On tour to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their eponymous debut LP, The Raincoats should be assured of its legacy if last night's gig at the Komedia in Brighton was anything to go by. Amongst the expected middle-aged audience was a healthy contingent of young people - and young women in particular - and they seemed to know the words to the songs as well as us oldies. Part of that may be down to the album's enthusiastic endorsement by the late Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love's Hole covering one of their songs; but even that was 25 years ago so I like to think it's more an enduring spirit that has been handed down through punk and riot grrrl and still has currency today.
The Raincoats were born from the west London squatting scene of the late seventies: inspired by The Slits, Gina Birch (bass and vocals) and Ana da Silva (guitar and vocals) started the band having met at Hornsey Art College. After some initial line-up changes, they became an all-female group in 1978 when they were joined by Vicky Aspinall on violin and Palmolive from The Slits on drums. They started from a point of little musical ability but were undeterred: as Gina advised last night, "write some lyrics, put them to a couple of chords - but be inventive." And The Raincoats were: at a time when so many bands were opting for rama-lama punk as a template, they were different and surprising; it was no wonder that disillusioned Pistol John Lydon was an early fan.
Only Ana and Gina from the line-up that recorded The Raincoats were present last night - Anne Wood and Vice Cooler were on violin and drums, respectively - as they played the original LP in its entirety book-ended with outstanding debut single Fairytale in the Supermarket at the start and songs from the Extended Play EP at the end. Still sounding angular and lo-fi but with uplifting harmonies, they worked through the tracks chronologically and it was a joy to hear songs such as Off Duty Trip, The Void and, my particular favourite, the Velvety nag of the discomfiting In Love, with its lyrics of turmoil: "I can't do a thing today/I can't see anyway/I haven't eaten all day." I last saw the band in early 1980 at the Electric Ballroom in Camden and it was such a treat to hear them live again, not in a nostalgic way but as confirmation that in the era of my youth there were people producing such distinctive and life-affirming music.
Charming and disarming in their interactions with the audience, the band were candid about the demands of playing live: Ana revealed the difficulty of getting their cover of The Kinks' Lola right (they did) and Gina, switching to guitar for a couple of songs, confessed that it was hard to sing when playing the bass. It was just this sort of honesty that made The Raincoats so refreshing and opened up the way in music for countless others. The honesty continued to the end of the night when Ana said, "This is the last song, we're not pretending, we have no encore, we have no more songs." And as they took a bow to rapturous applause, they were joined onstage by 'fifth-Beatle' Shirley O'Loughlin, The Raincoats' manager since the start.
