The old saying “better late than never” could certainly apply to bassist-singer-artist-filmmaker Gina Birch. Forty-five years after co-founding the seminal British female punk group the Raincoats, Birch is finally releasing her solo debut album I Play My Bass Loud. Outside of the occasional Raincoats reunion and her collaborative side projects over the years, Birch had been mostly concentrating on painting; her artworks were exhibited late last year in London. But as it turns out, music was never far away from her radar.

“Some of the songs that are on this record have been songs that I have started a long time ago,” she says, “and I’ve got a whole lot more of them. So I’m always writing or painting or making films. If I don’t do something, I don’t exist. I have to be working on something.”

Scheduled for release this Friday via Third Man Records, Birch’s new album could be considered a further extension of the Raincoats’ critically acclaimed and feminist-minded indie rock. The music on her record, which was co-produced by Killing Joke’s Youth, mines such genres as punk, dub, experimental, electronic and even ’60s girl group pop. However, I Play My Bass Loud‘s sonic diversity wasn’t deliberate, according to Birch, but rather the result of the sound that she liked at the time.

“I think with everything I do, I tend not to censor myself. So if someone says, ‘Oh well, that doesn’t really fit, having finger clicks or a girl group sound there.’ I’m like, ‘I like it.’ Or ‘What are you doing with the Auto-Tune? We don’t think that sounds right.’ I said, ‘I don’t care. I like it.’ I think there’s a cohesion to the record in spite of its diversity. I asked the sound engineer, ‘What kind of album is this?’ And he said, ‘It’s a Gina Birch album.’”

A common thread throughout I Play My Bass Loud is Birch’s introspective yet rousing lyrics shaped by womanhood and empowerment, as quite evident on the anthemic track “Feminist Song” (“When you ask me if I’m a feminist/I say to hell with powerlessness,” goes the lyric). “It’s very important that women are represented in certain ways,” Birch explains. “Sometimes they’re feisty. Not all women would agree with all my phrases or statements, but not all men would agree with all men’s statements or phrases. So I’m representing my own perspective or experience.”

The hypnotic, electronic-influenced song “I Will Never Wear Stilettos” can be interpreted as the narrator asserting her independence by defying society’s preconceived attitudes about the way women should appear. Birch says: “It seemed to me that there was some kind of difficulty or powerlessness somehow of having to teeter along on these very thin spikes. And that seemed an odd thing—that women were perhaps being disadvantaged in some way. Yeah, you could say they [stilettos] can be weapons. They can be sexy. I do think if you’ve got the right-shaped legs, stilettos can really make a leg look beautiful. And I’m not against them, per se. It’s just that I would never wear them.

“When you’re my age, there’s a certain thing. It’s like, ‘Why is your hair like that?’ ‘Have you ever thought of wearing these shoes? Why are you wearing those big clunky shoes?’ You have your moments of defiance and rebellion. They’re kind of quite small rebellions compared with Pussy Riot, for example. But they are my own rebellions against the traditions that certainly mothers of people of my generation would have liked for us. They would have liked us to have more femininity in the way that they understood femininity. So it’s defining a new femininity or a new femaleness.”

Speaking of the Russian feminist music collective, Pussy Riot is also the title and subject of another track off the new album. “There are so many women in very difficult circumstances,” says Birch. “And they are determined to fight. With Pussy Riot, their bravery is unbelievable. My little rebellions feel rather pathetic by comparison. I would like to say I take courage from them, but I don’t think I have their courage.”

The first single released ahead of the album, the noisy rocker “Wish I Was You,” features an appearance by Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore (its accompanying video was directed by Birch’s daughter Honey). Prior to co-writing the song with Youth, Birch had been busy with painting and working on a single for Third Man.

