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Audrey Golden, "Shouting Out Loud: Lives of the Raincoats" (Da Capo Press, 2025)
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- [00:04]
Audrey Golden
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- [00:27]
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- [01:32]
Rebecca Buchanan
Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host of New Books Network, New Books in Popular Culture and today. I'm here with Audrey golden who is the author of Shouting Out Loud, Lives of the Raincoats. Audrey, thanks for being here with me today.
- [01:44]
Audrey Golden
Oh, thanks so much for having me.
- [01:46]
Rebecca Buchanan
Could you talk a little bit about this book? Why did you decide to write a book about the Raincoats and a little bit about them?
- [01:54]
Audrey Golden
Yeah, absolutely. I have been shocked for a long time that there's not a really big full book on the Raincoats and all the ways that their music has really made waves and made impacts into so many different kind of components of art and culture in different parts of the world since they formed in the late 70s. And so I thought it would be amazing to think of a way to try to pull together that big and broad and sort of projecting story that brings together so many other stories and histories. Yeah. So I asked the raincoats in 2022, I think if they might be willing to sit for interviews with me for this book. I wasn't really sure what to expect. They asked to see a proposal before they would consider it. So I wrote a proposal before I had even submitted a proposal to a publisher or given it to my Agent or anything like that. And they all read the proposal, and they came back and said they'd sit for interviews with me. So it got started there.
- [03:02]
Rebecca Buchanan
So before we jump into kind of. You've separated into three kind of lives of the Raincoats. But I love that you started with a note about the research you did and how you sort of did the oral histories and the sort of interview process. So can you talk a little bit about that, why that was important? Why? Yeah, sort of your process for interviewing and researching this book?
- [03:25]
Audrey Golden
Yeah, absolutely. I come to popular culture writing as a former academic. So that's in part where my research methods come into play. But for a lot of the work I do, and for this book, too, it was really important to me to do a lot of oral history research. Even though I wasn't going to craft the book as an oral history book. So it's not an oral history form. But doing a lot of oral history research, because I wanted to sort of record and get so many of the stories from the people themselves, from the Raincoats and from all of these other people who have been influenced by or sort of catalyzed by the Raincoats at all of these different points in time. And for me, oral history research is really important and really interesting because it really reveals how there is no singular definition of history. There's no such thing as a definitive history. I always kind of, you know, like, shudder when I see something described as a definitive history. Because there just really is no such thing. Because any history is crafted. It's crafted by the person writing it, but it's also crafted by the voices of the people who are dipping into their memories to tell those stories. There are all kinds of reasons that memory sort of plays with how histories are crafted and what specific people remember. There are often overlapping memories, things that buck up against one another when you're doing oral history research. And I think all of that is really important to bring together in any kind of, I guess, more comprehensive book or book that's going to really flesh out this idea that there are different lives of a band and different lives of their music. So I knew I wanted to do a lot of oral history research for the book. But I also knew, kind of coming to it, that I wanted to not write this as an oral history. As I had my book before this one, which was an oral history of women at Factory Records. In this, I really wanted my voice to be able to bring the story together, but to rely on oral history research.
- [05:38]
Rebecca Buchanan
So you do these sort of Three lives of the Raincoats. And so starting out with sort of the start of the Raincoats. And so I'm wondering if we can just start by talking about that first. The first life of the Raincoats and who they are and sort of how they came to be for folks who don't know who they are. Yeah. So can you sort of give a little background and we can talk about that for a bit?
- [06:02]
Audrey Golden
Definitely, yes. So this first section of the book is maybe more straightforward traditional biography in some ways. It really relies on the voices of the band members themselves and tells how the band came to be a band and how they came to record records and to play shows for different people in different parts of the world. And how that all started was at Hornsey College of Art in London. Gina Burch, who had come from Nottingham, met Anna da Silva, who had come from Portugal. And they were art students together. Started out not necessarily as close friends, but sort of more like, I think, colleagues in art school. There was an age gap between them. I don't know that they necessarily had a lot obvious in common at that point. It's funny because I think they still don't getting to know them except a shared kind of punk ideology and sense of feminism and voice, I think. But they came together and after a varied series of drummers and guitarists and other people in the band, came to form the version of the Raincoats that would record the first EP of the band, which is Fairy Tale in the supermarket in 1979, and the first LP, which is a self titled record, and it's the one, I think a lot of people know, that has the pink cover and it came from a Chinese book that has images of young children singing in a band. So that is how the band came together. And in that first recording incarnation they had Paul Molive on drums, who had come over from the band the Slits, another really critical feminist punk band in London, who came to inspire members of the Raincoats too. And they had Vicki Aspinall on violin, who became a critical component of the Raincoats through the first life of the band.
