Bikini Kill: 'When we started out people were very sexist towards us or dismissive'

“That would be great,” she enthuses. “We’re going to Europe on June 1, we’ll have a couple of days to practise in New York when Kathleen’s on her book tour. I think we would probably all like to make some new music but we don’t all live in the same place, so when we get together we’re just like ‘OK, we’ve got to do this...’ But yeah, it’s a good idea.”

Vail recalls a previous connection with Leeds. “Isn’t that where Karren Ablaze’s fanzine was from?” she asks, remembering one of the UK’s leading Riot Grrrl publications from the 90s. “I do think we played there with Huggy Bear in 1993.” Although the band returned to the UK three years later for a string of shows with Bis, her memory of shows outside of London is hazy. “We’re trying to make a timeline of shows,” she says. “There is a tour archive on the internet but it’s a bit of a mess and there’s a pile of stuff that’s not well documented because it was pre-internet. Kathi Wilcox has extensive tour diaries with meticulous lists of everything, so she’s probably the best resource on that.”

While band members busied themselves with separate projects for 20 years, the prospect of reforming Bikini Kill had looked remote until 2017, when they were individually asked to open a show for legendary British post-punk band The Raincoats in New York. Vail explains: “I’m not really a solo performer, I have done it but not very many times, so I was like, well, Kathi lives in Brooklyn maybe she wants to do something with me. Then she emailed me and said, ‘Would you be opposed to doing something with Kathleen?’ I said, why would I be opposed? And that’s where the conversation started.

“But honestly Kathleen and I were not really in touch after the band broke up. We were in touch in the sense that we had a back catalogue to deal with, we had all the records and we’ve always been really good about business but we went totally different directions. Kathi was more in touch with her because she was living in New York or LA at that time. Anyway, then we ended up getting together and playing one of our old songs and it was just really fun. I remember we were practising and we were walking around Brooklyn and ran into a friend of theirs, and he was like, ‘What is going on? Are you going to play some shows?’ I said no, but then I kind of realised that everyone was sort of like, ‘Wait, are we...?’ So it really is something that happened organically.

“Of course we’d been asked to do stuff over the years, but I’ve never been too into nostalgia or going back in time. I guess I was more like, why would we do that? But it also just felt we really did our band, we did it full-time, it kind felt like we did it as much as we could do.

“But at that Raincoats show, not only did they provide us with that opportunity, they performed with Palmolive on a few songs their early stuff and it was very meaningful for us and for everyone in the room, not just to see them do that work but also just to see older women on stage being celebrated. It felt very life-affirming, it didn’t feel like nostalgia, it just felt that maybe the world wasn’t ready for The Raincoats when they first came along and this was a way to have their work reconsidered. I was inspired by that personally.”

Rather than seeing the reunion as a chance to reclaim Bikini Kill’s story from historical revisionism, Vail says her approach was simply to enjoy some camaraderie again. “I was working in a library,” she says. “I’d been playing in bands the whole time since I was a teenager, I never quit doing that, but I was more like, what would it feel like to play these songs again? But as we started doing it, that did become an interesting thing because it’s so different now. When we first started out people were very sexist towards us or dismissive, but we were a real band. I love playing drums, I love singing, it’s just fun.”

Vail had been inspired to form Bikini Kill with Hanna and Wilcox in October 1990 after seeing the grunge band Babes in Toyland. The 54-year-old drummer says she saw the American punk scene of the time as a place where women’s voices could be heard. “That’s true to some extent,” she says. “Kathleen was in a band called Viva Knievel in the early 90s and I had been in several bands – my teenage band Doris was an all-girl band, that was during the hardcore punk era and we did not really take ourselves seriously. Through playing in that band I experienced sexism to some degree and started realising there was no culture in place encouraging women to participate.

“Within hardcore punk we were there in the audience, we were there doing fanzines, organising shows but not so much on stage. You could go to maybe 10 shows and maybe see a couple of women playing bass, maybe a singer. Every once in a while there would be a drummer but very rarely. There were women involved in the scene but the culture of women playing rock ’n’ roll in the 80s in that scene just didn’t really exist.

“But as far as women in punk, I got a radio show as a teenager so I had access to the record library and I learned about punk rock in the late 70s through the media or my parents or whatever, but I didn’t know that X-Ray Spex existed until maybe 1988 – and I was a music person. So the history of women in punk really was not well documented, the access to information that we had was very limited, it was just based on where you lived, what the people in the record store carried, who you knew, what bands came to your town. So when we first started a big project of it was through the fanzines, and that was to partially document the history of women in punk, that was very recent history that we didn’t know.

“It’s shocking to me. Of course I knew The Raincoats but that was just luck​​​​​​​ because over here they were kind of big and they got played on the radio​​​​​​​; I knew who The Slits were but ​​​​​​​I don’t know that I knew their music very well until later. But keep in mind in the 80s all the histories of punk weren’t really written yet either – like Greil Marcus​​​​​​​ (Lipstick Traces). Those came out in the early 90s, so we didn’t really know.

“Then seeing a band like Babes in Toyland, that really did motivate us​​​​​​​ because it was like, wow, they’re really doing it​​​​​​​ and they’re doing it as women. They’re not doing the super American hardcore thing ​​​​​​​of no make-up, big T-shirt, they’re girls that are playing music ferociously and it was very inspiring.”

