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Originally published in hardcover in July 2025 by White Rabbit Books in the United Kingdom.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBNs: 978-0-306-83590-2 (hardcover), 978-0-306-83592-6 (ebook)

E3-20250526-JV-NF-ORI

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword by Greil Marcus

Author’s Note: On Methodology

Introduction

LIFE NUMBER 1

LIFE NUMBER 2

LIFE NUMBER 3

Notes

List of Images

List of Interviewees

Acknowledgments

Discover More

Also by Audrey Golden

Credits

Cover

Table of Contents

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FOREWORD

AN OLD RAINCOAT WON’T EVER LET YOU DOWN

BY GREIL MARCUS

Have you had some good friends on the road with ya?

Who’d stand by you through thick and thin

Here’s to Ana and Gina, Vicky and Anne, Palmolive and Shirley

—after Rod Stewart, “An Old Raincoat
Won’t Ever Let You Down,” 1969

In late 1975, two young art students in London find themselves at what turns out to be the first public performance of a band called the Sex Pistols. The four people on stage plainly have no idea what they’re doing, but seem to be having a wonderful time doing it—and with a queer kind of vehemence, as if something is actually riding on whether the performance comes across or not. A light that over the next years will go on for countless people goes on for the two women in the crowd: We could do that. We could get up in front of other people and say what the world looks like to us, and see if they have anything to say back.

One woman plays guitar, the other bass. They have no background in music; a violinist they bring in has. A drummer, late of the Slits, the first all-female punk band, comes on board. They call themselves The Raincoats, a name so perfect for a London band it’s hard to believe no one has used it before, but there they are.

They begin to play shows, whatever they can get. Working with a resolutely independent, not to say anarchist, little London record outfit, in 1979 they make an album. They’re a punk band, but even in the punk milieu, where chaotic noise is the currency, they sound like no one else, as if they’re still learning to play, or unlearning what they played the night before. Even the Mekons’ songs are predictable, or rememberable, compared to theirs. They make another album, and then a third. They never escape the small-time; it’s not clear they mean to. In 1983 they call it a day and go on to other callings.

But if the band is soon forgotten, the music press chronicling the next small things as if they’d never been, the records, as few copies as there may have been still traveling, find their way into the world. In the early 1990s, in the town of Olympia, Washington, around the try-anything-anytime Evergreen College, people begin to pass cassettes among one another, to gather around their Raincoats records with the obsessiveness and awe, the shock of hearing themselves captured in the music of people so far away and unknown to them, people not quite real, as blues collectors in the 1950s and 1960s gathered around their rare 1930s 78s of such Mississippi blues artists as Charlie Patton, Son House, Skip James, Robert Johnson, all whom carried such a faraway strangeness that they seemed to be calling out from the dead, even though some of them were living, and would soon be performing again, to audiences they could not have imagined existed. The same thing happened in Olympia, as people heard what the first two Raincoats once heard in the Sex Pistols. They form their own bands, their own little groups of public speakers: Kathleen Hanna, the singer for the most notorious, Bikini Kill, unfurls what she has learned from The Raincoats like a flag, like one of her songs: “punk wasn’t a genre—it’s an idea!” One of the most celebrated and dedicated musicians in the world, once part of that Olympia milieu, Kurt Cobain, the leader of Nirvana, becomes the Raincoats’ most determined fan. He has his record company put out the old albums again, and like Skip James appearing at the Newport Folk Festival generations after his last record sold its few hundred copies, The Raincoats (“Seeking them out,” Golden quotes the Bikini Kill manager Liz Naylor of their Olympia followers, “talking about them as if they were some ancient oracle! You’d have thought they were ninety, one hundred years old, but they must have been what, maybe forty at the time?… It makes them part of some kind of fairytale, doesn’t it? You have to find them, if they’re really there at all,”) re-form, with a different violinist, a different drummer, and with Nirvana’s Los Angeles record company make their own new album. They are about to tour the world with Nirvana when their champion kills himself and everything goes away.

But the story, somehow, doesn’t end—can’t, won’t, it isn’t clear, but as that lightbulb grows dim, the urge, the instinct to climb the ladder and screw it tight again will not go away. In the first decade of the next century, the band begins to play again, as always with new drummers, now in galleries and museums, not ratty clubs or even decent theaters—“It’s one extreme or the other with The Raincoats,” says the second violinist. “CBGB or MoMA, nothing in between!”—but that old raincoat, that old idea that you talk the talk of freedom by never letting a piece of music find a final shape—“where someone would say, ‘I’m the bassist and I’ll play the song this way each time,’ we never had that in The Raincoats,” says the first violinist. “Every time we played, we’d be starting fresh, playing in a slightly or wholly different way”—still kept them from the drizzling rain of stale culture, the same old jokes and complaints anyone has heard a thousand times before. In their last performance merely of this moment, at the sleek White Cube gallery in London, they played their song “In Love,” and, as always, it seemed impossible—impossible that it ever achieved any shape, that after nearly half a century it had held its shape just to the degree that you could recognize what it was, with the certainty that you had never really heard it before. Today the Sex Pistols are about to embark on a new tour, with a tattooist in place of the singer who once stared down the world and made it flinch, promising to play the songs from their one, forty-eight-year-old album as close to how they’re supposed to sound as they can manage. The Raincoats are biding their time, the cloth somehow never wearing thin.

