Call it heartland Everett True territory. Call it a cleansing ritual. I spend the next morning mainlining Northern Soul – five CDs, immaculate grooves, total devotion – trying to process what happened the previous night. Because something happened, for sure. Something magical.
You can never go home anymore.
And yet here I am, stood somewhere between the bar and the ghosts of my former self, shaking hands with people I once swore I’d never see again, feeling that old, uncontrollable urge kick back into life. I was racked with nerves on my way to the concert: fear of the unknown. My past. Why was I so worried?
A review in four parts.
Gina Birch and the Unreasonables
Everything shifts.
Fragility, inner strength: not as binaries, but as a tangle, a braid, a lived contradiction. Gina doesn’t so much perform songs as allow them to tumble out half- (fully) formed, trembling, daring you to meet them halfway. You can never go home anymore because Gina refuses the very premise. She stands rooted in the present tense and demands that you do the same.
‘The Feminist Song’ towers over everything. The line “When you ask me if I’m a feminist/Why the hell would I not be” isn’t rhetoric. It’s life lived and processed and handed back without apology. A revolution happening right now in front of our eyes. Everything I always believed music should be.
“I bet you’ve never seen three women playing bass before,” she laughs.
Colour-coordinated, luminous, slightly surreal: a fairytale in a supermarket where the fluorescent lights hum in sympathy. Songs like ‘I Play My Bass Loud’ and ‘Lola’ don’t just sit there – they ripple, they hesitate, they bloom. Every note fought over and wrestled into being. Pure genius.
The ‘Au Pairs’
The difference is subtle. The difference is everything.
The difference between Gina Birch and the ‘Au Pairs’ is profound. (Inverted commas because really, it’s just main woman Lesley Woods and three other musicians, very accomplished and cool musicians for sure, fucking great on stage and all that, but not the Au Pairs.) Gina is living painfully, beautifully in the present; Lesley – magnificent, undeniable – is reaching back, reassembling the past, holding it up to the light like a relic you’re not sure you’re allowed to touch. There is no comparison. I spend most of the ‘Au Pairs’ set catching up with my former community because that’s what this music does, or did, or still does if you let it. Helps you find your community again. Even so, the music is wonderful. Songs like ‘It’s Obvious’, ‘Come Again’, ‘Armagh’… they don’t land, they insist. Songs that dragged me away from the patriarchy over 40 years ago by confronting contradictions and injustice and gender imbalance head-on. Songs that made me reconsider sexual dynamics long before I even had sex.
No subtlety. No soft focus. Confrontation as choreography. Rhythm as argument.
Lesley Woods stands there, voice still sharp enough to slice through four decades of accumulated nonsense, while the guitars snap and recoil, angular as ever, and the rhythm section locks in with militant grace. They sound incredible. Tight, angular, precise. A fairytale in a supermarket, but one where the fluorescent lights flicker just enough to remind you it’s all reconstruction. Memory with muscle. Memory with teeth.
Charley Stone said it best (the following is lifted with permission from her Facebook page:
About 2 mins into Gina Birch’s set, when she was on the stage alone and singing about rage, I remembered again that whenever I see her or The Raincoats, emotions happen, and that I’m often not sure what emotions they are, just that they’re very visceral and present. Will I start crying this time, I wondered. Or will I just burst out smiling. Viewers, I did both, intermittently, cycling between the two according to the song in this perfectly put together set. The harmonies, the instrument swapping, and mostly just this indescribable “other” that Gina brings to the stage, and which I think I’ve rarely experienced to such a degree in fact. I cried three times! And “burst out smiling” loads more. It was intense, and joyful, and cathartic, and just really good #art, the kind that takes hold of you and makes you feel stuff, and sparks little connections in your brain, gives you a different way in to feelings and thoughts that were probably there already but maybe could do with a shake, y’know?
“I’m a city girl/I’m a warrior/the city made me this way/when you ask me if I’m a feminist/why the hell would I not be” and “sunshine bursts right through me”.
And then they finished with Lola. I was not expecting that.
“Gina we love you!” I wanted to shout out at one point, but did not want to draw attention to myself.
I think this was one of my favourite ever gigs.
A conclusion (of sorts)
That indescribable other. That thing you can’t historicise, can’t package.
The ‘Au Pairs’ remind you why you once needed this music.
Gina Birch reminds you why you still do.