IT STARTED OUT as a joke. Ana da Silva and Gina Birch, students at Hornsey College of Art in London, were hanging out in a bar in 1977, talking about starting a band.The two concert rats attended shows at least three days a week, watching bands like The Clash, The Slits, Talking Heads, Television and the Ramones, and concluded that in order to start a band of their own, “You just need to know three chords,” da Silva says. Da Silva played guitar, so Birch bought a bass, and they, along with a couple of friends, played their first show as The Raincoats that same year. “We were nervous, but we enjoyed it,” da Silva says, even though her knowledge of how to be a professional musician was limited. “I didn’t even know what a PA was.”
Da Silva, originally from Madeira, Portugal, was in her early 20s when The Raincoats formed, which was “old in punk terms.” She and Birch played their first shows at clubs and above bars with a rotating list of band members, but by 1978, the lineup had solidified into da Silva, Birch,Vicky Aspinall on violin and Palmolive of The Slits on drums. The next year, Geoff Travis, who founded the label Rough Trade Records in 1978 out of his record store, Rough Trade Shop, told da Silva, a frequent store patron, that he would help record the band’s first single.The band signed with the new label and went on to release its raw, seminal post-punk debut album, The Raincoats, that same year.
The lineup changed after the album’s release, but da Silva and Birch remained at the group’s core through the release of 1984’s Moving, the album that signaled the band’s split. “We found it very difficult to work with each other at the time,” da Silva says, explaining that the band only finished recording the album at the encouragement of manager Shirley O’Loughlin. Da Silva continued playing music after the breakup, but in 1992, she was working in her cousin’s antique shop, which is where Kurt Cobain found her when he came searching for a copy of the first Raincoats LP.
Da Silva says that Cobain had stopped by the Rough Trade Shop looking for the album and was told that he could ask da Silva about it, as she was working nearby. “He spoke a bit quickly,” da Silva says of Cobain. “He said, ‘Oh I’m a big fan.When I listen to your music, I fall on the floor.’” Da Silva says that at the time, she did not know anything about Nirvana and that Jude Crighton at Rough Trade had to tell her who Cobain was. “I didn’t know he was a musician!”
The meeting with da Silva, and her mailing him a copy of the LP, impacted Cobain enough that he wrote about the meeting and The Raincoats in the liner notes of Nirvana’s 1992 album Incesticide.The Raincoats had already been considering re-releasing their albums on CD at the time, but Cobain’s enthusiasm for the band gave the group the extra push it needed to follow through. The group was in the midst of rehearsing for some shows to celebrate the re-releases when Cobain requested that the band tour with Nirvana, but Cobain died before the tour could take place. Though the Nirvana tour never came to fruition, the rehearsals inspired Birch and da Silva to reunite to record 1996’s Looking in the Shadows, but not to reform permanently, something da Silva says will never happen, not even after this year brings them together again on stage.
The 2009 reunion tour of The Raincoats was spurred by another re-release of the band’s albums, only this time on vinyl from Kill Rock Stars, with the CD happening next year.This incarnation of The Raincoats consists of da Silva, Birch, violinist Anne Wood,
Mothers of invention: The Raincoats who has played with the band since the ’90s, and drummer Vice Cooler, also known as Hawney Troof.The short tour stops in New York, which has special sentiment for da Silva, as the first time she experienced the city was with the band in 1982, when The Raincoats found themselves stranded after a tour with no money for return flight tickets.To raise cash, the band recorded its only live album, The Kitchen Tapes, at The Kitchen in Chelsea. In addition to earning the group enough funding to return home, the recording time also gave da Silva a chance to explore and for the Londoner to find that “Everything I dreamt about was happening in New York.”
> The Raincoats
Oct. 16 at The Knitting Factory, 361 Metropolitan Ave. (at Havemeyer St.), 347-529-6996; 8, $22.