This is the story Audrey Golden tells in Shouting Out Loud: The Lives of the Raincoats, a book that in a way that evades the cliches generated by countless previous books about groups of musicians is as much about the band’s audience, and its own role in the creative life of the band, as the band itself—and as it goes on, through decade after unlikely decade, as loss leads to persistence, as failure means most of all that an ending remains unwritten, the story generates undying drama and pathos.

But along with the story of the band, running through the book, taking on more resonance, more melody and rhythm, is the story of the oddness of the Raincoats’ music, how and why it is not like that of anyone or anything else—how and why its quality of abstraction, of just-out-of-reach of any listener or any member of the band herself, is not jazz, is not dub, is not punk in any comparable sense (Golden quotes John Lydon, quotes Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, saying in 2009 that the first Raincoats’ album is “the sole record he’d choose to represent ‘the punk years’”—because, you can think, compared to The Raincoats the Sex Pistols sound like a conventional band), but an act on its own terms, a clearing of the ground and the thrill such an act makes that leads others to take their place on their own ground. As with the extraordinary tale Golden tells of a 1978 show the nascent Raincoats played in pre-Solidarity Warsaw: “By the second night, members of the audience were singing along—they’d taped the first show, gone home, obsessively listened, and learned the words phonemically; most couldn’t speak.”

Again and again, over Golden’s three hundred and some pages, that story itself finds new forms. From Jean-Marc Butty, an off-and-on Raincoats drummer since 1996: “With The Raincoats, it is never about putting on ‘good’ shows—now, they want to put on a good show, but more, they want to share something that’s completely remote from the preoccupations of other bands. And that’s something that’s refreshing, that is freedom… Sometimes you learn more by watching someone who doesn’t know how to play technically… They didn’t have formal technique and didn’t want it, because they found a way to be challenged by something else that’s very strong, that almost cannot be named.” A musical aesthetic that to Kathi Wilcox of Bikini Kill translated into an argument about selfhood, about identity, about community, about politics in the fullest sense of the word: “The Raincoats stepped out of this orbit, neither male or female—another kind of being! They taught so many women that there are other ways to play music or be in a band without having to perform any version of gender. They weren’t trying to be feminine or not feminine, and it didn’t feel like they were trying to occupy any kind of particular gendered identity—they were being themselves and showing you that you were also free to be yourself.”

It comes down, finally, to what the Raincoats’ first violinist, the classically trained Vicky Aspinall, saw in their guitarist Ana da Silva, bassist Gina Birch, and drummer Palmolive, what their second violinist, Anne Wood, would see as well: their “limitations were also the groundwork for the flowering of their creativity.” And that is the heart of the Raincoats’ life in punk, as they found it and, by now, as much as anyone, define it. Enormous feeling is released by very limited technique. It’s the moment, somehow recaptured permanently, when an anonymous person dares to demand that someone listen to her, and only then discovers that she has something to say, that she likes saying it, that one thought and feeling leads to another, that she likes being talked back to—whether it’s peope in Warsaw living under Soviet rule who she will never meet, students and hangers-on in a college town in the Pacific Northwest, the musician next to her trying to follow her lead but also lead her to follow her, or the echo of her own sound, her own speech, in her own head.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ON METHODOLOGY

The many lives of The Raincoats have been propelled by the band’s commitment to experimentation and evolving forms of collaboration. The research for this book is an extension of that spirit. In writing it, I sought to use new forms of narrative writing to bring together overlapping stories of and about the band into a single chronicle that reflects the many facets of those experiences. From the start, The Raincoats supported this experiment with a radical openness. They facilitated connections with many people in the story regardless of their varied experiences. And they invited me into their sonic and material worlds, sharing with unfailing generosity their memories, artifacts, and insights. These years of work gave me a taste of what it is like to collaborate with The Raincoats.

I could not have written this book as I did without such an approach.

Much of this book has been constructed through almost two hundred hours of oral history interviews I conducted with nearly a hundred storytellers, including The Raincoats themselves, and in-depth research into the band’s own object-based material archive.

During an early discussion of my intended process for the book, Shirley O’Loughlin, longtime Raincoats manager and collaborator, said, “The idea of this oral history thing is really important, because everybody remembers things in such a different way. They’ve got their own feelings, their own experience, and it’s all relevant.” And she’s right: One of the notable aspects of narratives based on oral history work is that experiential knowledge gets elevated, which allows individual memories and truths to overlap, diverge, and sometimes even contradict one another.

I chatted with Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill right around the time she was reading a pre-publication draft of Kathleen Hanna’s memoir (Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, 2024), and Tobi said she was grappling with these vagaries of memory herself. “We definitely remember things very differently,” she told me, referring to Kathleen’s writing. “And that’s what happens—she talks about how she remembers things, and I remember them differently. Sometimes, I’ll think I know exactly what I’m talking about, like, that did not happen in 1986. There’s no way. And then I’ll look back at something and realize, oh, it did. Totally.”

