The Raincoats’ Gina Birch on debut solo album ‘I Play My Bass Loud’: “Sometimes you’ve got to jump off the cliff and see what happens”

nme.com:

Gina Birch of post-punk pioneers The Raincoats has spoken to NME about the release of her long-awaited debut solo album ‘I Play My Bass Loud’, and what to expect from her upcoming live shows.The musician, visual artist and filmmaker released her solo debut last month via Third Man Records and is set to kick off some UK live dates later this month. “It’s thrilling – it’s nothing I thought I’d be doing this time last year,” Birch told NME of going it alone.She compared the feeling to a point in the early 1990s, when she had thought she had turned her back on performing in order to focus on her work directing music videos for other bands (she would go on to work with The Libertines, New Order, Beth Orton and more).“I was in the edit suite, I think I was working on a video for The Pogues, and the phone rang,” she recalled. “It was [music agent] Russell Warby, who asked, ‘Would The Raincoats like to go on tour with Nirvana?’ It seemed mad, like ‘I’m making films, what the fuck?’ But it also seemed mad not to do it.

In a way I feel a bit like this with the album. I’ve got a fantastic painting studio that I haven’t been to for about three months!”Although he died before the tour could take place, Kurt Cobain was one of the most notable fans of Birch’s now-legendary trio, and wrote about his love for them on the sleeve notes of 1992’s ‘Incesticide’ compilation.Though she had been writing and home recording the material that would become her new album for some time, it would be another encounter with a high-profile fan – this time David Buick of Jack White’s Third Man Records – that led to her return to music.“I was making songs on my computer, and every now and then it would cross my mind that it would be nice to do something.