A surprisingly difficult part of this was establishing what we talk about when we talk about post-punk. Roughly, the term refers to the wave of musical experimentation which took place in the wake of punk from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. It was informed conceptually by the art-school background and grounding in political and cultural theory of many of its members, and distinguished by musical, vocal and lyrical experimentation and by a frequently self-conscious and self-critical approach to the idea of being in a band and making music. All of which meant that it sounded, to varying degrees, original, arresting, and odd.

Post-punk’s disorderly, subversive and category-resistant nature has seen it marginalised in accounts of its era, although the past few years have produced a handful of useful retrospectives, as well as the early-2000s revival of post-punk musical techniques which, if you still can’t explain what it is, at least make it easier to explain what it sounds like.

For me, a large part of the significance of post-punk was that it seemed to involve an unprecedented amount of women as artists, fans, and critics. Its musical, political and aesthetic influence can be traced in many subsequent female-friendly movements, including twee, riot grrrl, grunge and electro. Some post-punk women – the Slits, the Raincoats, Lydia Lunch – have made a more enduring dent in popular consciousness than others, and some of them are more ‘hmm, interesting’ than ‘fuck yeah, hidden early-80s gem’, but all the artists featured below are worth a spin.

Extending the gains of punk’s emphasis on DIY culture, accessibility and amateurism, post-punk women were able to take their bands in experimental directions, producing lyrics which explored the female experience in startlingly innovative ways, and music which itself took on what Slits bassist Tessa Pollitt described, when I interviewed her for the book, as a ‘new, raw, and female’ form, a self-consciously radical sound dealing with rarely-expressed emotions like embarrassment, awkwardness and anxiety.

In terms of subject matter, post-punk’s ideological concern with the politicisation of the personal, and with identifying and promoting authenticity in the face of popular cultural stereotypes, lent itself to exploration from a feminine and feminist angle. This concern with authenticity was expressed in the songs themselves, which were produced, structured and presented in a way which set them apart from the glossy manufactured products of mainstream artists. It was expressed too in lyrics which demystified and deconstructed conventional femininity, love, sex and romance, and which analysed social and cultural pressures on women or the tensions of personal relationships in implicitly political ways.

There is far more to post-punk, and many more women within it, than I have space for here. The Young Lady’s Post-Punk Handbook provides a good starting-point to other women and bands in the movement, but here are ten from me to kick off:

1. ESG

ESG, from South Bronx, based their pioneering sound on a love of James Brown, Motown and disco. Spotted at a talent contest, they began to play New York’s cutting-edge clubs, where their sound dovetailed neatly, if unexpectedly, with that of the No Wave scene, and went on to share billing with PiL, Gang of Four and A Certain Ratio.

ESG’s blend of hip-hop and girl-group lyrical sensibility was sampled incessantly by acts from Miles Davis to Tricky and Public Enemy to Liars – although the lack of royalties received antagonized the band, who addressed the issue with typical panache in the 1993 single ‘Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills’.

2. Raincoats

The Raincoats attempted an unsweetened exploration of the social and sexual experience for women, mapping a landscape previously foreign to mainstream rock – a female-centred one of self-consciousness and self-doubt. Their debut’s self-effacing musical communalism has seen it described as the first ‘women’s rock’ album.

3. Slits

From the art-student squats of London’s Ladbroke Grove via Germany, Spain and English suburbia, the Slits made slippery and spacious dub-punk hymns to sex and shoplifting. ‘Love und Romance’ burlesques the banality of boy-meets-girl, ‘Spend, Spend, Spend’ analyses retail therapy as addiction, and ‘Typical Girls’ castigates conventional femininity as a profit-driven invention.

For more on the Slits I’d recommend Zoe Street Howe’s Typical Girls? The story of the Slits.

4. Bush Tetras

There’ve been whole essays written on this song as key to life in late-70s crisis-riddled New York, but Pat Place’s stabbing guitar and Cynthia Sley’s vocal darting between grouchy imperious disdain and incipient panic are more than enough to recommend it.

5. Lydia Lunch

The infernal anti-Blondie, or perhaps the sub-par Patti Smith. For Lunch, the extent of her musical ability ‘wasn’t the point. I developed my own style, which suited the primal urgency I needed to evacuate from my system’ (quoted in Simon Reynolds’ Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984).

Lunch’s performances were, according to contemporary music writer Roy Trakin (quoted here) ‘very influential in freeing people from the idea of technique as being somehow prerequisite to talent’.

