Gina Birch

Born in Nottingham, England, Gina Birch has since the late 1970s developed a career situated between post-punk, art rock, and experimental practices. She co-founded The Raincoats in 1977 with Ana da Silva after their meeting at the Hornsey School of Art, in a context where London punk opened up to freer, more dissonant, and DIY forms. Bassist, singer and writer, Gina Birch contributes to the band's singular identity, made of nervous bass lines, oblique melodies and direct writing. After the first breakup of The Raincoats in 1984, Birch briefly worked with Mayo Thompson and Red Crayola in Germany, then formed Dorothy with Vicky Aspinall, another former Raincoats member. Her career also extends into cinema and video after studies at the Royal College of Art, with works for music and contemporary art. In the 1990s, the Raincoats reformation revived her musical work, alongside projects like The Hangovers, whose Slow Dirty Tears album appeared in 1998. Solo, Gina Birch released the single Feminist Song in 2021, followed by the album I Play My Bass Loud in 2023, where her post-punk remains raw, rhythmic and traversed by spoken word inflections, before Trouble in 2025.