Gina Birch

As one-half of the Raincoats’ core duo since 1977, Gina Birch is a punk icon with a pop sensibility, an art-schooled adventurer who has painted, filmed, and performed by her own rules for over 45 years—using her visual art to tell stories, charging raw recordings with concepts. Her history converges onto her first solo album, I Play My Bass Loud, its title evoking her singular approach to her instrument as well as an ethos. She won’t hang back, or play a supporting role. She is now taking centre stage.

This all befits the feminism and idiosyncracy of Birch, who witnessed the first Sex Pistols show just before setting her creative foundation at Hornsey College of Art in the 70s, studying the radical logic of conceptual art, performance art, and land art. Seeing the incendiary Slits in London, Birch was changed. She formed the Raincoats with fellow art student Ana da Silva, offering a melodic counterpoint to da Silva’s darker undertow, developing her style under the influence of reggae and the Ronettes as much as Subway Sect and Lou Reed. The Raincoats, still active today, became one of the first bands on Rough Trade, typifying the timeless idea of punk as raw expression, not one sound.

Birch amassed the songs on I Play My Bass Loud over the past two decades. Having taught herself the recording program Logic in the 2000s, she’d write to process the world. “I’ve been working on songs on and off forever because I can’t not,” she says. “I’ve got troves of songs I’ve been making for years. It’s a bit like a diary of my own obsessions and interests.”

The dubby, righteous anthem “Feminist Song” became the seed of I Play My Bass Loud when it was released as a Third Man single in 2021 (surrounding the opening of the label’s London store). Both “Feminist Song” and “Pussy Riot,” an ode to the Russian revolutionary art troupe penned around the time of their 2012 arrest, have been a part of the Raincoats’ set list for many years (an early performance of “Feminist Song” took place at MoMA in 2010). “I Will Never Wear Stilettos” underscores Birch’s unwavering streak of humor; the concept has also served as the basis of a Birch painting and short film, screened at the Kitchen in 2017. “If people want to wear them that’s fine,” she elaborates, “but it does seem like a hindrance to running away. I never learned to be that kind of woman. The idea of wearing them seems so absurd.”

The title track was originally created as a fundraiser single for Birch and Helen McCookerybook’s 2016 documentary Stories from the She Punks, and it features five women bassists, including the Modettes’ Jane Crockford and Emily Elhaj, bassist for Angel Olsen (with whom the Raincoats collaborated in 2016). Not unlike the Raincoats’ own “No Side to Fall In,” it’s an opener about the spark of a song entering the world. “I always thought: if I open my big bay window upstairs and play my bass, I’m not some groovy young rapper. I’m this old white woman playing my bass guitar out of my window. I just want to stick my head out and yell down the street: HELL, I’M HERE, AND I’M PLAYING MY BASS LOUD!”