The legendary post-punk musician, artist, and filmmaker Gina Birch is releasing her debut solo album, ‘I Play My Bass Loud’ via Third Man Records on Friday, February 24th, 2023.

“The album distils my years of musical, political and artistic life with these genre breaking songs” says Gina Birch, “It’s a personal diary using sounds and lyrics, full of fun, rage and storytelling.”

As a founding member and 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 created music 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. On ‘I Play My Bass Loud,’ Gina takes centre stage.

This all befits the feminism and idiosyncrasy of Birch, who witnessed the first Sex Pistols show just before setting her creative foundation at Hornsey College of Art in the 70s. 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.

In recent years, Birch has committed herself to painting, with her first UK show staged in recent weeks at Gallery 46 in Whitechapel, London; she also recently illustrated a book of Sharon Van Etten’s lyrics. But then Birch has never stopped making art. While in the Raincoats, she was a member of Mayo Thompson’s band the Red Krayola, and in the 80s, she also formed the pop project Dorothy with Raincoats violinist Vicki Aspinall. She was just beginning her career as a filmmaker, creating music videos for the likes of The Libertines and New Order, when a resurgence of Raincoats interest, sparked by Nirvana and riot grrrl, found the band reconvening in the 90s—and cited as an influence by Bikini Kill, Sonic Youth, Beat Happening, and many others. Kurt Cobain loved the Raincoats so much that he wrote extensively about them in the ‘Incesticide’ liner notes and even asked the band to open for Nirvana in 1994.

The album’s striking artwork features one of Gina’s paintings entitled Loneliness.” With ‘I Play My Bass Loud’ and her recent paintings, Birch keeps discovering her singular voice. “It’s like a dream come true,” Birch says of her creativity in both fields, “I’ve been working hard in my artist’s garret, mostly painting, but always writing songs … an idea forms in my head and I write it or paint it … and now it seems, these ideas are blooming wildly, reaching over the wall! I have a solo album coming out and a solo painting show. Almost simultaneously. It is so great.”

“Each song I write has an element of personal experience in it”

Oh, it’s really lovely to have you. How have you been in the last three years?

Gina Birch: Things have been great really. COVID obviously was very strange and I know it was extremely hard for a lot of people.

I think a lot of artists had an interesting time. I certainly worked very hard, painting mostly. I have a studio which I share with another painter Nicole Price and we get along very well. During the bad parts of COVID, we took turns to be there. But our paintings saw each other!

There are also other painters in the building and one other good friend from my Turps Banana days, John Wyatt Clarke so its good, because there is time to be alone, and then there is time to talk, talk about our painting and exchange ideas et cetera.

Obviously I have also worked on the music and since making the first 7-inch for Third Man Records, I started to gather some of my songs together and see what I wanted to put together for the album. Then recording them last February and co-producing them with Youth and Michael the engineer, was such a great time. We all seemed to thrive and make work that was sparkling and interesting.

All in all the last three years have turned out pretty amazingly for me.

‘I Play My Bass Loud’ is your debut album coming out after a set of fantastic singles also issued on Third Man Records. Would you like to talk about what inspired the songs on the upcoming album? Would you say it’s a COVID album to a certain extent?

No, it’s specifically NOT a COVID album. I do have songs that relate to certain events, like Occupy and the banking Crisis, and COVID, and the murder of Sarah Everard, but none of those are on the album. I’m saving those for a history concept album … HA!!!

I will talk about a couple of songs.

’Digging Down’ was written, when I was still living in Notting Hill and some bankers moved in next door to me. They started digging down to lower their basement floor and generally gut the house. They were shaking our house, making big cracks in the walls, and the doors and shutters stopped being able to close … They also destroyed a beautiful Victorian studio in the garden. So I decided I’d make a soundtrack out of the noises coming through the wall. Then I found a bass line, and started to let rip and it turned into more of a song … We moved soon after that. They were fucking up my life.

’I Play My Bass Loud,’ was written as a celebration of the bass obviously. It started with a familiar bass line of my own then I added other parts to it, over the top and in between. I then decided to ask other women bass players who I knew to put parts on the tracks too and it seemed like a bass party. The words came early, as I was pondering what a musician/artist does during the day … do we have jobs, or are we free to do as we please … a bit of both I think … so I decided that day, my job was playing the bass!!

<a href="https://ginabirch.bandcamp.com/album/i-play-my-bass-loud">I Play My Bass Loud by Gina Birch</a>

I just love how you approached and delivered the tracks sounding like small fragments from different parts of your life. Would you say it’s your most personal/intimate work so far?