Memory is ambiguous, and the interviewer’s role is extremely important in drawing out an interviewee’s memories and specific moments of experiential knowledge they’ve locked away. It’s not just about what interviewees remember on their own when they’re presented with a certain subject like The Raincoats, but the specific questions raised and the way those questions are asked. One interviewer might bring out entirely different responses than another in the same storyteller; the interviewer’s background and framework shape the material that emerges in the dialogue.

I’ve written extensively about oral history practices elsewhere, so I won’t belabor these points here. All this is to say, you’ll see details in this book that may or may not appear in other chronicles of The Raincoats, and that might confirm or contradict what you think you know.

Various portions of this book also draw on materials contained in the extensive Raincoats archive that Ana da Silva has collected for more than forty years. “I’m not obsessively an archivist,” Ana initially told me when she mentioned the archive, noting, “It’s all in a cupboard.” When I asked what she’d kept, mentally running through my own training in special collections archives, Ana replied,

“I have two scrapbooks, but the rest got shoved into boxes.” OK, definitely manageable, I thought. When I eventually saw the collection, my jaw dropped: nearly an entire flat’s worth of physical objects, not to mention additional born-digital materials.

I spent months processing the archive, which involved photographing more than 4,000 physical objects for recordkeeping and compiling their data into methodical categories: artwork and proofs, correspondence, diaries and diary pages, handbills and posters, film and video footage, legal documents, lyrics drafts, magazine and news clippings, merch, music and instruments, photographs, press and promotional materials, setlists, zines. Each time I thought I was getting close to nearing completion, I’d hear from Ana or Shirley that they’d found another folder or box of materials.

For several decades now, feminist scholars have pointed to the importance of women archiving their own stories, given that official repositories housing biographical archives have traditionally retained only those items related to the lives of men. For women, archiving their own lives and work becomes an act of resistance. Historian Honor Sachs points out how such materials offer opportunities for large-scale reshapings of historical memory and the figures central to it. Indeed, for people traditionally marginalized in historical accounts, including women and people of color, archiving becomes an intervention “against larger tendencies to erase the past,” archivist Eira Tansey observes. According to Tansey, archiving is thus a political “act against forgetting, by informing larger communities that traces of the past still exist.” And as Sachs clarifies, “Approaching documents [in archives] as living artifacts whose history as material objects continues long after the events they record took place can, ultimately, provide new perspective on the ways that we remember, shape, and understand the past.”

This isn’t to suggest that archives are in any way objective representations of any particular point in a given past. They’re constructed, like all histories—shaped by those who assemble and arrange them. As historian Elizabeth Yale highlights, “No archive is innocent.”

Yet the very fact that a Raincoats archive exists also speaks back to the anarchic time signature created by The Raincoats in their music. I’m drawn to the words of cultural historian Andreas Huyssen here, who suggests it may be possible “to resist the dissolution of time in the synchronicity of the archive.”¹

“I suppose I am the keeper,” Ana confesses.

There is an essential connection between oral history and archive-based work that helps to shape a book like this one: Both underscore that there’s never just one way to tell a story. In the same way that oral history interviews reveal how multiple perspectives can coexist in the realm of experiential knowledge at the same time, material object-based archives reveal, as Jacques Derrida suggests in Archive Fever, that relying solely on a single archive to present a “History” with a capital H suppresses the alternate lower-case histories around which the archive has been collated. Any material archive, historian Francis X. Blouin observes, offers one window—among many—into a past.²

I consider this book—constructed from a Raincoats material archive built by Ana, as well as an archive of oral history interviews and additional research materials collected by me—to be a layered feminist archive unto itself. The way I’ve curated this composite archive intentionally echoes many of the forms contained within it: fragmentary moments recorded in private journals, epistolary notes on leftover papers, clipped and recorded images and stories assembled alongside one another. It is both a granular account of a band written out of punk histories by the journalists and authors who’ve been the gatekeepers, and a broad-reaching chronicle that weaves in and out of the private and public, the local and the global. In many ways, it’s a record of my own exploration of The Raincoats at this point in time with the materials I collated and in which I researched.

It’s thus my hope that the archive that is Shouting Out Loud: Lives of The Raincoats, and the myriad interwoven archival materials central to producing it, will one day help readers, scholars, and other thinkers to shape a new kind of thinking: about the role women’s archives play in radically remaking historical knowledge. But rather than tell you precisely how I want you to read the text that follows, or how to interpret my use of objects from the Raincoats material archive that Ana constructed or words from the oral history archive I built, I hope you’ll take ownership yourself of what’s contained within. I’ll end with the words of scholar Maryanne Dever here, who says, “If we want to know what a feminist archive is, what feminist archiving looks like or what archival tools and theoretical dispositions feminist researchers might require, then we will only know in times to come.”³ That future, like the continued existence of The Raincoats, is yours to help create.

³