I had the DGC reissue of the first Raincoats LP, which I purchased as a teenager from Columbia House at Kurt Cobain’s suggestion. Inside of the CD were the sweetest liner notes, something about how listening to the record made Mr. Sad Pants feel as if he was hidden in a closet, secretly listening in on their rehearsal. Sunday’s Raincoats performance had all the same qualities that once inspired Cobain to call their record “rehearsal-like”: several songs had to be restarted due to fuck-ups, several guitars were quite out-of-tune, and a few numbers fell apart into utter chaos (notably “Adventures Close to Home,” which featured Viv Albertine—a member of the Slits, the Raincoats’ slightly-more-polished sisters from “back in the day”—playing guitar bemusedly in the corner on a song that she too had recorded in the late ’70s). The difference, though, is that no one felt like we were listening in on something we shouldn’t witness. Rather, this was a full-throated celebration of the Raincoats sloppiness and charm, and the audience would have been appalled had these broads ripped up the stage with shiny versions of songs from the decidedly crisp Moving LP from 1983. The audience reveled in the fuck-ups and the cacophony. The addition of absolutely awful drummer Vice Cooler (XBXRX, Hawnay Troof) was actually a nice touch!

Oh, but that’s not to say that the Raincoats were not ON FIRE Sunday night. This was indeed a dream come true, one of those special moments that can’t be described as a “dream come true” because none of us would have ever even imagined that we’d get to see the Raincoats until those trusty little Part Time Punks posters started telling us we would. The most miraculous thing about the show was watching the dynamic between founding members Ana de Silva and Gina Birch. It must have been absolutely strange, thirty years after releasing a mostly-ignored record on Rough Trade, to find themselves playing a packed basement in Los Angeles for an audience made up mostly of people who weren’t even around then. But here they were, with personalities beaming!  Ana carried herself like a wisened journeywoman, arching over her guitar and occasionally staring coldly into the crowd, her wrinkled face looking like it came off the cover of a Johnny Cash record. Gina, on the other hand, was all ebullient joy as she buzzed through not only the set but between-song banter about her Ebay obsession and other cute idosyncracies. I apologize for using a cliche here, but watching the two interact was special in the same way as it’s special to go to a dinner party with a long-married couple. Ana’s eye-rolling was visible during Birch’s monologues, but it conveyed not a sense of annoyance but of sisterhood and an abiding and resilent friendship. I told Gina about my observation after the show and she wrote the following in a little speech bubble above her head on the back cover of the LP I bought: “We broke up after every record, but we love each other!”

The show was electric and beautiful. They opened up with my favorite, “No Side to Fall In.” I embarassingly stopped my full-throated sing-along about halfway through the first verse when I realized no one else was singing along. It just wasn’t that kind of an audience—everyone wanted to hear THE RAINCOATS sing those songs and seemed pretty content to sing along silently in their own heads and occasionally fist-pump on hits like “The Void.” The set was, understandably, skewed towards earlier material that fit more within the “punk” aesthetic of the festival. For all of the moments that the Raincoats bounced along messily, there were enough spot-on performances to keep the set moving along solidly. For me, the highlights were Gina’s opener from Moving, “No One’s Little Girl” (my only complaint is that this was the only song from Moving they played), Ana’s achingly frustrated “No Looking,” and encore-closer “Fairytale in the Supermarket”—which somehow raged even harder than it did thirty years ago. “Lola,” their heralded Kinks cover, was spot-on and powerful in a genuine, chunky-rock kind of way. Gina also offered up what seemed to be two new songs—a heart-wrenching number about having a dog instead of a baby, and a cheery and drunken manifesto about feminism, happiness, and being a “City Girl.” To be sure, they were both a bit longer and more repetitive than the early material through which the band was rifling—but they provided a stunningly honest portrait of their author, one that I think we were all grateful to see.

—Geoff Geis