Gina Birch and The Unreasonables

Gina Birch has never been one to stay silent. The artist-songwriter-filmmaker-feminist-icon has had an undeniable and outspoken hand in shaping the UK’s independent music scene, perhaps most notably as a founding member and bassist of post-punk legends The Raincoats, a band which to this day is responsible for socially conscious rock groups being formed in garages and rec halls across the globe. In 1977, she debuted one of her most recognized art pieces, the short film 3 Minute Scream, in which she stares down the camera and, as the title suggests, screams for the duration of a Super 8 cartridge. Viewed in the present day, it’s still a rage-filled, prescient, important piece of work—so much so that in 2024 it was shown in Women in Revolt, an exhibition of feminist art and activism at Tate Britain.

“I sort of became the poster girl for that show. My picture was all over the place,” says Gina with a wry chuckle. “I still feel that that is an important thing, to make people think, fuck things up a bit—you know, cause a bit of trouble.”

Aptly, Trouble is the name of Gina’s second solo album, a fiery yet introspective collection of post-punk, dub, experimental rock, and indie, ranging from blistering guitar-driven songs like the title track “Causing Trouble Again”, to the spaced-out ‘60s-tinted “Happiness”, to “Train Platform”’s percussive, pulsating drone. Much like 3 Minute Scream, Trouble is a declaration, but not an angry shout into the void—it’s a statement of intent, a commitment to uninhibited creativity, an artist letting her audience in on her wildest thoughts and innermost emotions.

Trouble is a patchwork of sorts: its 11 songs are not only eclectic in genre, but play like stitched-together vignettes, fly-on-the-wall scenes in which Gina describes meeting a stranger on a train, or a flare up with her teenage daughter, or the nostalgia of driving past a certain part of your neighborhood that’s been unchanged for as long as you can remember. It’s the politics of the everyday, a work that is feminist not because of slogans or placards, but because it’s a candid portrait of a female artist simply existing. “It's a bit out there, a bit off the tracks, and I always like to go there,” says Gina about the album’s diaristic undertones. “I unofficially subtitled the album ‘Trouble I've Caused and Trouble I'm In’, so the songs are based around that feeling—that dangerous place to be.”

Cultural touchstones abound in Trouble, not only as influences on its genre-hopping mood but as testaments to the things that inspire Gina’s everyday life. While speaking about the record, she effortlessly cites Bob Dylan, Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, Derek Jarman, The Color of Pomegranates, Elton John, Café OTO, Laurie Anderson, Syvlia Plath, and a litany of other references that have seeped into Trouble’s DNA. On lead single “Causing Trouble Again”, Gina asked several female artists, including legends like experimental music pioneer Cosey Fanni Tutti and painter and writer Caroline Coon, to record themselves saying the names of women who have inspired them—women who have indeed “caused trouble”. The epic six-minute track, propelled by Gina’s springy bass and a breakneck drum machine beat, crescendos until hundreds of names are being read aloud: Nina Simone to Dolly Parton, Grace Jones to Louise Bourgeois, Elizabeth I to Stormy Daniels. “Causing Trouble Again” acts as a defiant centerpiece on the album, the opposite of a bogged-down history lesson. It’s a jubilant exploration of what it means to go against society’s grain, overlaid with fuzzy guitar solos and rebellious flair.

While there are other tracks on Trouble that lean into Gina’s progressive politics (the dub-tinged electro track “Keep to the Left” speaks for itself, whereas “Doom Monger”, with its tale of “lunatics in power” and “violence in the air”, is the perfect screed against the rise of the far-right), those songs are only one aspect of Gina wants to express with this album. “What I wanted to do was to give a rounded picture of being a human in this world,” she explains. “It’s about the things that get you going, the things that soothe you, the things that let you express yourself.”