6. LiLiPUT

Surrealistic in their Swiss-German and English lyrics, rudimentary in their technique, and the subject of a 40-seconds-long Yummy Fur song (Why don’t you listen to Liliput / Where punk rock starts and ends?), but great for all that.

7. The Bloods

New York’s finest queer anarcha-feminists. ‘Button Up’, their only single, is absurdly ahead of its time kink-funk.

8. Mo-dettes

Sharp-tongued and stylish Anglo-Swiss outfit. Had a complicated relationship with the partisan feminism of some of their contemporaries, but their arch, insouciant music was less ambivalent. ‘White Mice’ giddily champions female sexual agency, ‘Two Can Play’ dramatises relationships as struggles for autonomy and control, and ‘Foolish Girl’ catalogues the misadventures of a girl who renounces feminism for an unhappy marital ending.

9. Au Pairs

At the intersection of left, feminist, queer and antiracist politics, Birmingham boys and girls the Au Pairs made radical, slyly danceable music. A good introduction to them from the Kitchen Tapes’ Rupinder Parhar can be found here.

10. Linder Sterling

Muse to Buzzcocks and Morrissey, a visual and performance artist whose work critiqued cultural expectations of women and the commodification of the female body, an unequivocally militant feminist and occasionally a musician with the band Ludus. Ten post-punk points if your response in 2010 to Lady Gaga’s meat dress was to sniffily point out that Linder did it better at the Hacienda nearly thirty years ago.

For more on the background, careers, music and politics of these and other girl groups, and a look at the history of women in music from Ma Rainey to Pussy Riot – please consider buying the book!

In terms of consumption and emotional language, the pop song occupies a similar status to the sonnet. Well, not exactly, but certainly for the purpose of romance or desire, pop lyrics are an absolute boon for the tongue-tied (a group which includes “most of the English population”). They’re used to express whatever happens to be lurking unformed in the minds of the listener, and as a point of identification when the lurking stuff has been given a concrete identity.

Reams have been written about the depiction of women in pop music by male songwriters and the presentation of women by the music industry, but recently I was having a wee listen to PJ Harvey (while drunk in someone’s living room in Portsmouth on a Saturday night, because I am very cool) and it occurred to me that I’d not seen as much on the subject of how female desire’s presented in pop songs BY WOMEN.

This thought came up because This Is Love felt like an anomaly: it presented desire as active on the part of the female narrator. PJ Harvey’s persona for the song has sexual agency, and longings that do not centre around waiting for someone else to make a move. She uses the phrase “I want” and backs it up with action: “to chase you round the table, wanna touch your head”, and in that “wanna touch your” she rather casually and without fuss flips the entire common model of heterosexual desire on its head by pointing out that women also want to touch, as well as being touched.

It shouldn’t sound unusual, and yet at the time of listening it was borderline revolutionary, at least to me. There are other lines from the song which imply action: “I can’t believe that the axis turns on suffering when you taste so good”; suggestive of all kinds of sexual acts, instigated by and controlled by the narrator, but nothing else is quite as direct as that seemingly harmless “wanna touch your head”.

This Is Love is not unique, but on examination it becomes harder to find other songs which inhabit the same active, instigating desire.

I Just Wanna Make Love To You does, but even the Divinyls’ famously salacious anthem to female masturbation and banned song I Touch Myself is self-contained sexuality; the desire is there, but it is self-directed. The narrator says nothing of what she wants to do to the object of the song, only what the thought of him makes her do to herself!

Interestingly, when the object of desire is no longer male, the desire becomes more active in its expression: contentious and open to a variety of interpretations, Katy Perry’s I Kissed A Girl does at least carry the flow of action from the narrator to her object of desire: Katy KISSED a girl, rather than being kissed BY a girl, as so many heroines of pop songs are kissed BY a boy rather than kissing him.

In a song of the same name, Jill Sobule’s narrator makes the same distinction: Jill KISSES Jenny, the narrator as the actor rather than the acted-upon.

This is a small sample to draw a conclusion from, but it is intriguing that female desire is more acceptable as active, instigating, and potentially dominant when the object of the woman’s desire is also female. The repurposing of songs originally intended for male singers often underscores this, as in Patti Smith’s cover of Gloria.

There are songs with male narrators in which the instigation of action is undertaken by the female half of the heterosexual proto-couple (usually because the narrator is far too shy or lacking in confidence, rather than because of any societal prohibition on his asking her out): the main contender in this category is Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus. A casual glance over popular music seems to reveal far more male references to female desire (“she wants me”) than female references to female desire (“I want him”).

