I found these photos on eBay with details about how it’s is a rare find etc. Price: $7
Cardboard Box House of Love 7″
Mecca Normal
a r c h i v e
Argentina’s Radio Gulp interview with Jean Smith
RADIO GULP in Argentina just posted a giant (print) interview with me. Google will translate.
My original answers and photos are on my artist site.
Brave New Waves
A piece in the Feb 1, 2024 Exclaim article about the seminal radio show Brave New Waves includes the phrase “sleek indie rockers like Stereolab and Mecca Normal”.
In reality, no one would ever call us “sleek” and the term “indie rocker” hadn’t been invented when we did most of our interviews and live-to-airs on Brave New Waves. Let alone we’re not indie rockers.
40 Years Later, ‘Brave New Waves’ Still Reverberates Through Canadian Underground Music
How the CBC’s way to fill dead air became a beacon for boundary-pushing sounds
BY DANIEL SYLVESTERPUBLISHED FEB 1, 2024
“Promised You a Miracle is perhaps the most ideal yet unexpected soundtrack to start a revolution. On the one hand, it’s a miracle that two public radio employees could push through 35 hours a week of challenging and subversive programming during the era of Mulroney, Reagan and Thatcher; on the other, the UK hit from Simple Minds that heralded the arrival of CBC’s new late-night lineup didn’t do justice to the cutting-edge and avant-garde radio that would define its next two decades.”
Find the entire piece here.
First airing this month in 1984, we share the 40 year anniversary with Brave New Waves, but didn’t appear on the show until 1986 after we released our first LP. I recall being extremely nervous sitting in the basement of the CBC building in Montreal, waiting to go live across Canada (and some of the northern USA).
Released in 2019, the live album (1996 in Montreal) was originally recorded by Brave New Waves for future broadcast. A snippet of that first interview is included on the album.
1996, Peter Jefferies (drums), Jean Smith, Patti Schmidt (host of CBC Radio’s Brave New Waves) and David Lester in Montreal for the Mecca Normal show that was released as a live album in 2019 in the Brave New Waves series.
Melody Maker
1995, London
The reviewer says it’s our first-ever British date, but we’d already toured and played a bunch of shows in 1989 or so. He wrote a review of “Sitting on Snaps” for Melody Maker around the same time.
Melody Maker
“Why have we been deprived of this for so long?” Melody Maker, 1995
Melody Maker
April 15, 1995
Rolling Stone
The 200 Best Songs of The 1980s
by Rob Sheffield, November 23, 2023
#189: Mecca Normal, ‘I Walk Alone’ 1987
“An early proto-riot-grrrl pipe bomb. The only sound is the voice of punk poet Jean Smith, with the guitar of David Lester, about a woman walking by herself in a city and feeling like a target everywhere she goes. Every time she sings “I walk alone,” it hits deeper. A song designed to change the way you saw the world around you, and for many who heard it, it did and still does.”
KCRW 1997
From the KCRW web page: “If Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine had demented younger siblings, they would be the Vancouver duo known as Mecca Normal. Their work is never less than astonishing – jagged guitar sounds matched with a vocal performance as barbed and potent as the lyrics it delivers.”
Hosted by Tricia Halloran
I’m not sure what we were doing in LA in December. We didn’t usually tour in the winter months. Regardless, we were, and “Who Shot Elvis?” was the album we were performing songs from on a visit to KCRW in Santa Monica on December 3, 1997.
The sound quality is pretty bad. The engineer added reverb to my voice even though, no doubt, I instructed him not to. I say him because I highly doubt it would have been a woman. There is also significant damage to the original recording due to its age, I suppose.
Listening to the introduction to the first song, the title track, it’s interesting to note that I’m talking about what we now refer to as misinformation in terms of history and historical events.
Who Shot Elvis? (Matador Records, 1997 and Smarten UP! Records, 2006)
Fugazi
September 24, 1993
“30 years ago today …. Mecca Normal played one of its most memorable shows, with Fugazi and Jawbox at Roseland Ballroom in New York in front of 3,500 people. Fugazi had recently released “In on the Kill Taker” album, which had sold a 180,000 in one week. The ticket price was a remarkable $5.
FYI: Roseland was converted from an skating rink to a music venue in 1958.” – David Lester
“I’m grateful to remember so much about this night (like Ian offering to fetch us beer for the stage because the place was so packed we couldn’t have gotten to the bar and back in time for our set… didn’t he go out into the alley, in the front entrance, to the bar and back via the same? …awfully decent of him, considering he’s a non-drinker) and our other adventures! I couldn’t have conjured up a better person to do all this with! David… not Ian.
It was a thrill to play with Fugazi in Vancouver, Seattle, Olympia and NYC!” – Jean Smith
The Raincoats
This starts with me emailing Dave, then the piece in question, which I’m posting here, rather than waiting for a book to come out and seeing three of my sentences… lol…
A woman writing a book on The Raincoats messaged me, saying Slim had sent her my way after telling her that I included their songs on a mix tape (cira 1987… lol)
She wrote the book “I Thought I Heard You Speak: Women at Factory Records”.
When I tried to squirm out of a phone interview, she thought it was because I didn’t remember things… lol… so, I wrote this… I might also talk to her.
…
Oh, I remember it all, it’s just that my introduction to them came from Mecca Normal guitar-player David Lester, as opposed to the Olympia musicians who later became our friends. It might be worth noting that those friends are about 10 years younger than we are.
I believe David became aware of them because he lived in a squat in London around the time The Raincoats were active. He saw them play a Rock Against Sexism gig.
