Gina

Gina Birch never thought of calling herself an artist. Which seems like a strange attitude for this restless musician, painter, and filmmaker who first made her mark as a founding member of the Raincoats, a lasting spark from London’s musical underground of the late 1970s and a personal favorite band of Kurt Cobain and Kathleen Hanna. It was just one of Birch’s many “mini-revolutions.”

She was a young art student when she attended the very first Sex Pistols gig in late 1975 at the St. Martin’s School of Art in London. It was a revelation, but her life was truly changed after witnessing another band of the early punk scene, the all-female trio the Slits. Not long after, the Raincoats were born.

The Raincoats’ self-titled debut album in 1979 was recorded by the classic all-female lineup of Birch (vocals, bass), Ana da Silva (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Palmolive (drums), and Vicky Aspinall (vocals, violin). After dissolving in 1984, the sound and symbolism of the band helped inspire the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s and many others. By then, Birch had played in other bands and was an active filmmaker, directing music videos for New Order, the Pogues, the Libertines, and more.

She is happy to discuss her past, but her focus is very much on the present, and creating new work in a variety of mediums from her home in North London. Her new album, Trouble, is only the second she’s released under her own name, both of them for Third Man Records. The music on 2023’s I Play My Bass Loud and Trouble is modern and sophisticated, a mixture of indie rock and dub, strings and electronics, as elegantly recorded by her esteemed producer and collaborator, Youth. Trouble would fit easily among recent forward-leaning work by Nick Cave and St. Vincent.

The new album’s title was taken from the song “Causing Trouble Again,” an anthem for female heroes of culture and politics at over six minutes of controlled chaos and euphoric cheers. It closes with a roll call of impactful women, among them, “Joni Mitchell … Lee Miller … Yoko Ono … Stormy Daniels … Nina Simone … Ruth Bader Ginsburg … Maya Angelou … Sinead O’Connor.” The track was inspired by last year’s exhibition Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 at the Tate Britain, which used Birch’s Super 8 film from 1977 called “3 Minute Scream” as its defining image.

On the last night of her North American tour, a few days before Halloween, Birch relaxed on a tour bus she shared with headliner and fellow Brit Miki Berenyi, parked outside the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles. (Birch will be back on the road again across Europe and the U.K. through 2026.) If music seems to again be a priority, she sees it as just another part of an ongoing creative continuum.

“I don’t think I had priorities. I wasn’t that sorted,” Birch tells SPIN with a laugh. “I just get up each day and put one foot in front of the other and see what happens. I’ve never been a career person. It’s only more recently that I’ve ever even described myself as an artist. I always thought that was up to other people to describe you as.”

Your new album Trouble is a sophisticated, modern collection of songs very much about the present. When people keep bringing up the Raincoats, does that bother you at all?

No, because that was my entry. If it weren’t for that and it weren’t for punk, I would never have done this. I liked singing, but I couldn’t play anything. Punk was so exciting and enabling, and I was right in the middle of it. It was kind of like, “You can do whatever you want to try. With just a bit of energy, a bit of courage, and you can do it.” But we didn’t know what we were doing. And in a way, that’s what made it quite inventive. We were art students, after all. So we were just trying different things out without trying to play rock and roll particularly. We were trying to put one section after another or one bit, or let’s shout here, or let’s chant here, or let’s try this here, or let’s slide the bass up on the violin. We were just trying to see what we could do. 

Many people refer back to 1977 as the year when things really coalesced for that original U.K. punk scene. Did it feel like that for you? 

Totally. I remember thinking, I’m so lucky to be young and alive at this moment. It felt really special. I thought the world was changing, you know? I was in the heart of this little revolution. I was interested in the dynamism of just giving it a go, knowing a couple of chords and trying to see what you can do creatively with it. Obviously, there are some overlaps between the hippie culture and the punk culture.

Not everyone from the 1960s was able to move forward with the punk movement. It was just noise to some of them.

If you can see the similarities between the two things philosophically, they are quite a good fit. But I do think that in the hippie era there was more skill required. You got the Hendrixes and the Joni Mitchells, people who really knew what they were doing. Whereas with punk, it was valuing an idea. For me, it came out of conceptual art. You have an idea and then you try to achieve it, whether you’re capable of it or not. What was interesting about that time was that each band had their own way of breaking the rules, or finding ways to become themselves. It was very exciting.

Was the fact that the Raincoats were female incidental or did you feel like that was making a statement?

When I saw the Slits play, I just absolutely loved them. And it was great that they were all women, because I know it sounds daft now, but there was this idea that if there was a man in the group, he would be somehow responsible for pulling the strings, taking charge of the whole thing. We did have some men in the group early on, and then when Palmolive joined and Vicky joined, we became all-female for a while. But then, on the second album, we didn’t even have a drummer for quite a lot of it. And then Robert Wyatt came in and played afterwards, and he was like, “This is like jazz!”