PJ Harvey is not, of course, the first or only female artist to sing about desire. Ani Difranco has filled several albums with heartfelt songs cataloging the effects of desire on the psyche: primarily in the aftermath. Ani writes about regret or lack thereof, but rarely if at all about the white-hot moment of simple wanting.

By now there’s a good chance you’re wondering how anyone could skip over Bikini Kill on this subject: they have a song entitled I Like Fucking – surely this must qualify for a candid and unabashed demonstration of naked female desire?

Well, yes and no. Riot Grrrl has an agenda which is unshy of communicating, and sexuality is, as all other aspects of feminine experience, politicised. The song itself discusses internal obstacles to feeling and acting upon desire, the ubquity of rape, and the “radical possibilities of pleasure”, which while a notable feminist sentiment on the reclamation of sexuality, is a far cry from Harvey’s “I just want to sit here and watch you undress”. Politicised recognition of the rightness of female desire and its value is highly important, but isn’t quite the same thing as an unselfconscious expression of that desire.

Someone else who believes in the radical possibilities of pleasure, even if she doesn’t phrase it that way, is Rihanna. In Shut Up And Drive, she creates a shallow but effective metaphor in which she is a car to be driven: it is potent, referencing power and femininity, but ultimately it is – no matter how transparent and brazen – a metaphor and rerouting of desire through the stalking-horse of car culture, rather than the bald, outright statement of This Is Love.

I could go on, but I’m sure the general idea is clear. That was my little radio revolution, thanks to Polly Harvey, and with any luck I’ve given you something to think about too.

• Delilah Des Anges is given to unnecessarily close examination of song lyrics, but excuses it by writing poems. She also writes novels, for which she has rather less excuse.

Hi, I’m Jo. I’ve been calling myself a feminist for as long as I can remember. And I listen to black metal. As in, while I appreciate other forms of music, the overwhelming majority of my time, attention and love is lavished on black metal. I can’t help it – I just love black metal, and the filthier it is, the better.

Black metal is purposefully alienating. Its logos are unreadable; its practitioners often wear corpse paint; its lyrics revel in references to hatred, violence, nihilism, death, Satan. The music itself is typified by screeched vocals, blastbeats, fuzzy guitars; songs stop suddenly.

The genre is also overwhelmingly white and male. Of the 46 black metal bands on my iPod, only one of the bands has a female member (LSK, bassist/backing vocalist for Secrets of the Moon from Germany), and as far as I know, none of the members of any of the bands identify as a race other than white.

As I said up top, I’ve identified with feminist ideas from an early age. Unequal representation of women in places like government, the boards of businesses, the upper echelons of journalism and the law and churches and so on make me angry and upset. So how can I justify investing so much in a type of music produced, in the main, by men? A type of music which is often linked to vile white nationalist ideologies, such that NSBM is a thriving sub-genre?

Er. It’s tricky.

Black Metal and Me

I operate from a position of relative privilege, being white, cis, currently able-bodied, in a relationship with a white cis man, UK-born, and so on. My various forms of privilege allow me to ignore some of the more problematic areas of black metal, and have surely insulated me from encountering prejudice at black metal gigs. For the record – as a cis woman attending many dozens of metal gigs in London, I have very rarely encountered sexist treatment from fellow gig-goers. From anecdotal experience, black metal bands also attract more women to their live performances than, say, death metal bands. Which is not to say that black metal audiences are gender-balanced, because they’re really, really not, but they’re relatively better than those observed at concerts of bands from other metal subgenres.

I sometimes wish I did like more ‘acceptably feminist’ types of music – or, at the very least, types of music where women performers aren’t a vanishingly small minority. The problem is, if it ain’t black metal, I’m (probably) not interested. The intensity of black metal gives me an emotional ‘hit’ I don’t get from many other types of music (live classical music can produce the same effect – but not as reliably as black metal, whether live or recorded). I fully acknowledge that black metal isn’t for everyone, and I fully understand why most people do not enjoy it; I don’t want to come across as ‘judging’ people for musical taste, which, OK, I did when I was 13, but that was a long time ago.

Which leads on to another of the problems with black metal, from a feminist/progressive point of view. It is, as I said above, unapologetically impenetrable to outsiders; more than that, the scene contains a strong current of elitism.