- [08:08]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, I love one of your themes throughout this whole book is that they always need a drummer, right?
- [08:13]
Audrey Golden
Yeah, they're always like.
- [08:15]
Rebecca Buchanan
Because that's another thing. We have a couple of members who are sort of integral to the Raincoats. But then there are people who sort of come and go throughout their time, even when they were first sort of starting out, that become really important. So, yeah, can you talk a little bit about that? And this how this band sort of kept going even though they didn't always have usually a driver.
- [08:37]
Audrey Golden
Yeah, absolutely. I think both Anna and Gina think that, you know, as long as it's the two of them, then in some capacity, it's the Raincoats. In some ways it's the Raincoats. They're the ones who formed the band. They're the ones who had the idea for the band. And so Anna and Gina from the start are the heart of the band. But the band actually starts out with a friend of theirs from art college who never even plays with the band. The band doesn't actually play ever. And they break up before they've even thought about like making music or performing together. They come back together after a summer away and decide maybe we should give this another go. And they bring in Nick Turner on drums, who's a really young student at the time. I think he had just been or was studying for his A levels in the UK when he came to play in the band. He came to or went on to become a drummer and Lords of the New Church and other bands that a lot of people know him for, but joked when I was talking with him that people still think the fact that he was a drummer for the Raincoats is kind of the coolest thing he did. So they had Nick Turner on drums. They had Jeremy Frank, an American architecture student on guitar. And Jeremy was, you know, as far as I know, and by all accounts a really amazing guitarist, but had like a really glam style and didn't necessarily, I think, fit in aesthetically with the rest of the band, at least as Anna and Gina remember it. And at the very start for the gig, they first played the first ever show. They also had Ross Crichton, a guy from Australia, playing with them. And they played at a venue called the Tabernacle in London. That was a really important punk venue. And at that first gig actually Joe Strummer of the Clash was in the audience. And there were other just West London punks there who, a lot of whom would become pretty famous in the punk scene. But Ross got terrible stage fright, didn't ever want to do anything again with the band and sort of called it quits after that. They had Jeremy and Nick in the band while they actually went on a two show tour behind the Iron Curtain in War Soft, which is absolutely incredible. They were the first punk band to play behind the Iron Curtain. And that was the lineup for that show. This. Then they fired Nick. Jeremy had to go back to architecture school if she Wanted to keep her visa. And so the lineup of the band changed again and they did get Paul Mullev, like I mentioned, for the first EP and lp. Those were both recorded pretty close in time to one another. Like very close in time to one another, actually. But then Paul Molle soon decided to leave, was really fed up with the music industry and was actually one of the shortest lived drummers in actuality. Even though I think in some ways she's the best remembered drummer, in part just because of the writings out there about the Raincoats.
- [11:50]
Rebecca Buchanan
So it's really interesting because this is like an oral history throughout, but especially I thought in this first section we really get a feel because it is. And I guess because you did all these oral histories, maybe that's how I should phrase it. You did all these really. We really get situated into kind of a specific time in the uk, In London. Right. Like you talk about Rough Trade records and how, like, integral they were. So could you talk a little bit about that and kind of that scene that was going on during this first sort of iteration of the Raincoats?