One such song is “Happiness”, which stems from a very particular experience Gina had while visiting her mother. “I was driving home from seeing my mum—she’s 96 and I go to see her every week,” she says. “At a T junction at the end of the road, there was an old Chinese restaurant with a red sign with gold letters that said ‘Happiness’. It was beautiful, but looked really fucked up from being in the horrible, smoggy part of Seven Sisters for so long. Every time I saw it in the murky light, I'd be like, ‘There's Happiness!’ It used to make me feel happy every time I passed it. And then one day the sign was gone and in its place it said something stupid like Big Eats, or Yummy Tummy. I thought it was so terrible. So I went home and wrote a song about it.” “Happiness” is both uplifting and melancholy at the same time, its jangling tambourines and falsetto harmonies expertly encapsulating the feeling of trying to recapture something that’s been lost forever.

Like on “Happiness”, Gina is the type of person that has a funny anecdote for every occasion, and this knack for storytelling is central to her songwriting style. Trouble’s lead track, “I Thought I’d Live Forever”, takes trip-hop beats and reggae low-ends to tell a story about the discomfort of aging and confronting one’s own mortality. The story goes as such: Gina was transferring files from an old Mac tower to some new drives over several days for a film project, when her daughter, sitting at the kitchen table, said: ‘When are you gonna turn that off, that annoying buzzing sound has been going on for too long! Meanwhile, Gina hadn’t heard a thing.

With that came the realization that after decades of playing in bands and working with headphones that were too loud, perhaps her hearing wasn’t what it used to be. As its title suggests, “I Thought I’d Live Forever” is tongue-in-cheek, poking fun at the notion of holding on to the past. “It's quite massive, that song,” states Gina. “It’s about sensations dying, but not feeling them go. It’s about wanting to be alive—it’s provocative, I suppose.”

Trouble sees Gina teaming up once again with Youth, the acclaimed producer/former member of ‘80s post-punk icons Killing Joke, and engineer/mixer Michael Rendall, the duo who helped capture the rugged-yet-refined sound of her 2023 debut album, I Play My Bass Loud. Recorded on the top floor of Youth’s London home, fueled by “plenty of tea and toast”, the sessions also included Jenny Green and Marie Merlet, who play in Gina’s live band as The Unreasonables, ad well as long-time collaborator Helen McCookerybook who has worked with Gina on various film and concert projects throughout the years. “Some people like the whole immersive experience of,  ‘Lets go to a studio somewhere out of town’ or something, but I think my whole life as an artist is an immersive experience,’ explains Gina. “I like being able to go home, sleep in my own bed, decompress and feel a bit normal before heading back the next day.”

Navigating her listeners through her experience with witty and relatable songwriting is what Gina does best. Filled with slice-of-life moments, none of the stories on Trouble feel generic or mundane. “I’m usually inspired by something that makes me laugh, and I have a kind of weird sense of humor,” laughs Gina. For example, a recent naked self-portrait she painted, revealing all the scars she’s accumulated from various medical procedures, when she found she was going to have symmetrical scars from two ops at either end of her life so far. “Something that someone might find a bit disgusting or a bit wierd, I just find funny.”  Later referencing “Train Platform”, a song about looking into trains, pining for the object of one’s affection.  “What sparks me off is humor in both the absurd and the off-putting. Little incidents that happen. I find humor in things that a lot of people might find sad or difficult. But on the other hand, we all laugh when somebody falls down the stairs and ends up at the bottom.”

As such, the connecting factor that links all the songs on Trouble together isn’t one single ideology or theme or topic, but Gina herself. It’s her vision, informed by her status as a rock icon, her voice as a forward-thinking artist, and her perspective as someone who just thinks life should be a bit of a laugh sometimes. For a musician who has had such an impact on her genre, it’s downright life-affirming to realize that she still has so much to share with her audience—and frankly, Trouble is just cracking the surface. “These songs came to me like a radio tuning, the airwaves going along, and I just plucked them out of the air. Something just clicks in the atmosphere, and I just take it. I'm not writing an opus about one thing. I'm writing an opus about being me.”