Kvlter Than Thou

One of the stereotypes of black metal fans is of the elitist “kvlter than thou” forum-poster who spends obscene amounts on deleted demos by long-defunct bands, limited to three tape copies. No, three reel-to-reel recordings, two of which were burned as part of an occult ceremony by the band before they went and attempted to torch a church. Black metal enthusiasts often proclaim themselves proud Nietzscheans, which, in their (often rather simplistic) worldview, boils down to I proclaim myself to be better than everyone else. As a feminist, I have a problem with any philosophy which deems some to be superior to others. Black metal is imbued with it. The elitist fans take their cues from the bands themselves, from Varg Vikernes onwards. Black metal is fiercely individualistic; feminism is rooted in solidarity with others, a concept that is incompatible with the proclamations of the most influential black metal bands.

Incidentally, the concept of “black metal as expression of individualism” has led some in the scene, notably He Who Crushes Teeth of the band Bone Awl, to describe NSBM as oxymoronic (warning: long article – ctrl+f “nsbm” for the relevant section); black metal based on a philosophy which is inherently ‘optimistic’ is paradoxical, he says, and Nazism counts as ‘optimistic’ because it aspires to be all about building a ‘better’ future – ‘better’ if you deny the humanity of groups you don’t like, of course. Black metal should be nihilistic, in his view, and nihilism as a philosophy is as antithetical to Nazism as it is to socialism. But I digress.

As part of my sometimes uneasy ongoing attempts to reconcile my feminist/lefty political beliefs with my love of black metal, I do not listen to any bands which are classified as NSBM on Metal Archives. It’s nothing more than a gesture, really, but it’s an important one to me. I’m cutting myself off from many bands whose music I am sure I would love; but I just can’t bring myself to give them any playlist space. For many metalheads, my shunning of black metal is treated as illogical (I’ll listen to songs about the destruction of all life or the murder of Christians but I won’t listen to songs glorifying the ‘Aryan’ race) and ‘wimpish’. I think, for, me, the difference is that persecution of Christians is not something that happens in the West, despite what the Daily Hate-Mail would have you think, whereas we still live with the repercussions of what happened when a lot of Europeans got rather too worked up about racial ‘purity’. And a song attacking Christianity written by people from Europe or the US is a very different proposition to the same group of people attacking Muslims, who are an often-vilified minority in Europe. (Bands from Islamic countries attacking the theocracies under which they live, such as Janaza – that’s very different, and something I can get behind, mostly.)

Theatricality and corpse paint

Another reason I feel able mostly to disregard the lyrical content of non-NSBM bands is the theatricality of black metal. There is a definite tension at the heart of how many black metal bands present themselves. The spikes, the shining black leather, the corpse paint, the OTT references to Satan – they can’t be serious, can they? Well, the best reply to this I can formulate is yes… and no. It’s pretty impossible to parody black metal bands, because however hard you try to come up with something ridiculous, an actual band somewhere will have beaten you to it. (Watain store their stage outfits with dead animals so that they pick up “the stench of death”, FFS.) Fans – the non-über-kvlt ones, anyway – tend to treat bands with a mixture of affectionate humour and deadly seriousness. We go and watch monochromatically-painted and -clothed bands who follow the style rule that there is not a single type of apparel that can’t be improved by the addition of spikes, lots of spikes, singing songs about being the devil’s executioners or whatever; it’s all a bit silly. Yet at the same time, it’s taken quite seriously. Singers exhort audiences to hail Satan. And they/we do. Not because we’re all practising Satanists – most metal fans I’ve met tend to be of the cheerful atheist variety – but because it’s part of the act.

Black metal’s theatricality can be seen on one hand as being about escapism. Of course I don’t believe in demons, I’m far from being a nihilist, and I can’t even watch horror films because the sight of blood makes me feel all wibbly, but I’ll happily listen to bands singing about all these things because, on one level, it’s so outrageous, I can’t possibly be expected to take it seriously. Yet I do, truly, deeply love the music, and spend large amounts of energy seeking out new bands, going to gigs, talking about metal to friends with similar tastes, and generally being a huge fan. So I take it seriously – and not seriously. This allows me to worry less about the violence inherent in the genre’s lyrics and its underlying philosophy; it’s all part of a big joke, and everything is on a continuum of unseriousness, so I can ignore the less-than-savoury aspects of black metal fairly easily. (Again, I am sure that my relative privilege plays a large part in this luxury to ignore what I don’t like about the genre.) And hey, that church-burning and murder unpleasantness was years and years ago – we’re past all that, aren’t we? Unlike the stark black and white of corpse paint, I’m in something of a grey area; I can blur boundaries enough to quieten my social justice instincts. Is this an ethical position to hold? I’m not really sure.

