I love a band that has no idea what it’s doing. I’ve always considered amateurism a virtue rather than a vice, and preferred a band that is capable of producing only a vile racket to the slick musicianship of so-called professional musicians. Which is why I adore The Raincoats, whose early gigs were so bad one eyewitness said that every time a waiter dropped a tray “we’d all get up and dance.” But amateurish as they were, The Raincoats had the good sense to turn their lack of chops into an asset, by writing a bunch of punchy songs that made the most of what they could do, namely produce a sound that was as perversely catchy as it was chaotic.
Personally, I suspect the motives of the guy with his waiter and falling tray. I believe he was a closeted Haircut 100 fan, and immune to the charms of the all-female post-punk band from London and their uncompromisingly anarchic, yet inexplicably melodic, sound. One listen to their 1979 self-titled debut should suffice to convince anyone in their right mind that The Raincoats were onto something totally unique. Sure, I hear faint echoes of Television, Talking Heads, Mekons, and the Velvet Underground in a few songs, but The Raincoats were beholden to none of those bands, just as they owed nothing to their punk predecessors, eschewing as they did speed and power for more off-kilter effects.
No, what they were doing was creating a sound all their own, and as a result they stand alongside The Fall and PiL in the ranks your wonderfully idiosyncratic English bands. That they never made as much of a dent commercially as The Fall or PiL is just one more glaring injustice of fate, like the fact that I wasn’t chosen in the NFL draft despite my own high estimation of my imaginary abilities as a running back.
The Raincoats’ sound is not easy to describe. Abrupt shifts in tone and tempo, multiple voices clamoring against one another, lots of truly off-kilter drumming and dissonant guitar scratching, and the wild pyrotechnics of violinist Vicky Aspinall all contributed to a sound that could swing from harsh to lovely in a heartbeat. And the difference between their sound and what was happening around them was deliberate; they wanted to set themselves apart from the rock tradition, which they considered both sexist and racist. They succeeded to the extent that they never attracted more than a cult following, which included John Lydon and, most famously, one Kurt Cobain.
Formed in 1977, the band originally included males of the species, but by late 1978 The Raincoats had an all-female lineup consisting of dual founders Ana da Silva (vocals, keyboards, and guitar) and Gina Birch (vocals and bass); as well as Palmolive (formerly of The Slits) on drums; Aspinall on vocals, guitar, bass, and violin; and Lora Logic on saxophone.
The Raincoats only produced four albums (if you include 1983’s live The Kitchen Tapes) in their first incarnation, and I’ve always preferred the first one, The Raincoats. From opener “Fairytale in the Supermarket,” a raucous but melodic tune featuring great bass, some frantic scratching of the violin by Aspinall that recalls The Mekons, and multiple vocalists, the Raincoats make it clear they’re on a path no one else had ever trod. Interestingly, the tune wasn’t even on the original release, but has been the opening cut on all re-releases since 1993. “No Side to Fall In” highlights call-and-response vocals, more dissonant violin, and an interesting guitar figure, to say nothing of some primal percussion. The guitar and violin play a fascinating interlude, and Logic comes in on sax, even though my sources have her playing only on “Black and White.” The song closes with some naked vocals, and is followed by “Adventures Close to Home,” which opens with a very Talking Heads/Television guitar interlude and then proceeds in a herky-jerky fashion, while the multiple vocalists come in and out and the guitar plays a rudimentary riff to the accompaniment of muffled drums and a cymbal that’s as reliable as clockwork.
“Off Duty Trip” opens with a cool guitar riff, some machine gun drumming, and some relatively dissonant vocals, and features some stop and starts before the great and anthemic chorus comes from out of nowhere. This one sounds like the offspring of a marriage between Wire and The Minutemen, and ends in a jangle of guitars. Follow-up “Black and White” is catchy as hell, in spite of Logic’s alternately warbling and keening sax and some frantic guitar shredding. An up-tempo number with a prominently throbbing bass line, I love it for its deranged sax (my second favorite sax skronk ever, right behind the sax in Flipper’s “Sex Bomb”) and weird left turn into the atonal. As for The Raincoats’ take on “Lola” it’s great, with the vocalists singing alone one minute and in tandem the next, their voices going from low to high in a dizzying take that sticks to the original but is better I think, due both to the great vocals and the added weirdness introduced by having a woman sing rock’s most famous song about male sexual confusion. “Lola” is followed by the violin and bass that introduce the great and dissonant “The Void,” which proceeds slowly and features an angular guitar figure and some atonal violin scraping, backed by the simplest of drum beats. That is until the song explodes and one vocalist cries, “The void! The void!” while another counts off “1, 2, 3.” They’re followed by a slow march that includes a primal guitar solo accompanied by the violin and more muffled drumming, before the number fades into the void that they were just singing about.
“Life on the Line” opens with more great scraping violin before the melody kicks in, and includes some paranoid lyrics as the tempo shifts helter-skelter from slow to fast and Palmolive lays down some real cool drums. The song speeds up only to come to a virtual stop, then starts up again as the vocals grow more frantic, and I don’t know whether it’s the guitar or the violin that is making that delicate linear noise. Finally the vocalist sings, “Could not achieve” over and over until those delicate strings come back and the song stops. As for “You’re a Million” it opens on a slow note only to quicken up until the singer says, “Stop here!” This pattern is repeated until the song really takes off, and The Raincoats sound less like a rock’n’roll band than some insane troupe of Balkan folk musicians who have just dropped acid. To be honest I despair of providing an accurate description of this tune, which is all over the fucking place, and all I can say at the end is “Holy fucktooth, that was an ear twister!”
It’s followed by the Velvets-influenced “In Love,” a slow moving and strangely beguiling tune with great vocals and a violin that has John Cale written all over it, just as the melody reminds me, oh so faintly, of one of Lou Reed’s better ballads. But the late Lou would never have thought to arrange/derange the vocals the way the Raincoats do, although he might have had the wherewithal to throw in the suddenly accelerating instrumental section towards the end. “Feeling happy/Feeling sad,” who knows; about all I do know is that the melody is as catching as Ebola, the vocals are the epitome of audacity, and that violin is as beautiful as it is ominous. The LP closes with “No Looking,” which opens on a slow percussive note while the violin plays the melody. Then the vocals come in and they’re as emotionless as Nico, and I’m talking Nico post-mortem. Then the tempo abruptly speeds up and the vocalist sings, “I’m not looking/I’m not talking” about 1,000 times before shifting to “No looking at me/No looking at me,” which she repeats another 500 times. It’s a great song, not as great as “In Love” or “Black and White” or “The Void,” although comparisons are futile really because all of the songs on the LP are top-notch and there isn’t a hobbled mare in the bunch.
In a just world, The Raincoats would be a household name like The Talking Heads or The Velvet Underground, and I wonder to what extent their relative obscurity is the result of sexism. Like The Slits they dared to challenge the mostly all-boys club that was English punk and post-punk, and like the Slits they have gathered together a small legion of fanatical fans in the years since their dissolution in 1984. And it’s these fans who have inspired them to regroup occasionally since, and to even release an LP, Looking in the Shadows, in 1996. As for yours truly, I hope to see them someday, because I was far too ignorant to see them in their heyday, when they were intuitively twisting sound into strange and beautiful shapes, visionaries who sought their own path and didn’t give a flying fuck what anybody thought about it.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