“[My mom’s cousin] said, ‘Things are going so well for you. It seems like you’re kind of being lifted up and carried along.’ So I wrote this thing about how you have moments in life where you catch a wave…And then at the end—I was reading this book about Francis Bacon, the painter. He said to his friends, ‘Let’s all be brilliant. We should all be as brilliant as we can.’ I thought that if I’m going to big myself, let’s be brilliant. So I put that in. And in a way, I quite like the idea of people all singing, ‘Let’s be brilliant! Let’s be brilliant!’ The lyrics of that came in an odd way, really.”

The rhythmic, dub-like title track is particularly unconventional in that it features Birch and four musicians (Helen McCookerybook, Emily Elhaj, Shanne Bradley and Jane Perry Woodgate) all playing bass. The declarative song originated with McCookerybook’s book The Lost Women of Rock for which the author interviewed women who took up an instrument during the punk era. It prompted interest in a film and McCookerybook invited Birch, who had done a documentary about the Raincoats, to collaborate with her.

“We thought we’ll make a couple of songs and try and get funding [for the project],” Birch says. “So I got a few of the women to come and play bass on this track to try and get funding. I think we sold about two. (laughs) We weren’t very good at marketing ourselves. And so I worked with that and pushed it further…I have this house and there’s a big bay window. I imagined playing the bass there, opening up the window, and shouting up the street. So I started writing those lyrics.”

Complementing the music is the album’s cover art featuring Birch’s 2018 autobiographical painting “Loneliness,” inspired by the time when she moved into a squat in London’s Westbourne Grove sometime in the 1970s. “When you move from a province to a capital city, there’s a kind of different vibe. People seemed a lot more sophisticated in London and had different ways about them. I came from a lower-middle-class family in the Midlands. Suddenly I’m in London. It was brilliant, but I needed to find my feet. And I had these two rooms at the top of this house, only cold running water. The plaster was falling off the walls. I had a little tiny sink and two rings on the floor to cook on. It was both magical and horrible.

“At art school, I discovered Super 8 film when [film director] Derek Jarman had come to my college and showed his work. I made a conceptual piece, which was screaming for the duration of the three-minute cartridge. So I took a still from that—’arrrrgh!’ It was kind of a cry from the heart, and I called it “Loneliness.” People seem to relate that to the album. I kind of don’t know if I chose it or it chose me or someone else chose it. I’m not really sure how it happened. It just attached itself to the album.”

Birch’s first solo record comes 45 years after the formation of the Raincoats, the band she co-founded with singer and guitarist Ana da Silva, in London. One of the first British female punk acts, the Raincoats released their self-titled album in 1979, which is now regarded as a classic. (“The band illuminated a new register, and a new perspective that was defiantly feminist,” wrote Vivienne Goldman in her 2019 book Revenge of the She-Punks). Over the decades, the Raincoats have been held in high regard by future generations of rockers like Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, who found the Raincoats inspirational for going against musical convention.

Although they have regrouped a few times over the years for special performances, the Raincoats are somewhat retired; their last studio album came out in 1996. “Ana never wanted to do any new music as the Raincoats,” says Birch. “Occasionally as the Raincoats, we play “Pussy Riot.” We occasionally played “Feminist Song” probably a bit more, and “No Love.” I couldn’t bear just playing the same old songs over and over. I’ve always been writing. And so when the opportunity came to do this [new record], it wasn’t difficult. The only thing was which songs to choose. And I had lots of songs.”

In the end, fine art and music balance each other out for Birch, who will be doing concerts in the U.K. and Ireland while eyeing possible dates for the U.S. “I love them both a lot,” she explains about the two mediums. “I completely fell in love with painting and I kind of stopped doing music. But then when Dave Buick from Third Man said about doing “Feminist Song” [as a single], I realized how much fun that is. It probably happens to you when something you love and something else takes over. Then you rediscover the original thing. You’re like, ‘Wow, I’ve been doing that for so long and I love it.’ They’re both great. I don’t know what will win out in the end. Probably as my old person career, it might be painting. But while I’m still young, fit and able, I’m going to do the music. It’s a lovely thing to do.”