- [12:23]
Audrey Golden
Yeah. So in West London, like you mentioned, you have Rough Trade records. They're just coming up founded by Jeff Travis, who creates this really interesting egalitarian punk label in West London. Really wants to have a label that does right by the artists, that features artists who don't necessarily have a sound that's similar sonically to one another, but bands that have a similar ideology, a kind of feminist, egalitarian, left leaning, progressive ideology that they share. And all of the contracts are really fair to the artists. And he just creates this kind of ethos in the Rough Trade label, the Rough Trade Shop, which sells records, the Rough Trade booking agency, which the Raincoats manager Shirley ends up forming. And in kind of all arms of Rough Trade that everyone just really loves. It's a sense of family and community and like progressive, I think, fairness and equality. In West London and around Rough Trade, you also have all of these punk artists, many of whom are connected with Rough Trade in some way, who are squatting. So squat living is huge in West London and other parts of London at this time too. So basically people occupying a lot of largely Victorian, once grand buildings that have fallen into total disrepair after World War II. And they're just living there free of charge and making music, making visual art. And so these squatting communities really become really important too, for the burgeoning art scene there. Almost everyone you can think of in a punk band who came out of West London was living in a squat at the time. So Gina Burch of the Raincoats is famously living in a squat. So is Joe Strummer of the Clash. Richard Dudansky, who was in Joe Strummer's first band, the 101ers, lives basically adjacent to Gina's squat. Members of the Slits are living in squats. And so it's really just, I think, a fruitful, artistic time in West London. And. Yeah. And so that's really the kind of space and community and energy that gives rise to the Raincoat.
- [14:47]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. And one of the things you have throughout the book, which is really great, is that you have lots of ephemera and images that came from that time. Yeah. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit just like that, because it sounds like Anna just had this huge collection that you got to go through. Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about that and kind of the artifacts that you have to kind of support some of what you talk about?
- [15:18]
Audrey Golden
Yeah, definitely. So around the time I started writing the book, I was over in London and I wanted to start doing interviews with members of the band in person. And so I was sitting down with Anna and Shirley in their kitchen, and they've lived in this place for a while, and they said, you know, we have an archive. Anna has an archive. And when I was in grad school and I was working on my PhD, I worked as an assistant archivist at the Special Collections Library. And so I was pretty familiar with people saying, you know, coming in, saying, like, oh, I have an archive. Would you be interested in it? And sometimes people have stuff that, you know, a library is going to be interested in, but often, I mean, the archive is obviously important, personally and for families in certain ways and, like, for all kinds of reasons. But more often than not, it's like a box of something that, you know, the. The sort of outward sort of meaning and relevance isn't always clear. And so I've just heard a lot of people say, like, oh, I have an archive. And I wasn't quite sure what to expect. And so I thought maybe Anna would have a couple of boxes of stuff. I thought there might be some cool things, but I wasn't sure. And so they took me outside the flat and to the second flat, which I didn't know. Ex. I didn't know was connected to them, that is upstairs. And they still live in West London, by the way, very close to the original rough trade shop, actually. It's like a really short walk from where they live. We went into the upstairs plot. And it's basically filled, I mean, filled with raincoat stuff that they've saved over the years. And so I was just astounded. And I realized I was going to need a lot longer to look through everything and to kind of, you know, just think about what was there and to be able to imagine ways of incorporating that archival material, both textually but also visually into the book. So I ended up scheduling another longer trip over to London to essentially go through the archive. I photographed every single item. I think there are over 4,000 items, something like that. And I've been working on putting it into a spreadsheet for the Raincoat. So they kind of have a record, an archival record of what they have, along with images of each thing. But, I mean, it was massive. All original artwork, original posters, masters, fan mail. They kept all the fan mail, which I just absolutely loved. Zines where people had written about them every single, I think, magazine or newspaper clipping that where the band had been referenced in any way. I mean, essentially just everything you might imagine or hope would be in an archive was there.
- [18:22]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. And it's really great. So you can sort of see it throughout. And I do. I do work on zines, so I really love sort of the fan mail and the zine stuff throughout. So that's really awesome. So we have this band that. That in the UK at least, is getting some notoriety. People are liking them, but they pretty much. And they break up and they could have disappeared. Right, right. Like, I mean, and so you sort of start with this. Here's this biography, here's this band. This band is really important. Right. But it could have been a band that was really important that nobody knows about. And then you kind of move into this sort of second life of the Raincoats. So can you talk a little bit about how the Raincoats sort of got a second one? You can get their second one.
