Shouting Out Loud: Lives of the Raincoats

In this admiring account, music journalist Golden (I Thought I Heard You Speak) frames overlooked British post-punk group the Raincoats as a galvanizing force in alternative music. Founders Ana da Silva and Gina Birch met at Hornsley School of Art in London in 1977 as the city entered a period of creative ferment. Empowered by such all-female groups as the Slits, they formed a band that harnessed punk’s “tremendous energy” for an uncommercial and sometimes unorthodox sound. The group started out in London squats before accruing a modest but devoted following. Later, they even spurred Bikini Kill to reunite to play at a Raincoats show in 2017—Kathleen Hanna remembers thinking, “We’d do ANYTHING for The Raincoats! Even get back together after twenty years!” The author highlights the band’s squatter-art-student origins, their influence on Nirvana and other groups, and the challenges of negotiating sexism as an all-female band, with members debating whether their lyrics had to be overtly political to convey a feminist message and whether the term feminist itself was pigeonholing. Such discussions are effectively contextualized against the broader cultural shifts of the period, though Golden’s attempts to bring to life the band members themselves often feel belabored (“The fact that Ana and Vicky didn’t always see eye to eye... reveals their humanity; they’d had different experiences, and while they saw the world in similar ways, they also saw it differently”). It’s an ardent if imperfect ode to post-punk trailblazers. (July)