Here’s where it seems to have become too specific a story. I was in my mid-20s in the mid-80s, catching up with an array of bands that I hadn’t been exposed to earlier due to living a somewhat more conventional life that included more Elvis Costello than punk.
David had an excellent grasp of feminism. He was very interested in the intersection of culture and social philosophies. Lucky for me, he introduced me to albums and singles by a lot of women-fronted UK bands. CRASS, Au Pairs, Poison Girls, X-Ray Spex, The Slits, of which, I’d say I gravitated more to X-Ray Spex and Au Pairs, likely because the musicality was more familiar and accessible. Having said that, the intensity they achieved made the idea of writing and performing songs more daunting because, like most bands with fairly conventional structures and arrangements, the different sounds the instruments make fit together in a way that creates an overarching phenomenon that can be difficult to deconstruct and replicate. At least, that’s how I felt.
Last night, I was watching a recent interview with Jagger, Richards and Wood who were answering questions from the audience. Keith said “Gimme Shelter” was probably his favorite Stones song. It’s mine too, but let’s say you were going to quickly pack that song into a ball the way you’d make a snowball, and roll it down a hill. Now imagine doing the same thing with “No Side to Fall In” with all its clacking, angular bits poking out. It would be pretty obvious as you were handling it, that it was not going to go down the hill in the same way as the Rolling Stones’ song.
“Gimme Shelter” is like photo realism, feeding back to us what we already know. Already knew, even when it was released in 1969. All guys, of course, except for the rather incredible inclusion of Merry Clayton, who was a total stranger they phoned out of the blue in the middle of the night to run down and record. Totally disrespectful. Not to mention how much she put into her performance and what it cost her.
I grew up in a mid-century modern house listening to the jazz that my abstract-painter parents played on the hi-fi. In art, photo realism was openly mocked. Actually, almost everything conventional was a target for my dad’s acerbic commentary. Religion, country music, the neighbors. That is to say, I wasn’t busting out of some sort of rigid conformity that I’d been steeped in. In my early teens, I was into Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple more than softer genres.
By my late teens, once I’d left home, I guess I wanted the jazz I’d left behind. Inspired by Lester Young, I bought an alto sax when I was about 21. I made some charts to learn the notes, but quickly decided it was best to work on the sounds possible within the best sounding notes. It was important to recognize my disinterest in what it would really entail to get to proper playing. I was, at that time, a painter with a full time job in newspaper production. Making music was daunting.
The Raincoats entered my awareness around 23 or so, around the time I was starting to write songs with David. I got the impression the elements of their songs were not set in stone, which is a strange thought coming from a jazz-saturated background, where one of most fluid of forms tended to sound tightly constructed. Getting the feeling that a Raincoats’ song was a recording of that particular version of events made an impact on me. The same would be true for jazz, but it didn’t always strike me that way. Maybe you can hear if the horn player is on or not, but The Raincoats felt more responsive to each other as things were happening. Co-habitating within the song seemed to be the point, whereas maybe jazz is more about reaching wilder and more dizzying heights, setting oneself apart in a solo, the way guys like to.
Listening to The Raincoats freed me from many previously-held limitations. That they were women made that freedom tangible. Visceral. I could hear their like-minded affinities and encouragement, yet their approaches were all very different. They seemed to be functioning based on working fully with what they had at hand, giving it everything in terms of creativity, confidence and vulnerability.
Let’s put it this way, I’d be very surprised if they ever phoned a very pregnant woman in the middle of the night and urged her to come and record some special part that intended to make their song better. Better meaning that more people would like and more sales. Not to mention pushing her to repeat the part until her voice cracked under the strain and then they were then satisfied that they’d got everything from her. Leaving race and the loss of her unborn child out of things.
Sure, I love the Rolling Stones and that song, but in a week following Rolling Stone Magazine co-founder Jann Wenner’s comments about Blacks and women not possessing a high enough intellect for him to interview for a book called “The Masters” it seems important to contribute a bit of a vignette on how The Raincoats allowed me to take inspiration, to build and maintain confidence, and some years later, to inspire the co-founders of Riot Grrrl, along with The Raincoats and all those other women-fronted and all-women bands that energized a social movement that, to this day, still shows signs of being ongoing as opposed to over, in the way that rock historians like to nail things down.
Obviously, Wenner would not have any interest in talking about any of this. His interest is in male rock that both celebrates and perpetuates the patriarchy, whereas The Raincoats’ songs are fuel in the ongoing rejection of that very same sexism. Those of us who aren’t white males, fuse creativity and intellectual philosophies to overthrow our oppressors. This activity will of course be diminished and ignored by said oppressors, but it will continue to go on in plain sight. It reminds me of how quilts were made to disseminate information to fleeing slaves. Quilts with specific patterns were hung in open windows and clotheslines, apparently to be aired out or dried, meanwhile they were giving directions and warnings to travelers.
It was a total thrill when Gina and Ana came to a Mecca Normal show in London. I recall talking to them like they were old friends, not rock stars. It was almost weird in that way. Years later, Gina bought 5 of my paintings that I sell on Facebook, one of which was of her! It’s also a thrill when Ana “likes” my paintings.
That they have integrated with music scenes after their original time makes it seem like there are fewer unnecessary boundaries that they or we (in subsequent scenes) have to follow and protect. Their impact transcends those initial songs, showing others that there is much to be done and experienced beyond youthful enthusiasm.
As Gina said not that many years ago in a BBC documentary about punk, “Now is the time of the older woman.” Not caving in and disappearing from the cultural landscape has a profound impact on those always grappling with the various ages that Gina has already been.
Mecca Normal 