- [19:10]
Audrey Golden
Yeah. Yeah. What has always been so interesting to me about their story is that the Second Life sort of came to be without their knowledge. They didn't even realize the Second life or kind of set of second lives was even cropping up. As far as they knew, the band had broken up and they had moved on to different projects, several of them, different jobs entirely. And what was actually happening was that in North America, they were really getting picked up by different artists who are interested in them for various and really important reasons. So first, G.B. jones in Toronto, who creates the famous queer Quarazine, JD's, is a fan of the Raincoats. And is listening to their music and wants to put one of their songs on the JD's top 10, which is a list of songs that appeared in issues of JD's, basically to introduce readers to songs that were either covertly about queer love or were dealing with queer issues in ways that may not always be obvious. And then sometimes gb, she's told me, would put songs on those lists that were maybe homophobic in ways, so she wanted to kind of reclaim them also. So there were these lists of songs, the JD's top 10 and the Raincoats song Only Loved at Night gets on the list. And so JD's start circulating among queer punk communities essentially in all different parts of the world. It's circulating in North America, but GB and Bruce LaBruce, the other co creator of JD's, are sending out zines to Europe, to South America, to Japan, to Australia. And so other people start discovering the Raincoats and start finding these kind of hidden queer messages in the music and start thinking of the Raincoats as this really important queer band, which the Raincoats didn't even know was happening in the mid-80s. And then as time goes on a little bit, they become a key band basically by the late 80s, early 90s for riot grrrl in the Pacific Northwest. And this sort of life of the band actually starts in the late 70s with John Foster on Kaos, K A O S, the radio station of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. And he starts playing the raincoats. And other DJs like Lois Mateo, like Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening and K Records play the Raincoats on their playlists. And people in Olympia and kind of around that region start hearing the Raincoats and getting really into the music, trying to find the records, trying to hunt down those records. And they become a huge inspiration point for people like Toby Vale, the drummer of Bikini Kill for Kathy Wilcox and Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill for other Riot Grrrl artists. And so the music then takes on this whole life as well. And Toby Vale actually introduces the Raincoats to Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, who in the early years is living in Olympia. And that becomes a kind of key moment in bringing the Raincoats themselves back into another life of their own that they actually know about.
- [22:44]
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- [23:12]
Rebecca Buchanan
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- [23:14]
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- [23:44]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, and I'd love. And so you talk a bit too about, like, how some of these bands, some of these artists start and form connections with the Raincoats and the community with the Raincoats. And one of the things I really. And I you to talk about that, but I really loved this idea, especially with the Riot Grrrl bands talking about how they didn't want to be the Raincoats, but they just really appreciated that there was this sort of kindred spirit there. Right. That they found people in this space that was sometimes often very misogynistic and masculine, knowing that there were these sort of women that came before them that did some of the same work. So. Yeah. Can you talk about those sort of relationships that they've built and kept building and. And. Yeah. And how that sort of formed?
- [24:30]
Audrey Golden
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think what you say that I talk about in the book is a really crucial link between the Raincoats and the Riot Grrrl bands. They weren't trying to create the same sound as the Raincoats. It's so important. But what they took from the Raincoats was that punk is an idea. It's an ideology. It's a method. It's a way of being. It's about being yourself.
- [24:53]
Rebecca Buchanan
It's.
- [24:53]
Audrey Golden
It's about using your voice loudly. And it's about getting up on stage and, you know, playing your instrument and playing your music, how you want to do it, even when you're told by society, by individuals, by anyone that you shouldn't do it that way or you can't do it that way. And so that's the connection, and that's what they take from the Raincoats. And it's really, I think what Contemporary bands continue to take from the Raincoats. Not that they want to replicate the sound or kind of channel the sound itself, but to channel or replicate the idea and to kind of imbibe this idea of feminist power that is really special and really gives life to a lot of other bands and gives life to the riot Grrrl artists. But what's so cool that you are getting at is members of riot Grrrl, Riot Grrrl bands, and especially a Bikini Kill actually track down the Raincoats.
- [25:53]
Rebecca Buchanan
So.
