The Kitchen Presents The Raincoats in Conversation with Jenn Pelly, 11/2-3

Feminist punk icons The Raincoats return to The Kitchen, November 2-3, to celebrate the release of Jenn Pelly's The Raincoats' The Raincoats, the first book-length writing about the revolutionary band, focusing on their eponymous debut album. In this publication from 33 1/3 Press, Pelly builds on rare archival materials and extensive interviews with members of The Raincoats, along with Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Hole, Scritti Politti, Gang of Four, and others. At The Kitchen, founding members Gina Birch and Ana da Silva along with Anne Wood and Vice Cooler will join Pelly to tell the story of their audacious debut album, which Kurt Cobain once called "wonderfully classic scripture," and more.

In 1979, from the basement of a London squat, the Raincoats reinvented what punk could be. They had a violin player. They came from Portugal, Spain, and England. Their anarchy was poetic. Working with the iconic Rough Trade Records at its radical beginnings, they were the first group of punk women to actively call themselves feminists, paving the way, a decade down the line, for the riot grrrl movement. The Raincoats traveled to The Kitchen in 1982, performing an evening of music that John Rockwell of the New York Times described as "a contradictory confusion of feminism/glamour/folk/sex/rock." This concert was recorded live and later released as The Kitchen Tapes.

In The Raincoats' The Raincoats, Pelly engages with biographic specificities, recuperating The Raincoats from a journalistic tendency to describe them as a collective entity-in no small part because the group often spoke as one, with a lucidity, consistency, and deep consideration of the politics of their work. "Never had I met rock and roll people who so insistently questioned every aspect of their work," Greil Marcus tells Pelly in the intro of her book, in a section noting the very reasons the band worked to assert a sonic and political distance from rock's exclusionary tendencies. Pelly looks into how the individual lives of the all-female lineup on the debut album-Ana da Silva on guitar, keyboard, and vocals, Gina Birch on bass and vocals, Vicki Aspinall contributing guitar, vocals, and genre-defying violin, Palmolive on drums, and Shirley O'Loughlin as a manager and, more accurately "fifth raincoat"-coalesced in music that sounded so effortless in the embodiment of its politics.

The punk genre had, by the time The Raincoats made their debut, become inseparable from loudness, abrasion, and masculine-aggression-as-musical-resistance. Despite their differences in sound from the radical genre's own calcified norms-their embrace of moments both loud and quiet, disruptive and ruminative-Pelly's book emphasizes just how fundamentally punk their work was, and how The Raincoats is, rather, "introversion as punk." The band, she stresses, exemplified punk's ideal of untrained expression and the embrace of the idiosyncratic, but in an inward-looking manner that made their debut "34 minutes of clattering feminist outsider art" that became "spiritual music for so many generations of women, and medicine for the quietest, cast-out kids, odes to outsiders among outsiders in perpetuity."

"The Raincoats were a total manifestation of punk's most sacred promise: this can be yours," writes Pelly. "Even if it hurts to hold down the strings. Even if you have no idea what the strings are called."

The Raincoats: Gina Birch & Ana da Silva will take place November 2 and November 3 at 7pm. Tickets are $20 for the general public, and $15 for members; they can be purchased online at www.thekitchen.org; by phone at 212.255.5793 x11; or in person at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street), Tuesdays - Saturdays, 2:00 - 6:00 P.M.

Funding Credits

This program is made possible with the generous support of Mila and Tom Tuttle; endowment support from Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust; annual grants from The Amphion Foundation, Inc., The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Howard Gilman Foundation, and The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

About The Kitchen

The Kitchen is one of New York City's most forward-looking nonprofit spaces, showing innovative work by emerging and established artists across disciplines. Our programs range from dance, music, performance, and theater to video, film, and art, in addition to literary events, artists' talks, and lecture series. Since its inception in 1971, The Kitchen has been a powerful force in shaping the cultural landscape of this country, and has helped launch the careers of many artists who have gone on to worldwide prominence.