“Not for girls”

The overall metal scene is seen by outsiders as bloke-dominated; there’s a lot of truth in that, but I am constantly annoyed by mainstream publications’ disappearing of women in metal, be they performers or fans. Just because we’re a minority doesn’t mean you can ignore us, dear music journalists taking sideswipes at “that boy from school who had a bumfluff moustache, constant body odour and an unwashed Megadeth T-shirt that he always wore on non-uniform days”. And please, as the mighty Grim Kim says, don’t dismiss us by trying to fob us off with “girlfriend metal”.

Having said that, though, I have a horrible snobbish tendency when it comes to outward signifiers of musical taste – which, in the metal scene, means t-shirts and patches. Moreover, it’s a pretty gendered snobbishness, which makes me feel even guiltier. Whenever I see a woman wearing a Nightwish t-shirt, I feel absurdly, un-feminist-ly disappointed; we female fans of metal are already characterised as liking ‘girly shit’ like Nightwish (symphonic, melodic, female-fronted, no Cookie Monster vocals), so why, I find myself thinking, do you have to go reinforcing stereotypes? This is a really bad habit of mine and one I am trying to break. It spills over into my own wardrobe choices: I’ll borrow my boyfriend’s Absu t-shirt to wear to a metal gathering, but not his Sólstafir one, despite the fact that I love the band – because Sólstafir is on our playlist of “stuff that’s safe to play for non-metalheads”, whereas Absu certainly is not. I don’t want to be thought of as one of “those” female fans of metal, you know, the ones who like metal with actual clean vocals and stuff. Ugh. As a relatively unstereotypical fan of black metal, it’s all too easy to think of myself as a special snowflake as a consequence – a tendency I have to be on my guard against.

If I were in a relationship with black metal, our Facebook status would definitely be ‘it’s complicated’. With depressing frequency, something happens to make me roll my eyes in feminist outrage (the “girly” t-shirt for the band Shining [Swe] which says “I have a boyfriend at home but I think of Niklas Kvarforth when he fucks me”, a blog post like this…), but I don’t want to give up on the scene. In fact, the recent internet flap over Sady Doyle’s article on Game of Thrones (spoiler alert!) reminded me why I want to stick with black metal. I’m a huge fan of GoT, and yet I agree with most of Sady’s points about its problematic nature. As with GoT, I don’t deny that there are many problematic aspects within the black metal scene. But I am and will remain a fan nonetheless, because a) if I leave, I’m not working within the scene to make a difference, and b) I love it and am not prepared to give it up.

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• Jo lives in London, and goes to far too many metal gigs. She got into metal at a relatively late age, thanks to last.fm. She’s toying with the idea of writing the dissertation for her MA on black metal, if the university will let her. Say hi to her on Twitter, or at the Underworld next time Taake comes to London (19th October, as it happens).

So, I’m supposed to buy her some noodles and a book and sit around listening to chicks who can’t play their instruments, right?

– 10 Things I Hate About You

As a twelve-year-old in a post-industrial backwater, I discovered punk a long time after the fact, but when I did I took to it like a mohawked and safety-pinned duck to water. With the snobbery and omnicognisance of youth, however, I quickly developed a doctrinaire approach whereby if ‘punk’ songs weren’t short, sharp, and shouty, I didn’t want to know. Man, did London Calling fuck with my head, with its rackety punk take on reggae and soul and funk and lovers’ rock and, god forbid, jazz. When I first heard London Calling I swore never to listen to a good two-thirds of it again because it clearly wasn’t Real Punk. Like all teenage girls, I was insufferable.

However narrow my definition of punk, part of my love for it stemmed from the women involved. From The Slits, Gaye Advert, and X-Ray Spex to Debbie Harry’s pop-punk perfection, and I even liked some of Siouxsie’s dubious proto-goth warbling. But the Raincoats, a London-spawned collective built around the partnership of Gina Birch and Ana da Silva, never crossed my radar.

As I got deeper into exploring music in its socio-political context (told you I was an insufferable teenager), my compulsive reading of Greil Marcus and Simon Reynolds and the 90s music press made me aware, to a grudging extent, that it was what came after punk that really shook things up – the fragmented, untrained, scraps of mad genius that formed the postpunk movement, in which punk’s long-term revolutionary potential really bore fruit – or so I read, suspiciously. One of the most lauded of postpunk bands were the Raincoats. So I tried, but at the age of thirteen or so I never could click with them or their kind of folk-punk-gypsy-jazz-spoken-word-world-music tapestry. What was the relationship this band allegedly bore to punk? Where were the tightly-wound two-minute blasts of guitar scree and rants about boredom, alienation, nihilism, concrete and bad sex? The Raincoats’ hesitant, eerie, self-effacing, gentle and loose-knit stylings were something I had no patience for and no sympathy with. I didn’t get it, and the suggestion that this was music which, as a female, I should get, I found frankly offensive. It said nothing to me about my life.

