Raincoats Honor Ari Up, Keep It Real at New York Art Museum

Not content to work in one medium -- the brittle, minimalist folk-dub music they've been playing since the dawn of British punk -- the Raincoats showed up Saturday night at New York City's Museum of Modern Art with their own photographs.

Actually, they appeared to be photocopies, and as founding Raincoats Ana da Silva and Gina Birch affixed the 8.5" x 11" sheets to their microphone stands, they honored the woman whose likeness was visible only to fans lucky enough to be standing near the front of the sold-out museum lobby.

"We felt really heartbroken when Ari Up died," Da Silva said, referring to the legendary Slits lead singer, who died last month. Up formed her pioneering all-girl punky reggae group in 1976, a year before the Raincoats got together, and this was a tribute from one gang of feminist British rock 'n' roll lifers to another.
"We're going to play the first song Ari ever wrote," Birch said.

That song is called 'Vindictive,' and in case Saturday's audience didn't know the words (or hadn't yet swilled enough complementary red wine to fake them), Birch prefaced the tune with a quick tutorial.

"And I spit on it!" the singer said, grinning as she waited for the audience to repeat her. "And I s--- on it!"

The Raincoats also got some help from former Bikini Kill and Le Tigre leader Kathleen Hanna, who'd kicked off the evening -- staged in conjunction with the 'Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography' exhibition -- with a killer 90-minute DJ set. Hanna spun everything from dub reggae to the Go-Go's, and as she sang 'Vindictive,' a sloppy garage-punk tune the Raincoats just about stumbled through, she looked thrilled to be standing alongside her heroes.

"I think we played that about as well as the Slits did at their first concert," Birch said afterward. "I hope Ari wasn't watching, actually."

Had Up checked out Saturday's set, she'd have found plenty to love. Like the Slits, the Raincoats aren't particularly skilled musicians, but they approach music with an eccentric enthusiasm befitting of the MoMA.

Midway through a standout "Shouting Out Loud," as the tempo abruptly sped up, and the drummer began rolling away on his tom-toms with increased urgency, the quartet's violin player leapt into the air, sawing away on strings she'd plucked minutes earlier. Birch, meanwhile, did her version of a dub bassline, foregoing much of that genre's characteristic fluidity, while da Silva played a high, nervous guitar lead.

"You wouldn't believe we've been playing these instruments for 30 years," Birch said later. "We like to keep it real."