- [25:56]
Audrey Golden
Bikini Kill has a tour planned with the UK riot grrrl band Huggy Bear in London in 1993. And they have a couple of goals when they go over, which is that they want to find original Raincoats records and they want to track down and meet a Raincoat. So they're being followed around meanwhile by documentary filmmaker Lucy Thain, who is a British filmmaker and a friend of Kathy Wilcox's in Bikini Kill. And through a series of sort of fortunate connections and Bikini Kill's sort of quasi UK manager, the amazing Liz Naylor, they find out where Shirley and Anna live. And this is the same plot, by the way, where the archive is all kept. They live in the same place. They actually have the same kitchen table that they had then. So originally, Toby and Kathy are supposed to go over to Shirley and Anna's flat and get filmed by Lucy meeting the Raincoats, you know, meeting Anna for the first time. And Toby kind of chickens out. And so it's just Kathy and Lucy Thain. And Lucy ends up filming like an hour of footage for this. And it's really fabulous. A tiny, tiny little slip rabbit gets used in her Bikini Kill document. But I was able to get the original archival footage and watch all of it while writing the book. And it's really incredible. And it leads Anna and Kathy to develop a pen pal relationship. And Kathy later meets up with Anna and Shirley and Toby, this time at a Dunkin Donuts in London. And Toby also meets one of her heroes, Anna, and they also form a pen pal relationship. And so they essentially stay in touch and continue to kind of build this friendship over time. And it happens with a number of the other riot Grrrl bands in the uk, too. The archive contains letters from members of Mambo Taxi, members of Huggy Bear, and other bands that are also following in the Raincoats ideological footsteps.
- [28:11]
Rebecca Buchanan
And I just will say that I really love the when. You know, I think it was Toby Vale who talked about the donuts everybody got at the Dunkin Donuts. With Kathy. Yeah, Kathy. Like, I'm like, this makes me so happy. Like, that's the kind of stuff where I'm like, this is why, you know, this is so important. Like, these are the donuts we bought like 30 years ago. So the other thing is like, so they've got this connection, they're doing this, but their music is not. They're not. Like, it's all discontinued, right? Like you cannot get a hold of it, which. I really love the story of all of that. And I'm looking at my 33 and a third raincoats book over there because you talk a little bit about the mini book inside of that. But so can you talk a little bit about like, then how do we get. So we've got this band, there's this interest, but no one's producing, right? The records aren't being produced anymore. So how do we get to a point where people get to hear their music on a little broader basis, right? How do we. How does this sort of second life help them to get re released as artists?
- [29:12]
Audrey Golden
So it comes back to that Kurt Cobain component. He also goes on a Raincoats pilgrimage of sorts. Also wants to find the first lp, the self titled lp, and goes to Roughtray, the shop in West London, and asks if they have a copy. He's with Courtney Love, he's married to at the time, and they go in and Jude Crichton, who is the partner of Ross Crichton, if you remember back to what I was saying, one of the original, very first stage playing members of the Raincoats, who gets stage fright. So Jude, she works in the Rough Trade shop and tells Kurt, you know, we haven't had a copy of this for years. But Anna is actually currently working at her cousin's antique shop, which is a kind of short walk from here. So Jude draws Kurt and Courtney a map, they take it with them. They walk to Anna's shop, meet Anna. Anna has no idea who they are when they come in, still doesn't know really until after they leave. And she mentions who it was to people. Kurt's a huge fan of the Raincoats. And because Nirvana has become so big, essentially when the Raincoats decide to see about reissuing their music on CD in the uk, dgc, which is the kind of indie major, and I'm using scare quotes here of Geffen, the huge, huge label in the 90s that includes Nirvana and a number of the other really, I mean, big mainstream becoming alternative bands, many of whom I think never intended to become that, but become that. And the 90s decide to reissue the Raincoat's first three records on CD. And so they're going to be issued for the first time on CD in the United States. And it means people who could never hear the music before, because, of course, this is long before streaming or anything like that for anyone listening wondering why you need a cd. And, I mean, I was among those people. I was a teenager, and I had heard the Kitchen tapes, the Raincoats live record on cassette that they recorded in 1982, but none of this, like, major Raincoats music was anywhere to be found. So it gets reissued on cd and people can finally get it, and it starts circulating. People are getting the CDs, people are sharing the CDs, you have to make tapes of CDs and give them away. So everyone's getting the Raincoats, and DGC decides to sign the Raincoats, which is just bonkers to make a new record. And so the Raincoats make a new record, they get back together and make a new record that ends up coming out in 1996, called looking in the Shadows. It doesn't do very well commercially, but it's got some great music on there. It sounds pretty different, I think, than some of the earlier stuff, but I especially love the song Don't Be Mean on there, which Gina directed a really cool music video for, which listeners can find on YouTube now. So if you don't know the song, look it up and watch the music video for it. But that ultimately comes to an end, too. And I think the Raincoats just really aren't meant to be a Geffen band in the 90s, and they break up again.
