Tag: The Raincoats

“The Raincoats is a beginning, but it is also a record about beginnings. In its songs you hear a cultural genesis story. The Raincoats were a group of women who were, in part, just learning to play their instruments, but their debut album also coincides with the start of a whole artistic sensibility, one of fearless and knowing amateurism. These overcast songs are charged with the feeling of newness that comes with realizing you are not what you expected. It is the sound of finding things buried inside you that you did not know were there. It is the sound of realities expanding note by note, of accepting punk’s dare. It is the sound of people believing in themselves. The album’s protagonists, who are also its authors, are young female mavericks alone in the city. They wander many miles of concrete streets and still more in the solitude of their minds. The scrappiness of life rumbles and tumbles along. They gaze at tube platforms and dream. With its defiantly shy temperament, The Raincoats is introversion as punk—a celebration of the female interior life. This is why its 34 minutes of clattering feminist outsider art have become spiritual music for so many generations of women, and medicine for the quietest, cast-out kids, odes to outsiders among outsiders in perpetuity. It is an ultimate loner album. …”
The Raincoats’ Debut Album Is a Classic DIY Document (Audio)
How a British Post-Punk Group Influenced Entire Generations of Rock Bands
Drowned In Sound
The Quietus – Post-Punk Distilled: The Raincoats’ Debut Album 30 Years On
W – The Raincoats
YouTube: The Raincoats (1979), full album 11 videos

“Over the course of its career, the band has released four full-length albums; toured extensively early on; was revered by the likes of John Lydon of the Sex Pistols, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth; and has most recently collaborated live with Angel Olsen. The emotional resonance of The Raincoats’ post-punk sound combined with a preference for inventive originality over standard technique has provided a notorious impact across genres and generations.  It mostly began when Birch and da Silva met at Hornsey College of Art, where they were both studying, and started going to punk gigs together. They saw bands like the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks, and Subway Sect, but it wasn’t until they saw the Slits play their first gig in London in 1977 that their brains were jolted. …”
40 Years of Fairytales: A Retrospective of The Raincoats
Tidy Tune #73: Fairytale in the Supermarket (Video)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Fairytale in the Supermarket, In love, Adventures close to home