The feminist punk band remain anthemic queer icons, past and present
BY AUDREY GOLDEN, IMAGE BY FLORIAN SCHULTE, COURTESY OF THE RAINCOATS
In one of my first conversations with Ana da Silva, co-founder of feminist punk band The Raincoats, I told her she was a queer icon. “You inspired people to be proud of their identities, to be bold and political!” Ana smiled. With Gina Birch, the two women started The Raincoats in 1977. Unbeknown to them, their music — and existence — catalysed a queercore movement in the eighties and nineties, and continued to spark queer artists in the 21st century.
I reached out to Toronto-based G.B. Jones of the band Fifth Column and co-creator of J.D.s, the zine that started the queercore movement in 1985. I’d seen its xeroxed Top Ten, a playlist featuring Only Loved At Night, a song Ana wrote for The Raincoats’ second album Odyshape (Rough Trade, 1981). The lyrics immediately caught G.B.’s ear, she told me; she was listening for secret references to queer love. “Only loved at night / The lady in the dark . . . . Girls loved her in the dark.” The language “was even more overt than other songs we included on the chart,” G.B. told me, describing “whole sections devoted to the female protagonist and her relationship with another woman.” Readers of J.D.s began to recognise The Raincoats as the queer luminaries they’d become.
Filmmaker Lucy Thane remembered a similar coded inspiration: “The Raincoats weren’t out there saying, ‘Oh we’re queer,’ but I think everyone smelled it, so they didn’t actually need to say it.” She was moved to make She’s Real (Worse Than Queer) in the mid-nineties, a documentary celebrating the women who defined queercore’s sonic power. I later mentioned this to Ana, asking if she ever felt a need to be more public about her identity. “As time has passed,” she reflected, “these things have become important to me, and important to other people.” And it was never just identity alone; The Raincoats created a map to break free from stifling cultural and sonic norms. They taught queercore and riot grrrl artists that punk isn’t a sound, but an idea of freedom.
At the 2008 BFI Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, programmer Nazmia Jamal brought in The Raincoats, and the band was honoured the following year as “Gay Icons” at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Raincoats collaborator Shirley O’Loughlin remembers exclaiming to Gina, “You’re a gay icon now!” A 10-song set at the museum ended with The Raincoats’ cover of Lola, a song that has continued to inspire queer artists in perpetuity. In the last few years, it has appeared joyfully on TikTok users’ accounts as a coming out soundtrack. The Raincoats remain anthemic queer icons, past and present.
Shouting Out Loud: Lives of The Raincoats by Audrey Golden will be published by White Rabbit on 31 July 2025. Featuring material from hundreds of interviews and ephemera from The Raincoats’ vast archive, Shouting Out Loud is the first comprehensive biography of this groundbreaking band.
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