Gina Birch: 'It was like a conversion moment when I saw The Slits'

The only problem was she couldn’t play an instrument.

“One day I was at an art and politics lecture in Soho,” she recalls, “and I did have a couple of drinks and I just marched down on my own to Macari’s (music shop) in Charing Cross Road and said, ‘Which is your cheapest bass?’ and they said, ‘This one, do you want to try it?’ I said no and kind of ran out with it. I was really shy. I just had this thing inside me that I had to do it. It was like a conversion moment when I saw The Slits which planted the seed, you’ve got to do it.”

The Raincoats, the band that Birch formed with da Silva in 1977, would go on to be regarded as one of the pioneers of post-punk, releasing three ground-breaking albums between 1979 and 1984, and another 12 years later after reforming due to a resurgence of interest sparked by grunge figureheads Kurt Cobain and Kim Gordon citing them as inspirations. They were also championed by Riot Grrrl groups such as Bikini Kill.

Four-and-ahalf decades on from picking up her first instrument, Birch, now 67, has made her first solo album. Unapologetically, it’s titled I Play My Bass Loud.

She describes the record as a diary of her own obsessions and interests – something that, as a politically-engaged artist she has always been wont to do. She cites as an example “a big kind of opus” that she made when the anti-capitalist Occupy movement happened around 2011. “I did a soundscape of stuff around that and used bits of George Monbiot, all different speeches and different ideas, I used vocoders and stuff.”

One day she will make a collection of her “historical moments”, she says, but for now the 11 songs on this album represent certain events that Birch “marked by writing a little piece of music about them”.

“They’re all things that happened to me – I suppose that’s why people write songs – but mine are issue-based, even if they’re kind of personal issues or little stories,” she says. “They’re all based on some trigger from my life.”

The title track features five women bassists, including the Mo-dettes’ Jane Crockford and Emily Elhaj, bassist for Angel Olsen, while Thurston Moore guests on Wish I Was You.

Feminist Song has been a staple of The Raincoats’ set for the past decade, but when Da Silva declined an invitation to record it for a 7in single that Third Man Records wanted to release to mark the opening of its new store in London, Birch decided to claim it for herself.

Likewise a homage to the Russian feminist collective Pussy Riot, who Birch sees as fellow travellers. “With Pussy Riot it was more politicised than feminism in punk was,” she says. “They actually started from the perspective of feminism and then the music came. It was a very dangerous protest that they made in the most outrageous place for them to do it (inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour) and the most perfect place for them to do it, almost knowing that they’re going to be facing a couple of years in a gulag. All we might face is a couple of rotten eggs.

“We got people who didn’t like The Raincoats. Perhaps one of us might have a hairy leg or we’re not dressing to please the boys in black. We were doing our protest in our own way, but it was very lightweight by comparison. But on the other hand, it’s stepping-stones. Without the suffragettes we wouldn’t have been able to do that at all.”

Alongside music and film-making – she has in the past directed music videos for the likes of New Order and The Pogues – Birch continues to paint. Her artwork adorns the sleeve of I Play My Bass Loud. She says: “There’s a different conversation going on in painting, but it’s related,” she says. “I did a series where I took classical paintings and I sent the Guerilla Girls in to (Ruben’s) Rape of the Sabine Women to try save them from being kidnapped and raped. I made one called Custard Tart where I took a painting by Gentileschi (Susanna and the Elders) in which she’s shy covering herself up and these two men are leering at her...and put my comedy hat on and thought, ‘She’d be throwing a custard pie in their faces’. Interventions felt very satisfying.”

I Play My Bass Loud is out now. Gina Birch plays at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on March 27.