I don’t really know anything about The Raincoats except that they recorded some music that has affected me so much that, whenever I hear it I’m reminded of a particular time in my life when I was (shall we say) extremely unhappy, lonely, and bored. If it weren’t for the luxury of putting on that scratchy copy of The Raincoats’ first record, I would have had very few moments of peace.

– Kurt Cobain, 1993

A couple of years later, as contemporary grunge and riot grrrl joined vintage punk in my affections, Kurt Cobain’s referencing of the Raincoats made me give them a second chance, or at least a second listen. This time around I could discern something I could identify with, something that was tangled up with the altered territory of adolescence. The burgeoning horror of growing up, the all-encompassing anxiety over my looks, my body, my clothes, was something the Raincoats now spoke to. There was an obvious prototype for riot grrrl’s anatomising of feminine neurosis and feminist analysis of the personal and political. The struggle to occupy public space with confidence rather than fear, the baffling revelation that falling in love can be more nauseating angst than fairytale bliss, the terrifying tricks that biology and psychology can play on you – it was all here, just expressed through suggestion rather than stridency.

Being a woman is both feeling female, expressing female and also (for the time being at least) reacting against what a woman is told she ‘should’ be like. This contradiction creates chaos in our lives and, if we want to be real, we have to neglect what has been imposed on us, we have to create our lives in a new way. It is important to try and avoid as much as possible playing the games constantly proposed to you.

– Ana da Silva, vocals/guitar, The Raincoats

The untried, experimental nature of a lot of postpunk music seemed particularly suited to the Raincoats’ female-centred concerns. Punk did a great deal to remove barriers of precedent and technical expertise, creating a space for musical and lyrical uncharted territory. The Raincoats had sounded so off-puttingly alien to me at first because they were– their tentative, unfamiliar steps towards music were a groundbreaking way of doing things.

Sure, women had been singers and musicians before now, but even Patti Smith remained reliant on male musicians and male-defined musical styles to back up her creative ambition. By contrast, the Raincoats’ self-titled début was described by Vivien Goldman as the first ‘women’s rock’ album, its deconstruction of traditional forms pioneering an arresting and persuasive form of rock without the cock. Their song writing was fresh and original, and so was their mode of dress and performance – a refusal of showbiz glamour which saw the band perform in outfits which clashed colours and styles, deconstructed fashion and female aesthetics, and certainly weren’t put together with an appreciative male gaze in mind.

It was The Raincoats I related to most. They seemed like ordinary people playing extraordinary music… They had enough confidence to be vulnerable and to be themselves without having to take on the mantle of male rock/punk rock aggression or the typical female as sex symbol avec irony or sensationalism.

– Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth

In a sense, I’m still getting into the Raincoats – they aren’t a go-to listen for me, they feature on few of the playlists I throw together, and I rarely want to stick them on at parties. They’re not a band I often want to listen to, but occasionally they’re a band I feel I need to listen to. At any rate, they’ve inspired bands, particularly women in bands, from Sonic Youth to The Gossip, and there’s little doubt of their significance, interest and influence. If further proof were needed, their version of the Kinks’ Lola stands alongside the Slits’ recasting of Heard it Through the Grapevine as one of the best boundary-blurring covers ever. It’s taken me a long time but I’m happy to admit that The Raincoats are, very gently, punk as fuck.

• The Raincoats’ second album, Odyshape, was reissued on 5 September
• www.theraincoats.net

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Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.

[WARNING: this post contains controversial opinions. Those of a sensitive nature may wish to look away now.]

Photo: Ron Baker

If I asked you to hum a song by The Bangles, you could probably do it, right? Perhaps this one. What about Bananarama? This might pop into your head. What about The Go-Go’s?

Perhaps you can think of a song, in which case: good work! Gold star. But over and over again I’ve found that people know nothing about them, even though they were one of the most successful girl groups of all time and – quite frankly – better than the other two. (I warned you…)

Here are my top reasons why I love The Go-Go’s and you should too:

1) Perfect pop

Just listen. My favourite is Head Over Heels (I like to think of it as the voice of the girl in Devo’s Out of Sync) but other hits include Our Lips Are Sealed, We Got The Beat and Vacation. Stupendously catchy choruses, simple lyrics, they’re like a revved-up 60s girl group. I guarantee you, one of these tracks will be stuck in your head all day.