- [32:34]
Rebecca Buchanan
So we have this reiteration, and then you have a third life for them sort of talking about. And you say it's kind of the longest one time, timeline wise. So can you talk a little bit about that, too? Like, what is. What do you see as that third life of the Raincoats? And what do you do in that last third of your book?
- [32:51]
Audrey Golden
Yeah, it's interesting because the third life, really, like, temporally is the longest, but it's the shortest section in the book, too, because it's interesting because they're kind of doing something different in that life. And essentially they've become a band that's of really great interest for performance artists. And they've kind of become a museum. Sorry, they've become a museum. Maybe that's a Freudian slip. They've become a museum that has a place in museums. A band that has a place in museums, which is really unlike most bands that have ever come before. So in the new millennium, they start getting invited to play shows in places like moma, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which is huge. Huge. That's. In 2010. They get invited to the British Film Institute, to BFI's Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. They're featured as a performer in the National Portrait Gallery in London's Gay Icons exhibition. They get taken up by the performance art collective Chicks on Speed to be part of this even bigger collective called Girl Monster. And, yeah, they really, I think, in the new millennium, start to ask us to question what it means to be in a museum and what kind of art belongs in a museum. And they start to reveal that, you know, punk music is something that belongs in a museum, but perhaps in a museum in a new kind of way of thinking about it. Not in the way that, you know, you might think of a museum as something stuffy that's, you know, containing canonical Masters works or something like that, but rather a museum for a new generation of artists who are thinking outside the box, who are rethinking what makes art art and the kind of various forms it can take. So, yeah, that's really how the third section comes to be. And I think their lives diverge in all these different ways, too, because they're all doing their own projects in the new millennium, too. They're other occasionally as the Raincoats, but they're also really leading their own individual lives and doing work that is pretty different from what they were doing in the Raincoats. Gina's making solo records on Third man, doing a lot of film work and music video work. Anna's working almost entirely doing electronic music, doing solo records. And, yeah, they're just in these new and different incarnations that I think are still pushing boundaries, though, and so that's really cool.
- [35:41]
Rebecca Buchanan
So, you know, in talking to them and talking to people around them, did they. Are they sort of still sort of surprised that they're still a thing? Right, that they. You know, I mean, like. Because there are so many bands that. Similar to them that have just kind of disappeared. But they have.
- [36:00]
Audrey Golden
Right.
- [36:00]
Rebecca Buchanan
Like, so did they. Do they have thoughts on that? I mean, I don't know if there's.
- [36:05]
Audrey Golden
Yeah, I mean, I think. I think in some ways they're surprised, but I think they're happy to know that, you know, that they're sad still sort of reference points or musical nodal points for artists who are up and coming. The Black Feminist punk band from London, Big Joanie, sort of formed because of a shared love of the Raincoats, which is really cool. And they're a real lesson in how your music can sound nothing like the Raincoats music, but can share an ethos. I love Big Journeys. And he's like, I'm a huge fan of them. And I think the way they see the Raincoats as their own kind of fairy godmothers, that's really interesting and cool. And I just read pretty recently, maybe a couple month or two ago, a horse girl referencing the Raincoats as inspirations for them and sort of, you know, points of thinking in their own music. And so I think the way that, you know, contemporary bands and really young bands continue to reference the Raincoats maybe helps to get them to realize just their, you know, their critical significance in the scheme of various music histories. But I think they're still maybe a little surprised.
