The Raincoats, Saturday Night

The night I'd been looking forward to for weeks didn't disappoint!
I met Caroline at the caff in the Tate Modern and she yanked me into a taxi as it started to pour with rain, so we arrived in style. The film took a while to behave, appearing without sound twice before settling down and running. The first impression was the true-to-the-feel-of-the-times element. Having spent the punk experience in Brighton, I rarely went to London, but I could see that there was the same power nationally in the music and the subculture.
The earliest footage shows the Raincoats almost looking like the New York Dolls- tall, some in high heels, brightly coloured and quite glam. Later, their style evolved to a more personal one. What was most striking was Palmolive- she was a fantastic drummer- fast, imaginative and fun- you see her grinning at the audience and generally having a whale of a time. Additionally, the band were very tight and well-rehearsed, something Ari said about the Slits. Just because the music was different to the ears and broke the rules doesn't mean to say the players didn't know what they were doing with sound. There was also some great footage of the group in the studio- a very young Geoff Travis is there, and the girls look intense and focused, and very very close to each other.
There was a lot of talking-head material in the film too- Jane Mo-Dette, there in the audience, looking splendidly extraordinary, the most stylish woman of the noughties without a doubt, Vivien Goldman being perceptive and funny, a bit too much David Thomas but one very funny sequence with Ana and Gina off-camera, Lucy O'Brien, Viv Albertine, Scritti Politti's dreadlocked drummer Tom (who told a funny anecdote about the Raincoat's live sound guy hating them so much he was listening to AC/DC on his headphones during their soundcheck), lots of others. Gina has done a great job; it bears her stamp of being intelligent, political and humorous in combination.
Afterwards we watched a live set, starting off with No One's Little Girl which featured Gina's daughters sitting with dangling legs at the front of the stage playing percussion, Shouting Out Loud with two false starts that added to the informality, One in a Million, Don't Be Mean and then a hilarious instrument-swapping episode in which the leads all got tangled up. 'We always make it look so effortless, don't we?', laughed Gina, and they launched into Babydog, a Hangovers song. Touchingly, Ana dedicated the next song, Step by Step, to the medical staff who have been treating Shirley's illness.
They finished with a rip-roaring version of Lola. Earlier, Gina had quoted Ray Davies' comments about their version of his song: 'making a single sound like an album track instead of an album track sound like a single'.
Well, this sounded more sexy, lively and exciting than the Kink's insouciant version, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr Ray Davies who promises to come and talk to songwriting students and then lets them down at the last minute!
The Raincoats fully deserved their standing ovation. After all this time you can see what a bona fide art rock band they were and are. Just because they are female, people said they couldn't play. But this film shows a rule-breaking band who played very tightly and with such energy, making a rock spectacle at the same time, that would put many of today's male rock bands to shame!
Pics show the band singing Lola, and Caroline, me, Lucy and Rhoda Dakar having a larf backstage.