Bikini Kill’s no-holds-barred approach sharply divided opinion. Vail recalls: “I’d known Kathleen, I wasn’t close to her before we formed the band, but I’d seen her perform and I had already observed how people reacted to her, it was always like that. People either really loved it or they were just mad at her. One of the things that she was talking about in her work was brutal sexual assault, violence against women kind of stuff...and she had a lot of anger, she was very confrontational and it is true, some people didn’t want that to be a part of their Friday night going-out-to-parties kind of thing or they would just be really weird to us. It was very strange.

“In some cases they would just be straight-up condescending, like giving us advice on how to be in a band. We were just like, we know what we’re doing, we want to sound like this. We were very intentional about what we were doing but we’d still get a lot of advice.”

The idea behind their ‘Revolution Girl Style Now’ was to ask questions, rather than provide definitive answers, Vail feels. “I was always trying to do things in a mode of enquiry, but then again, when you’re being discriminated against or are facing issues like if you had sexual assault within a punk scene which does happen, there’s going to be a lot of anger,” she says. “Sometimes that can be perceived as dogma, I think, but really I think we were more about community-building and creating a network of mutual aid and support for survivors and encouraging women to get onstage and take up space in the room.”

The band themselves ran the gauntlet onstage. Vail recalls one particular show in Cardiff ​​​​​​​when they were on tour with Huggy Bear. “Something happened and the audience was really mad​​​​​​​ and there was a death threat called in. We were backstage, I think Huggy Bear had already played and we were talking about should we cancel the show and the whole audience just started singing Rebel Girl​​​​​​​. I just went out there and started playing it and the band came on. That is very memorable.

“Things felt like a battle, where we were either going to get beat up or we were going to win the fight and the show was going to be victorious, and I think we were victorious that day.

“There were other nights where there were fights, there was actual real violence at our shows. Our roadie got completely knocked out. Somebody spit in Kathleen’s face in Boston and Laura jumped on the ground to try to stop them and the person just punched her in the face and she hit the ground. Then it turned out that the person who was hassling her had worked security at that show and he was from the hardcore scene, he was well-known.

“He ended up murdering his girlfriend shortly after that and he had just got out of jail for domestic violence and came to our show. So we were always very aware that even within the venues we might be assaulted. That did happen to Kathleen. It was brutal.”

The band’s tradition of swapping instruments during their set continues today. Initially it had been to prove a point to women within the audience, Vail says. “For me, that comes from Beat Happening, they were one of the best bands in Olympia when I first started ​​​​​​​going to shows and they were very inspiring to me and I think at least to Kathi as well​​​​​​​ in that none of them were very musically accomplished, almost deliberately so, but they could get onstage with their weird voices and their strange dancing and their sometimes goofy but very profound lyrics and create these amazing songs​​​​​​​.

“It showed to me that you don’t have to stay in your bedroom ​​​​​​​for 10 years learning how to play a guitar solo before you get up on the stag​​​​​​​e. Even if you have no musical talent whatsoever, you can still write a good song, and I still believe that firmly​​​​​​​.

“One of my favourite bands is The Lemon Twigs and their musicianship is completely next level, like Burt Bacharach, like classic level songwriters but at the smae time I still think there’s room for The Beat Happening or probably there’s someone that you know in your life that writes songs and nobody gets to hear them and that’s a shame. But ultimately the goal of that was just to get people to participate and Beat Happening did have that impact on our local scene, they got more girls playing music and I think that you can hear that influence in a lot of the Riot Grrrl bands.”

Vail credits fanzines with a vital role in fostering the Riot Grrrl scene. “Nothing would’ve happened really without the fanzines,” she says. “That’s how I met Kathleen, she read my fanzine and I read hers and that led to aconversation. I met Kathi when we were both hired on the same day in a sandwich shop for summer jobs and I don’t know if she knew that I had a fanzine but she knew that I’d been in a band and she’d probably read my fanzine. That was a way that people met each other but also that was a way that someone in San Francisco would find out about your band before you went on tour. Without the internet that just wouldn’t have happened.”

During the course of seven tumultuous years, Bikini Kill released two full-length albums, several EPs, a demo tape and a clutch of singles. Looking back, Vail feels that the end, when it came in 1997, was inevitable. “The stress was pretty hard to deny. We’re four very different people (including guitarist Billy Karren, who has not been involved in their later reunion) and being in a collective for seven years, even then we took breaks to do our own projects. It wasn’t easy, but I feel like once we played Japan was like my last goal. I think our last show was in Tokyo or Osaka but after that we came back and we were still working on new material that we never finished.

“Kathi and Kathleen also they had moved to Olympia to go to college but they didn’t necessarily want to live here, so that was another stress on the band. Kathleen quit bt they had moved away, so it wasn’t like it was going to be the same anyway. But I was ready for it to be over. It wasn’t so much that I had other bands I wanted to do, it was just we pretty much did the band. I would’ve be happy if we had made another album...but when you know that it’s probably going to be the last album it’s probably hard to follow through on. I would compare it to a marraige or a very intense family relationship, when it become dysfunctional there’s only so much you can take.

“We had a 20-year break and we’re much older and have had all kinds of life experiences, so I think our communication skills are significantly stronger.”

Today, Vail feels there is a strong bond between them. “It’s been great even just to have conversations about what we all went through because when you’re young and you’re going through that much you don’t necessarily sit there and analyse it. You’re not aware of how everyone else is experiencing the same thing completely differently​​​​​​​. If we all talk about something that happened it’s amazing to me that nobody remembers it the same wa​​​​​​​y. That’s very interesting...it’s ​​​​​​​mind-boggling.”

Bikini Kill play at O2 Academy Leeds on June 13.