Sorry for the terrible sound quality by the way – I thought you’d like to see the videos. There’s another great video for Vacation but the sound was too awful so you’ve got the karaoke version instead.

2) They played their own instruments and wrote their own songs

I’m not dissing The Bangles or Banarama, I love them too. I’m just saying they’re The Monkees to the The Go-Go’s Beatles.

3) For all your 1980s style needs

Think The Bangles or Bananarama have the last word on 80s fashion? Think again: The Go–Go’s may not have had as much hair but they did have VOLUME.

At one point they even looked a bit moody ‘n’ punk. Check out the braces! (Early on they toured with Madness…)

And guitarist Jane Wiedlin has sported some amazing looks:

• Anticipating the 1990s with fairy dress and pixie crop
• Dungarees!
• Top hat!
• …Russian folk chic? She has cool red tights, anyway.

4) Retro ironic album and single covers

Wheeeee! Anne Taintor eat your heart out.

5) Kicked ass in the charts

As someone with a lot invested in her ‘alternative’ identity (and a diehard contrarian) this doesn’t matter much to me. What I find surprising is that they aren’t better known given their chart success. They had a number one album and four Top 20 singles in the US. I read somewhere that they were the first all female group – who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments – to reach number one in the Billboard chart.

6) Better pop patron

I may lose some friends over this one. While The Bangles’ biggest hit, Manic Monday, was written for them by Prince, The Go-Go’s first hit, Our Lips Are Sealed, was co-written by Terry Hall of The Specials. I know who’s cooler. And I think, in your heart, you do too.

7) They get geek points

Because Jane Wiedlin played Joan of Arc in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Communications Officer Trillya in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Win.

I don’t understand why The Go-Go’s are so often overlooked. Hopefully there will soon be an end to this injustice as they’ve been recently been given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, right outside The Masque club where they played their first gig. They’re also doing a reunion tour, celebrating the 30^th anniversary of their first record, Beauty and the Beat.

Of course it doesn’t matter which was the best 80s all-girl pop group¹ – the important thing is that they were all there, blazin’ a trail for the next generation to follow. If you’re interested in the history of women in pop and rock I recommend reading Lucy O’Brien’s She Bop II, and if you’re interested in what’s happening now head over to the cracking Wears The Trousers music blog².

1. It was The Go-Go’s
2. Ed’s Note: Should you need further encouragement, our very own Rhian’s assistant ed over there, too. So really you can’t go wrong, eh.

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Sexuality in Rock’n’roll is one more area weighed down heavily by its history and language. While none could or should deny the aspects of sexual interest and thrill inherent in live music, the performance space is problematically male-dominated.
– Ian Penman, NME, 1979

I really wish that I’d been born a boy; it’s easy then ’cause you don’t have to keep trying to be one all the time.
– Gaye Advert, 1977

Women in bands, when under the media spotlight, often find themselves swindled out of due credit by virtue of their gender. If they’re not being accused of clinging to the coattails of their backing boys to disguise their own lack of musical ability, they’re being judged on their aesthetic appeal to the exclusion of anything more relevant. It’s disappointing to observe how ubiquitously this principle applies. Even in the midst of punk, as girls picked up guitars, bass, and drumsticks, taking the stage alongside boys as more than cooing vocalists or backing dancers, they attracted that lethal combination of critical suspicion and prurient interest.

I love punk partly for the number and variety of women it involved and the freedom of expression it offered them. I loved X-Ray Spex – a Somali-British teenage feminist demagogue whose vocal screech swooped like a bird of prey over twisting vistas of saxophone. I loved The Slits and their slippery, shuddering dub-punk hymns to the tedium of sex and the joys of shoplifting. And most of all, I loved Gaye Black, bassist for The Adverts and widely regarded as punk’s first female star.

Despite their intelligent, era-defining songs like Bored Teenagers and The Great British Mistake, you have to dig through several layers of punk sediment before the Adverts come to light. They were one of the first punk bands to gain commercial success, and how much of this achievement was down to Gaye is open to depressing debate. A groundbreaking example of the Babe on Bass, her experience prefigured the problems faced by lone women in bands from Blondie to Paramore: scepticism towards their musical ability tied to a disproportionate focus on their looks.

She could have the impact of five Runaways, Patti Smith’s armpit, and Blondie’s split ends on Britain’s vacant female scene.
– Jane Suck, Sounds, 1977

Gaye’s elevation to national sweetheart began as a generic punk fairytale. In 1976, she and her partner TV Smith made an escape in time-honoured fashion from their Devonshire coastal town to London, where they swiftly formed a band. The Adverts became a fixture at pioneering punk venue the Roxy before being snatched up for a tour with the Damned and a contract with Stiff Records.

