Part Time Punks Festival prompts post
While few would recognize the band name The Raincoats, just about everyone knows the name of grunge rock icon Kurt Cobain.
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Daily Bruin
While few would recognize the band name The Raincoats, just about everyone knows the name of grunge rock icon Kurt Cobain.

It was Cobain, one of the band’s biggest fans, who helped reissue The Raincoats’ late ’70s and early ’80s albums in 1993 and paved the way for a new generation’s rediscovery of the British band’s long-neglected sounds.

Regarded as one of the most influential acts in the sub-culture, The Raincoats, steeped in odd tones, tribal rhythms and stripped-down female vocals, will set foot in Los Angeles for the very first time to headline the 2nd Annual Part Time Punks Festival.

The world’s second-ever post-punk music festival begins Sunday at 2 p.m. in The Echo & The Echoplex and lasts until 2 a.m. the following day.

The lineup also boasts more well-known names like Gang of Four, whose drummer Hugo Burnham and bassist Dave Allen will make their West Coast DJ debut.

Section 25, of the legendary Factory Records label that was home to Joy Division, will also attend its first Los Angeles appearance since 1982.

In addition to other older bands such as Savage Republic, formed at UCLA in the early ’80s by undergraduate students, a young crop of up-and-coming new bands will also take to the Echo Park stages.

The Los Angeles-based Abe Vigoda and Weave! will bring to the festival their sonic racket and punky reggae tribal whoops, respectively.

“There will be literally all ages there,” said Michael Stock, co-founder and DJ of the Part Time Punks club and UCLA alumnus. “There will be teenagers there, and there will be people in their 50s and 60s who love this stuff.”

Despite being a smaller festival, Part Time Punks’ community of dedicated fans has attracted Viv Albertine, guitarist of the British seminal first all-girl punk band, The Slits, which fused punky spirit with reggae.

“I do think over in America they’re just so much more loyal to their musicians than the English in a way. They don’t forget you,” Albertine said. “I got e-mails from really young people who are 20 or 18 saying, “˜We think The Slits are really classic.'”

Albertine will appear at the Part Time Punks Festival as a solo artist, performing all-new songs that she wrote herself.

Her first single will be released by Los Angeles’ own label, Manimal Vinyl, by the end of the year.

“I’m not really so much celebrating (the old) as much as doing my new thing with the same attitude as I had before, which was, “˜I’m going to do this; I know virtuoso music; I’ve got stuff I’ve got to say; there’s a space for it; I don’t think other people are saying it,'” Albertine said.

According to Ethan Port of Savage Republic, the college crowd and college radio were especially important to underground bands in the pre-viral age before the advent of MySpace and Facebook.

“Some bands never got out of L.A., so you all play together and get a really mixed audience. That’s what post-punk is to me,” Port said. “You get so many different bands, different music, when you go to a show you go to the whole event. Now, people go to something and only see one band.”

Stock defines the post-punk era as roughly from 1978 to 1984, a most fertile and varied period for innovation in song-writing and musical styles.

“There are so many different styles that happen there ““ jangly pop stuff, dub-related stuff and classical avant-garde stuff,” Stock said. “There’s such a broad amount of music, and maybe it’s because it’s so broad (that) it doesn’t get dated.”

For Ana da Silva, guitarist and vocalist of The Raincoats, post-punk music is still relevant because it remains fresh and rebellious.

“We are still relating to the kind of simplicity on one hand, on the other hand very (open) to exploring (the new generation’s) own version of music,” da Silva said.

Weave!’s Bryan Backhouse believes there is an element of post-punk to his band’s music, though it isn’t a post-punk revival band.

“There’s calypso stuff, Africa stuff, hip-hop; there’s way less reggae ““ there’s more dub in what we do now,” Backhouse said.

Da Silva and bassist and vocalist Gina Birch formed The Raincoats while attending college in London.

The band originally had male members but eventually became all female at the insistence of drummer recruit Palmolive, or Paloma Romero), also of The Slits.

“We just thought, “˜Let’s try that,’ and (the music) somehow sounded strange because of that,” da Silva said. “We were like a gang or something; you felt that kind of presence and belonged to that presence.”

According to Stock, few women were involved in the punk scene.

Rather, it was in the post-punk era that many women and girls began crafting their own music, The Slits being the first and The Raincoats the second.

“It was the first time when girls were actually getting to say their piece and put their own bands together,” Stock said.

Albertine joined The Slits because the band was all girls, at first seeing the fact as a gimmick.

When band members all gelled together musically, boasting an all-female status became irrelevant.

“As we sort of played together, we talked and thought like girls together. That really influenced our music, our lyrics, our rhythms ““ although we never called ourselves feminists,” Albertine said. “The fact we were all that female energy together produced an end product that was quite intensely different from everything else that was going on.”

Although the festival is only in its second year, the first ever Part Time Punks Mini-Fest is happening at The Mezzanine in San Francisco, taking a similar lineup on the road two days prior to the main event.

At the fans’ urging, Stock is already considering taking the festival to New York next year.

“It’s not a retro festival, it’s really not like that at all. Michael (Stock)’s really good at balancing and fitting the bands that are included in post-punk with the newer bands that are redefining it,” Port said.

Stock maintains that the upcoming Part Time Punks Festival is as much about music as education, combining visuals, history and interviews in order to expose a new crowd to this genre of music or re-expose an older crowd to the records they may have forgotten.

“Hearing the newer bands like Weave! paired with these older original post-punk bands, right there on site you’ll be able to put it together,” Stock said. “So there’s this tradition that’s happening, unfolding in front of their ears.”