(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

The Raincoats emerged during the creative boom of the New Wave, but they played in London, where punk rock, dark-punk, and similar styles were dominant. Their music was intelligent and sophisticated, aware of classical and jazz traditions, and addressed feminist themes. The Raincoats’ art was primarily vocal—delicate and refined, drawing on the a cappella white-voice choruses of Gregorian chant, yet infused with an expressionist cabaret “weltanschauung.” A sense of impending tragedy, resigned fatalism, and desperate impotence is integral to their pessimistic message about the female condition.

The classic lineup featured guitarist Ana Da Silva, violinist Vicky Aspinall, bassist Gina Birch, and drummer Palmolive (Paloma Romero). They began performing in 1976, inspired by punk rock, but quickly distanced themselves from it, while retaining its independent and defiant spirit.

They debuted under the guidance of Mayo Thompson with the album Raincoats (Rough Trade, 1979), a collection of gentle moral fables like Fairytale In The Supermarket and feminist anthems such as Adventures Close To Home.
In reality, these angelic feminists proposed a “toy music”—simple, curious, inventive music. A cultivated version of the Roches, the Raincoats disrupted the concepts of rhythmic and melodic unity, alternating tempos within the same song and sliding between melodies through melismatic passages.

Encased in deliberately sparse arrangements (faded whispers, ethereal folk contraltos, flamenco chimes, atonal strums, drum rolls), their songs represent the most ingenious attempt to reinvent English progressive rock.

They presented themselves more refined and as multi-instrumental folksingers (violin, cello, cymbals, kalimba) on their second album, Odyshape (Rough Trade, 1981), closer to the Canterbury school: the Middle Eastern chant at flamenco pace of the title track, the menacing, cadenced nursery rhyme of Baby Song (with Caribbean polyrhythms and Gregorian chorus), the vortex of howls, tribalisms, and Gypsy violin of Shouting Out Loud, the rarefied free vocal harmonies and driving riffs of And Then It Is Okay, even a rhythm of clocks and taps creating boundless melancholy (Only Loved At Night); culminating in the solemn raga for Indian soprano at reggae-Cossack pace of Dancing In My Head.

Their journey concluded with an eclectic ethnic fusion (the single Animal Rhapsody, 1983, featuring playful Afro-funk in the style of Rip Rig & Panic) and a collection of more mature folk-jazz songs, Moving (Rough Trade, 1984), spanning from “Brechtian” theater to exotic Bohemian styles with an almost endless array of tricks: choral solfeggio in Caribbean rhythm (Honey Mad Woman), disco music with Arabic moves (Balloon), jazz-rock for raga singing (Overheard) or for Hare Krishna solfeggio (The Body); peaks of romantic pathos appear in the haunting Cossack melody of Dreaming In The Past, the hypnotic Eastern chant of Ooh Ooh La La La, the atonal nursery rhyme in reel time of I Saw A Hill, and the surreal reggae-funk fanfare of Avidoso.

The first album is exuberant and eccentric, Odyshape is a naïve experimental record, and Moving is tinged with an anemic mood. All three are enchanting, but on different levels.