Your favorite band’s favorite band gets its due

“You can’t tell the story of UK punk without The Raincoats.”

This is the opening statement of “Shouting Out Loud,” a fantastic new book about this important, culture-shifting band. Author Audrey Golden continues, listing the myriad other movements that The Raincoats are fundamental to, including: New York City’s downtown scene, Riot Grrrl, grunge, American indie pop, alternative rock, noise rock, queercore and the modern art museum. (This is not a complete list.) Over the course of the next 370-ish pages, Golden proceeds to definitively prove each and every assertion, in painstaking detail and astonishing depth, manifesting the telling of this story in a way that resonates with how The Raincoats made music across multiple formations and decades.

A lot of music fans haven’t heard of The Raincoats, the band founded by Gina Birch and Ana da Silva in London in 1977, despite their undeniable influence and far-reaching, still ongoing impact. In the introduction, Golden states matter-of-factly, “It is clandestine knowledge.” When The Raincoats began, you might have heard of them if you were the kind of person who was reading the underground music press, or who followed what was happening with the UK’s brand of punk rock. You also might have heard them on the radio if you lived within the transmission towers of a college radio station. But as Golden explains, most people — including some of their later and more famous fans — heard about The Raincoats because someone made them a tape. And as Golden also acknowledges, “…at a certain point in sonic history annals, the absence of The Raincoats’ story signals more than just inadvertent omission.”

The event that both resurrected and elevated The Raincoats, almost a decade after they had stopped making music together, was when Kurt Cobain decided to utilize his meteoric fame and get their hard-to-find, out-of-print records reissued on a subsidiary of his own major record label. Cobain went looking for their records at Rough Trade — the band’s original label — in London, and one of the staff working there explained that the records were out of print, but that Ana da Silva worked at an antique store not far away and that she might have a copy to give him. The shop worker drew Kurt and Courtney a map, and the rest is history. Cobain would later invite a reunited version of the band to open for Nirvana on a tour that never happened because he died by suicide. That association is tragic but also unfair, not least because (to quote journalist and punk professor Vivien Goldman), “It took a guy to reintroduce The Raincoats.”

The Raincoats had three major career arcs, and Golden uses these arcs as the main organizational structure for the book, calling them Life Number 1, 2 and 3. Life Number 1 is the origin story, Life Number 2 is their rediscovery by music fans in Olympia, WA, that resulted in a pre-Nirvana Kurt becoming acquainted with their work, and Life Number 3 is the subsequent aftermath of that particular interlude, leading to another wave of discovery. Their story is a dense and intricate history that required the diligent investigative technique of a good detective and the rigorous research chops of a scholar. It helps, a lot, that everyone (mostly!) whose voice was crucial to this telling was only too happy to participate, but that creates another challenge in that the author/researcher now has an overabundance of primary source material to sort through.

And then there’s the physical archive. As Golden began her research, Ana da Silva told her she had some scrapbooks and other artifacts in a couple of boxes. But The Raincoats archive turned out to be more than 4,000 physical objects, like: artwork, correspondence, posters, press clippings, photographs, setlists, lyrics and much more. In the pre-Internet days, people would send fan letters to the band, and so many of those were retained (including a marking system so they’d know if the letter had been answered). This massive repository enriches the book because Golden continually refers to and quotes from the contents. The inclusion of this material and how Golden utilizes it — with generosity and great openness — is a great equalizer, within the spirit of DIY, punk rock, equality and everything within The Raincoats’ worldview. You don’t know anything about The Raincoats and want to learn more? Here you go. There’s no gatekeeping here.

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Nothing about The Raincoats was standard or conventional. While they definitely (and definitively) espoused the punk rock ethos that anyone had the right to pick up a guitar and write songs and get on a stage and play music, they took that belief and stretched it to the very edges. In the book, Gina Burch tells the story of buying her first bass. “I had never been in a music shop before,” she remembers, “and I was about to buy an instrument I had no idea how to play.” The result was music and art — performances, album covers, gig posters, promotional material — that was revolutionary, groundbreaking and disturbing to their detractors.

Part of The Raincoats’ story is how the band was received, and despite enthusiasm from fans, some of the British music press, and other musicians, there was not universal acceptance. The band played gigs for Rock Against Sexism, but disagreed on their personal definitions of feminism, or what makes music political. Vicky Aspinall, the band’s first violinist, notes, “The real feminist aspect of the group was that it was non-hierarchical, the fact that we were collaborative and didn’t have a leader.” But none of that matters when you’re playing a gig and being pelted with beer in Manchester or tomatoes in Birmingham, or if a club’s in-house sound dude pushes back against the band’s specific requests. (“Because it inspires me,” is the answer Ana da Silva gave in one such encounter when asked to justify why she wanted something.)

(Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images) Ana Da Silva and Gina Birch of The Raincoats, 1997

A better story to tell is when the band was invited to play in Poland in 1978, part of a “rising dissent” manifesting in Warsaw. Their Polish guide during this sojourn relates that they seemed “like space aliens” walking the streets, the first tangible proof to Poles that punk rock was real. The Raincoats played two nights, and by the second night, the crowd was singing along like they were pop stars: “they’d taped the first show and gone home, obsessively listened, and learned the words phonetically.” The band hadn’t even recorded a record yet, and had only been together a few months, but their impact was enormous and immediate.

“Shouting Out Loud” is also notable for its somewhat unexpected structure. It is mostly linear, but not linear the way most rock and roll histories are linear. It will step forward, it will jog sideways, it will reference something in Life Number 3 that first arose in Life Number 1: Thurston Moore was an early Raincoats fan, and saw one of their first New York City performances. But in Life Number 3, he is now Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, recalling seeing those early shows. The ability to hold multiple parts of the timeline simultaneously, and to be able to reverse or move in an unexpected direction in service of the story, is an aspect that feels particularly Raincoats-like in that it is a structure that is unfamiliar but not incomprehensible.

Golden told Salon, “It was entirely deliberate and it was based on two separate temporal threads that were running through my mind as I was researching and writing, but that I think also run through these three lives of The Raincoats as I describe them. The first is the way in which I think their music and, as a result, they are sort of outside time in this really interesting way, and that they can sort of disappear themselves, but their music lives on and then inspires somebody and then sort of regenerates them in a way that they come back to life almost. They’re resurrected. And this happens at different moments in time and across these different geographic spaces. And I thought it was so fascinating to think of that idea of a kind of eternal return.”

The book also does a phenomenal job of surfacing all of the band’s collaborators, helpers and allies. Most rock and roll books — most biographies — seem to be operating in service of a narrative that the subject was a brilliant genius and they achieved their success because of that inherent brilliance. The Raincoats never pretended they were working alone and elevated and surfaced their creative partners (and in fact would be very upset if they discovered they had minimized anyone in any way, and would work to try to remedy it). Golden also illustrates the relationships between the band members and co-creators in a transparent and realistic way — “They could disagree and still make the music that they did,” is a point she makes, which is another rock and roll trope that gets abandoned here.

We seem to be in a golden era for music histories about women that are researched and written by women. Instead of waiting for someone else to write the books that should — that needed to be — written, the work is simply being done. You see that with “Shouting Out Loud,” but you also see it in the recent anthologies “How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR” (Harper One, October 2024), and “Hit Girls: Women of Punk in the USA 1975-1983” (Feral House, January 2023). (Disclaimer: your columnist has an essay in “How Women Made Music,” but this fact also reinforces the above point.) These are only a few examples, and there is plenty of room for more of these stories, told by anyone willing to do the work to make that happen.

Golden agrees. “Anytime you’re interested in a scene or in a book or in a story where it seems like, ‘Well, there aren’t that many women involved in this,’ think about how histories get constructed. Think about how that narrative got constructed and start your own digging below. Start scratching below the surface, start thinking about whose stories aren’t part of that kind of record, and how can you get them and what can you do with them.”

She continued, “I think that’s the message in some ways of The Raincoats. Do the thing. Just think about how you can make an impact, whether it’s a seemingly small impact in your local community, whether it’s a bigger impact by doing something like writing a book that gets published or making a song that gets heard, because you never know what that thing is going to do in the future or the kind of waves and reverberations it’s going to have down the line . . . You can actually make a big impact on the way history is told and the ways histories exist just by scratching a little bit below. And you don’t have to be an academic. You don’t have to be a published writer. You don’t even have to be someone who knows how to conduct an interview with somebody. Just do it, think about what interests you, and do it, and find those stories that have gotten hidden and marginalized.”

As you read through the book, one might observe that ostensibly, the band has had countless other sub-lives, because each time a member worked on a solo project, it launched yet another arrow into the sky, because you can’t tell the story of that project without mentioning the musician’s first and most “successful” band. What it effectively means is the ability to tangibly see the pulse, the heartbeat, the lifeline of this band across literal decades, resurfacing their work for the next group of inquisitive music fans to discover for themselves.