The band broke up by the middle of the ’80s, but in the ’90s another generation was talking about your influence.

In the early ’90s we heard about the Olympia [Washington] scene and the girls/women there who quoted us as an influence. I heard that Kathleen Hanna [of Bikini Kill] was interested in being a performance poet, and [writer] Kathy Acker said, “Don’t do that, start a band!” There’s more agency and immediacy in having a band and having an audience of young people who you can really talk to. 

Did that recognition mean a lot to you?

Oh God, we were absolutely thrilled. The Raincoats had a kind of underground core audience, but they weren’t really the movers and shakers. People like [U.K. critic] Jon Savage would say, “I have nothing to say about the Raincoats.” People found us a bit odd. We just did what we did. We never anticipated that anything would come of it. So when it came, it was a beautiful surprise. I remember Ana telling me, “There are these bands with women in them, and they call themselves Riot Grrrl.”

Kim Gordon said she related to us because we were kind of ordinary people making extraordinary music. We wore our clothes inside out. We wore odd footwear. We weren’t bigging up the femininity, but we weren’t denying it either. Ana was particularly moved by Patti Smith, because of her poetry and her performance. But, as she says, it wasn’t Patti Smith that made her think she could do it. It was the bands like the Slits and the Subway Sect, who were putting one foot in front of the other. They were the ones that gave us permission to do it. 

What do you think about the distinctions between punk and post-punk, which is what the Raincoats were labeled?

For us, post-punk met us where we ended up, although we were there at the punk happenings, and I was famously at the very first Sex Pistols gig. Punk ended when Sid [Vicious] died. It was disintegrating as it was rising, you know? The Clash carried it on, and the Buzzcocks. Perhaps if we’d released our album a year earlier, we’d be punk. 

Punk was very short lived in a way. It was bubbling under for a while, and then suddenly it hit. By the time I arrived, it was in full swing. And then the Roxy [in London’s Covent Garden] opened, and we were there every night and at various happenings all over the place. There was this intense energy. You could relax a bit more with post-punk. 

After the Raincoats, you kept doing music under various names, but how did you become a filmmaker?

When I was at art school, [filmmaker] Derek Jarman came to my college with his Super 8 films, and I got myself a Super 8 camera. It was like painting with film in a really magical way. Then of course, pop videos started happening, and some of them were really interesting. There were so many beautiful things that happened during that time with film. I was very moved by that. 

Why did you decide to call your new album Trouble? 

Linsey Young, a curator from London, had been plotting for a long time to do an exhibition of women’s work [Women in Revolt! at the Tate Britain]—a lot of largely ignored women’s artwork that had been made between 1970 and 1990. She said, “Oh, I’ve heard about your Super 8 films.” And she was particularly interested in the “3 Minute Scream.”  And then she said she wanted to screen it, and she wanted my image from it for the poster. So suddenly my face was all over the London Underground and everywhere. I felt very attached to the other women that were in the show. And I wanted a kind of anthem for us, to say, “We love you, we respect you, and you’ve made a difference to us.” 

[In the song] I wanted to have names of women who’d made a difference to our lives. I asked all the women who were in the show if they would suggest some names and record them onto my phone, and some of them did. I widened my search and got lots of different people leaving names on my answer phone. I put them all into a song called “Causing Trouble Again.” That seemed to be the theme tune of the record. There’s good trouble and there’s bad trouble. And I wanted our trouble to be good trouble.

Also on the album is “Doom Monger,” which is a kind of a reggae song. What is it about?

It was going to be on the first album, but I was never happy with it. I was like, “I wish I could find out where it’s all gone wrong.” It felt really trite. And then more recently, it seems like a reasonable question because everything’s gone so haywire. It just felt like, what the fuck has happened? There’s lunatics in power and violence in the air, so much fear in our hearts, and we act like we don’t care, you know? I thought, well, it’s quite good, really. I’ll give it another crack: “Hatred for our sisters, hatred for our brothers …” I just felt there’s a lot of hatred, isn’t there?

You seem pretty happy with the way things are going with this music project.

Oh, God, I feel incredibly lucky now. I’ve got a painting studio, I’ve had painting exhibitions. I’ve got films going out. I’ve written catalog essays for painters. I’m here on tour. I’m going on another. There are some people more successful than me, but I like my funny level of success because I don’t really get recognized. I can be creative. My overheads have always been low. I don’t have expensive holidays. I own a pretty crap car. And I got a lovely house and I decorate it how I want it. I’ve got a great partner and two great kids, and a lovely dog. [laughs]

I’m always doing something. I had a mosaic phase. I did loads of felting and made all these strange felt cushions. I made these naked dresses. I can’t really sit still and do nothing. It doesn’t sit right with me.