A devotee of Iggy Pop and the Stranglers’ bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel, Gaye made her musical presence a vital part of the Adverts’ brand of thuggishly intrepid punk. Their breakthrough single Gary Gilmore’s Eyes hinges on her instrument’s ascending throb. Most Adverts songs are played as though they’re throwing punches, TV Smith’s vocals advancing in one-two jabs while Gaye’s bass lines bob and weave. On stage, she was a static and self-contained sounding-board for Smith’s livewire showmanship.

image by Flickr user ariel awesome

But her visual presence hit equally hard: she caught your eye, you caught your breath. Her iconic look – battered black leather and a kohl-rimmed thousand-yard stare – drew on Suzie Quattro and Joan Jett’s effortless rocker fundamentalism rather than the try-hard iconoclasm of Jordan or Siouxsie. Gaye was punk’s terrifyingly blank, stark, dead-eyed minimalism made flesh, the girl nihilist next door.

For Greil Marcus, both Gaye and the Slits were punk’s ‘pretty people who made themselves ugly’ – although clearly not ugly enough. As the reminiscences of her admirers on tribute websites and YouTube comments testify, Gaye was punk’s first female pin-up. Her press and TV appearances stirred hearts and hormones across late-70s Britain, pulling the plug on her wish to be one of the boys.

I wasn’t made to feel as conscious of the fact that I was female [at the Roxy], as I was by the rock press.
– Gaye in Vacant: A Diary Of The Punk Years, Nils & Ray Stevenson

In a 2001 interview with the website Punk77, Gaye recalled that “the media would concentrate on irrelevant things like clothes or be extra critical of my playing in the same way that some men are prejudiced against women drivers”. The hackneyed trope of whether girls can play seems especially incongruous in punk, a musical movement studded with gleeful and defiant amateurism. Nevertheless, Gaye’s playing was picked on as “plodding” and her mute ‘fixed sultriness’ unfavourably compared with the vocal talent of other punk women. This latter criticism betrays, among other things, a peculiar disapproval of girls in non-singing positions, as though there were a correct set of requirements for band composition, with musical preoccupation on the part of female members an intrinsically suspicious transgression of their allotted role.

1978 single cover, uploaded to an extensive gallery of punk singles cover art by Flickr user Affendaddy

Dismissal of Gaye’s musical credentials went hand-in-hand with an insistence on her value as eye-candy. According to the NME, their bassist’s ‘superb squeakers’ were the best thing about the Adverts and the only conceivable cause of any mainstream notice they might attract. Stiff Records instantly latched onto Gaye’s looks as a marketing tool, giving the Adverts’ debut single a cover bearing a close-up of her face – all eyes and lips, the band’s name an afterthought. This was a stunt pulled without the band’s prior knowledge, which Gaye avenged by refusing to appear in other band photographs for the single.

As the Adverts gained more media attention, Gaye’s image began to dominate the band’s press. Again, the novelty of her status as sole female in a role other than singer seemed to confer as much fascination as her looks. She complained of fending off photographers’ requests for her “to pose with my jacket undone” and sudden “leching” from men she’d considered her friends. After ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ hit the Top 20 and the band appeared on Top of the Pops, the national response to Gaye was extraordinary. The Sun described her, bafflingly, as ‘one of the saucy girl singers who have taken over pop’, and the Daily Express swooned that she possessed:

…[the same] fragile beauty that made the world and Mick Jagger fall in love with Marianne Faithful. Gaye is beautiful, she is as dark as Marianne was fair, with black hair and Castillian white skin…

This presentation of Gaye, and its explicit comparison to pliant and angelic pre-punk darling Faithfull, attempted to explain her as a continuation of the past, rather than a messy break with it. As revolutionary a moment as punk was, it operated within a reactionary framework in which its icons were objectified and misunderstood.

The Adverts disbanded in 1979, their split hastened by Gaye’s discomfort with, and other band members’ resentment of, the puddles of critical drool collecting at her feet. Gaye’s enduring reputation as prototypical punkette pin-up tends to overshadow what she actually did – which was, in her own words, “[try] to get a good sound and play right. I’m not one of Pan’s People.” She had the misfortune to attempt this within a context in which women on stage, regardless of their reasons for and intentions in being there, were automatically sexualised, examined and evaluated in a manner wholly absent from attitudes towards their male counterparts. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

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[Thanks to tvsmith.com and Punk77 for several of the above quotes.]

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