Each song I write has an element of personal experience in it. This album though, I mostly wrote on my own, so in a way it is more intensely my work, as so many of the sounds and parts are mine. The personal element is as much if not more, musical, as it is lyrical.

“I have a lot of humour in my work”

In the recent years you have done a lot of painting, what would be some of the main influences when it comes to painting?

I have so many different influences in my painting. Subject wise, initially I was looking at work in the National Gallery and thinking about the representation of women in many of the classical paintings. I decided two courses of action, one was to copy and intervene in the narratives, like making a painting and in paint, send the Guerrilla Girls in to save the Sabine Women, and the other was to look at contemporary stories of the abuse of power of young women and to update these stories to make paintings of things that happened to young women when I was growing up … and I was doing this way before Me 2. Also I have a lot of humour in my work, like three girls dissecting frogs, or having sex education.

Then there are paintings about film, paintings about living in London, going on tour … all sorts!!

In terms of paint and style I am in love with many of the greats of history, Goya, Degas, Bacon and I also love Dexter Dalwood, Marlene Dumas, Mohammed Sami and on I could go ...

Do you feel more anxious when looking around yourself these days in comparison to when you were beginning with The Raincoats? Do you feel that people today are more or less aware of political/social situations than they were back in the late 70s?

Obviously things have shifted a lot. We are smarter, more educated, more cynical, less inclined to feel that we have the power to make a difference, especially with new laws trying to ban protests. I suspect you are young, it’s up to you lot to get going.

Do you recall if there was a certain moment when you and Ana da Silva knew that you had to put your ideas into the formation of the band?

For me, it was seeing The Slits play for sure. I was at their first gig and I knew then that I wanted to be in a band, never having thought before that it was something I wanted to do..

… but all around the punk thing was very inspiring, in what we wore, what we listened to, what we thought. the streets of West London, seemed to be our playground.

And Rough Trade was a great hub of excitement and interest.

How did you first meet Mayo Thompson? Were you familiar at the time with ‘The Parable of Arable Land’ and ‘God Bless The Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It’?

Geoff Travis asked Mayo to come to a rehearsal with us, before we went to record our first three track single. He was great, worked with us on the violin sound and gave us confidence to take as many risks as we wanted to.

I wasn’t familiar with his work, but I did soon get very into ’Soldier Talk’. I think I know every note on that album and I know a great deal of Mayo, and Red Crayola’s work.

Your upcoming album features a striking painting entitled ”Loneliness.” Do you feel that being lonely helps artists to think about something creative?

The painting was called ”Loneliness,” because it represented the time that I came from Nottingham to London. I was very at home in Nottingham, I was out a lot, always bumping into friends and having a good time. When I got to London, it felt very different. I felt very provincial, and I met so many different types of people that I hadn’t encountered in Nottingham. People seemed a lot more cultured and interested in things I was yet to discover. I had two rooms at the top of a house, in a cup-de-sac off Westbourne Grove, plaster falling off the walls, two gas rings on the floor and cold running water. I needed to work out how to live and how to cope with my new situation. I did feel lonely even though there were people around me. Gradually I grew into the person I wanted and needed to become and I began to thrive.

“I like to talk to my songs sometimes”

I would like to end this interview with a quote from Peter Brötzmann. When asked about parallels between painting and music, in my recent interview, he replied: “[…] if you play music it’s out in the clouds and you can’t take it back and usually you do it together with at least one more person. Working in the studio (alone) on canvas or paper or whatever, you always can put the result into the garbage or stuff it into the oven and it never has existed. You start from the beginning.” What’s your thoughts on that?

I don’t know … music is a different landscape from painting, but they are pretty linked.

In this case I made the music over time, sometimes coming back to a song on my computer, and talking to the song, like commenting on it … Like a Greek Chorus …”Can you run in them?” in Stilettos.

I like to talk to my songs sometimes. They became conversations for me. I didn’t know if anyone else would ever hear these songs.

Painting is somewhere I can create a world that again is all mine if I want it to be, yes, I can paint over things, paint things out, and make things big or small, colourful or subdued, like loud and quiet, like distortion and purity of sound. I like them both very much and I feel very lucky that I can do both!

Thank you. Last word is yours.

Thank you for having me. I look forward to my album hitting the streets and going and playing the songs live with a band. I hope I’ll be playing lots of festivals and enjoying sunshine soon. Come and say hello!

Klemen Breznikar

Headline photo: The Raincoats in 1979 | Photo Credit: Rocco / Shirley O’Loughlin

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Third Man Records Official Website / Facebook / Instagram / Spotify / YouTube / SoundCloud