- [37:21]
Rebecca Buchanan
Well, it seems, too, that they are very much fans of music, right? Like, they're fans of the people who've come and seen them. They kind of find out and learn about them. So I really love that, too, that they're not just like, oh, this is great. But, like, even in. When you read the sort of letters they pass back and forth, especially when they're asking people to write liner notes, they're talking about how much, like, I went and listened to this. I really love this. Right? Like, they have a song that will perpetually be dedicated to Kurt Cobain. Right? That kind of thing. So, yeah, like, they're fans, too, which I think is really important and great.
- [37:56]
Audrey Golden
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I mean, they're still going to shows and still going to see new music. Gina's members of her current band, the Unreasonables, are, you know, interested in Gina's music history, but in, I think, bringing a kind of contemporary perspective to their performances. And, yeah, they're still buying music, still going to shows. People are still seeing Raincoats in the audience at gigs they go to in London and then other places where they are. So, yeah, I love that about them, too.
- [38:31]
Rebecca Buchanan
So you said, like you said at the beginning, that you kind of realized there's. Nobody had written a book about the Raincoats before. In your introduction, you really have this whole, like, list of things, like, you can't tell the story of X, Y and Z without the Raincoats, Right. So what do you hope? Or what is your. Yeah, what is your hope? Maybe that this book does, like, why is this sort of. Why is this important?
- [38:56]
Audrey Golden
Yeah, I mean, I really hope it gives people a sense of the way that the Raincoats are such an important point in so many different sonic and cultural histories. The way they in so many ways gave rise and power to Riot Grrrl, which I think created a whole way of being for so many women in the 90s. And I think it's possible that those Riot Grrrl bands might not have existed, might not have had the kind of, you know, like, inspiration to form and to do what they did without thinking about the Raincoats. And I mean, then imagine what kind of world we'd be in now without Riot grrrl from the 90s. Queercore, so critically important, but so under talked about. And I say that in part because I'm just finishing a small Bloom's very genre series book on queercore. But I mean, I think without, you know, only Loved At Night showing up on GB's JD's top 10 list, where would you know, a lot of queer punks be? And how would they have really thought, okay, I can make music that. That talks about my identity, that, you know, sees my identif. My identity as something powerful, as something to be loved, as something that should be listened to and should be heard. I think just in all these ways. And in that conversation I was just talking about. About rethinking sort of what we see as art and re. Sort of conceptualizing punk as art or different forms of music and performance as art. The Raincoats play such an important role in all those histories. And so I hope readers sort of get to know about that. But then I also hope it urges them to think about the ways perhaps other artists, other musicians, other, you know, people working in various mediums perhaps might have had similar influences that have thus, you know, far to date gone sort of unrecognized or under talked about. And how can they sort of discover those like temporal nodal points themselves and bring those histories together?
- [41:18]
Rebecca Buchanan
So one final question, and you mentioned the genre series from Bloomsbury. So self promotion with this book, with anything new you're working on. Yeah. What do people need to know?
- [41:29]
Audrey Golden
Yeah, so I have this genre series book in Bloomsbury's new 33 and a third genre series coming out, I believe in the spring on Queercore, which I'm extremely excited about, mostly because I got to write so much about team Dresh and Tribe 8 two bands I just have absolutely loved since my own teenage years. But I also. I feel like the. The a book on queer core is. Is really important and so I want to shout out loud about that. And then I'm also working on a biography of Mark Lanigan, so I doing interviews for that now. It's going to take a really different form than anything I've written to date. I wanted to read more, kind of like a novel. It'll be nonfiction, obviously, but to read a literary work that attends to a lot of the really dark aspects of his story, but to the music in ways that perhaps readers won't know about and can think about in new ways.
- [42:36]
Rebecca Buchanan
Awesome. Audrey, thank you so much for talking with me again. Audrey golden, who is the author of Shouting Out Lives of the Raincoats. Thanks for being on new books in popular culture.
- [42:45]
Audrey Golden
Oh, thank you so much.
- [43:02]
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- [43:21]
Audrey Golden
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Audrey Golden
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