A catchy, energising, all-empowering, air-punching new post-punk single by the legendary Raincoats co-founder, artist, bass player and film-maker, inspired by, and name-checking heroines of art, politics and protest, heralding her forthcoming album Trouble, out on 11 July via Third Man Records.
The accompanying, highly entertaining video – directed by Birch and famed photographer/filmmaker Dean Chalkley – features an all-star collective of fellow female artists including Birch’s longtime friend and co-founder of The Raincoats, Ana da Silva, Neo Naturists co-founder Christine Binnie, singer-songwriter Amy Rigby, X-Ray Spex and Essential Logic co-founder Lora Logic, painter Daisy Parris, artist Georgina Starr, writer Jill Westwood, multi-disciplinary artist and activist Bobby Baker, award-winning costume designer Annie Symons, veteran photographer and Raincoats collaborator Shirley O’Loughlin, and many more.
Birch created this six-minute song by inviting several female artists, including experimental music pioneer Cosey Fanni Tutti and writer/painter Caroline Coon, to record themselves saying the names of women who have inspired them – women who have indeed “caused trouble.”
“For the ‘Causing Trouble Again’ video, after hearing Bob Dylan sing about a white ladder all covered with water, I became obsessed with white ladders,” Gina Birch says. “I decided to use five white ladders, three with seven rungs… I realized later that this references Jacob’s Ladder and a connection from Earth to Heaven, but I think I was thinking of ladders as a symbol of getting on, getting up. I wanted to have a choreographed movement with four of us with these ladders. How do we move with ladders? Do we move together, do we fight, do we dance?
“I also wanted to reference the wind scene from the film, The Colour of Pomegranates, and to include as many artist women from the Women in Revolt exhibition as I could. I wanted them to be troublesome, or just to shout ‘Causing trouble!’ I ended up inviting all the artist musician women I knew who could make the shoot, and it was a fantastic meeting of great women, many of whom had never met each other before.”
Causing Trouble Again was inspired by 2024’s Women in Revolt, an exhibition of feminist art and activism at Tate Britain which included one of Birch’s most recognized art pieces, 1977’s 3-Minute Scream, a landmark short film in which she stares down the camera and, as the title suggests, screams for the duration of a Super 8 cartridge. To explore and enjoy more by Gina Birch, see also the other embedded links below.
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