As part of the Nuits Sonores festival in Lyon, The Raincoats were hosted by the Chicks on Speed on Friday, May 18th, promoting their “Girl Monster” compilation. Babes in Boyland and Opaque met the post-punk heroines Ana and Gina from The Raincoats, probably the greatest Girl Monsters, thank you again.

Babes in boyland/Opaque : Can you introduce yourself?

G: Hi! We’re Gina and Ana from The Raincoats.

A: Hello! This is Ana. You can now recognize my voice when we’re talking.

Bib/O : How do you feel about being hosted by the Girls Monster event in Lyon?

A: We’re very flattered and very thankful to the Chicks On Speed.. We are very happy to be here. And Lyon is a very beautiful city.

Bib/O : Did you have time to visit Lyon?

A: A little bit this morning because we had a little walk around.

Bib/O : Were you in touch with The Chicks On Speed before ?

A: I’m on their label and also they invited the Raincoats once when the 99 cents album came out. They had a launch party kind of thing and they asked us to go and play in Berlin for that event. And I’m on their label also.

G: I played with them at Ladyfest in London. We were on the same bill. I had another project, a solo project.

Bib/O : How do feel about being introduced to young people going on with their music?

G: Well, it’s funny because for years and years after the Raincoats finished, there was not a great deal of feedbacks. And when the Riot Girl thing happened in London, we met a lot of young women who were really into it, into what we’ve done ten years previously. This is kind of a revisit of that and it’s been great these last ten, fifteen or more years that so many people have connected with what we did so long ago. It is really an honour for us to be involved with all these people getting into it. .

Bib/O : Is it more like people stole something from you?

A: Not at all, it’s not stolen. You’re just inspirational that’s the word.

G: Yeah, having role models is really important. Sometimes it seems really difficult to do something if somebody hasn’t done it before. We’re very luck being around in the punk times when there were women and just everybody was just getting up on stage with a guitar and making a racket, saying what was on their mind. We happened to be lucky enough to be amongst the few women who were able to do that. For us, that time was incredibly inspiring. And other people inspired us like Patti Smith, The Slits who are just a bit ahead of us. Without them, perhaps we wouldn’t have thought the label to put out records ourselves. And then feeling this incredible desire to do the same you know like “wow we can do that, it’s so brilliant”, we just got together and almost pretrend we had a band. And before we knew it, we did. It was just from pretending to reality, there wasn’t such a big step as we first thought. A: We felt so strongly about those people and women who did these things. It feels very good when you can do the same, when you can be as inspirational as they were to us.
G: We didn’t know that we were going to be or that we would be. We’re happy.

Bib/O : You mentioned Patti Smith. She’s playing in Lyon quite soon.

G: And she played in London last night.

Bib/O : Who inspired you when you first started the Raincoats?

A: Her! The thing is: I went to see Patti Smith that was... Probably... It’s difficult to say the most important moment of your life. I don’t think it was, but nearly. But it doesn’t mean I felt I could do the same because she was so powerful that I couldn’t never think that I could do the same. So in that way, it’s not like you see a girl and “ Oh, I’m gonna be like her”, not at all. But it sort of made me feel that a woman had her place, shouted out, say what she wanted, with such a strong presence on stage. To me, it was a big revelation. And then the rest slowly started building up. I didn’t think “I wanna start a band” because of this gig.

G: For me, I saw like the first Sex Pistols’gig, I was just visiting London. I saw it at the artschool, they just played about 5 songs, and I just thought they were amazing. And then, I saw The clash and all those people. We used to go the Roxy, I don’t know how many times a week. We would always go to these little clubs. We’d wear a mohair jumper, stripy trousers and our big boots, with sugar in our hair. It was just a real amazing time.The whole of different bands played there and started out. It was really like there was a revolution happening. It was a little mini revolution and it turned around and it revivaled and then it disappeared for a while after that.

A: It seemed to disappear, I think the influence of that era is still happening now in lots of fields. Those people are probably having jobs in certain places where that kind of filters through. A lot of the music people are playing now, they still call it punk. It was inspired by that era. It much sounds very different to the bands of that times. But it is still very energetic, people think a lot about what they are saying and they like to call it punk.

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