1997: The Headcoatees, Punk Girls

By Jennifer Whiteford

I had not yet discovered Thee Headcoatees when the Punk Girls record was released in 1997. 

In 1997 I was driving a UHaul across Ontario with my friend Dan, listening to Bikini Kill’s Reject All American on repeat. I was twenty-two years old and my curious end-of-high-school interest in punk had been quashed by three years at college where my classmates slid Ani Difranco CDs under my dorm room door with post it notes that said “THIS WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE.” 

Ani Difranco did not change my life. I don’t begrudge anyone whose life she did change, but my life remained the same before and after spinning those CDs on the stereo balanced precariously on the windowsill in my tiny campus bedroom. But I was freaked out and depressed and away from home for the first time and desperate to find an identity in this weird, semi-rural university town. So I pretended. I told the women who I wanted to be friends with that I loved those CDs and then bought a lot of earnest late ‘90s folk albums at the under-stocked Music World store in the local mall. I cheered when I recognized those songs being played on acoustic guitars at open mic nights in various university pubs. I did my best to fit in. 

But when Dan slid that Bikini Kill CD into the player in the cab of our rental cube van, as we drove away from that university town for the last time, it shook something loose in me. I thought about my past self, a teenager who listened to Sonic Youth or Violent Femmes on her Walkman while grumpily walking through the Toronto suburbs on the way to school. The kid who was just beginning to figure out what made the B52s so cool and who was getting curious about the bands in Sassy Magazine’s “Cute Band Alert”. (If you know, you know.) 

I wouldn’t have called any of that “punk” at the time. I was a shy, awkward teenage girl who wouldn’t have ever considered myself cool enough to go see any band billed as ‘punk’. I liked weird, goofy bands spawned at liberal art colleges. I was afraid of the boys I saw on the subway with spiked belts and mohawks. I didn’t realize that the definition of punk was broad enough to encompass so many of the things I already liked. I didn’t realize there were other ways in. 

So no, I was not listening to Thee Headcoatees in 1997 but at least I was finally listening to Bikini Kill. And Bikini Kill was listening to Thee Headcoatees. I know this because when I started reading about the band, I encountered Kathleen Hanna’s story about being on tour with Bikini Kill, happening upon a Headcoatees show and becoming an instant fan. She called them “the fucking coolest looking girls in the whole universe”. This was a different kind of “cool” than those punks on the subway. This was a cool I could understand.

Three years after that ride in the cube van, I somehow scrounged together enough money to make a pilgrimage to Olympia, Washington for the first Ladyfest. On the last night of shows, Sleater Kinney finished their set and throngs of fans left the theater not caring to stick around for the final act. I watched musicians from all of my favorite bands, including members of Bikini Kill, run to the floor in front of the stage to watch a woman from some band called Thee Headcoatees play a set. 

Holly Golightly had been originally scheduled to play her solo set before Sleater Kinney capped off the Saturday night show. If her band hadn’t fallen victim to a scheduling mix up, she would have played to a theater teeming with young music fans, a captive audience happy to watch whoever played while they held their spots in the general-admission area, waiting for the beloved headliners. Instead, she took the stage when the theater was almost empty. 

Golightly appeared before us, clearly irritated by the circumstances of her day. With her face set into a scowl, she turned to check that her band was ready, and then counted them into a blistering version of her song, “No Big Thing.” The small-time crowd went big-time bananas. For the rest of the set, I watched with my eyes wide, dancing along with the other women in the crowd, blown away by one of the coolest sets of garage punk I’d ever seen in my life. 

Back home in Ottawa, Ontario, I was lucky enough to patronize Birdman Sound, a record shop with a dizzying selection of bluesy garage punk. When I walked into Birdman, fresh from my adventures in Olympia, the owner, John, was delighted to provide me with a brief history lesson about the British Medway scene that spawned Thee Headcoats and, more importantly to me, their sister band. The first album I bought from him was the 1997 Punk Girls LP. 

It wasn’t clear from looking at, or listening to, this record that it had come out a mere three years previously. It is an album that is almost impossible to place in a specific time period, with covers of songs by The Ramones, The Beatles, and Plastic Bertrand mixed in with original garage punk tunes. It is alternately goofy and hostile, and very fun to listen to. What grabbed me at first listen was Kyra LaRubia’s scream towards the end of the first track. It remains one of my favorite screams on record. As soon as I heard that scream, I was ready for whatever the rest of the tracks had to offer. Love at first scream. 

While Thee Headcoatees were recording and touring to support Punk Girls in 1997, punk was breaking in North America in a way that had little in common with the Medway scene. Blink 182, NOFX, and Green Day were all top sellers that year in the U.S. For most of the friends I met later through the indie punk scene, these were the records that pulled them into the genre. I felt like I had somehow done it “wrong” — coming to the scene through scrappy, lo-fi, female-fronted bands. But albums like Punk Girls spoke to me on a level that no Blink 182 song ever would. It felt like this was the punk music I’d been looking for, made for fans like me who wanted something on the turntable that came with a wink and a sneer. The cleverness and ferocity of the album brought me intense joy the first time I heard it, and still is in heavy rotation two decades later. 

In 2009, after years of collecting Thee Headcoatees records and as many of the band members’ side projects as possible, I interviewed Golightly and her bandmate Lawyer Dave for Razorcake Magazine. I took a bus to Montreal and met up with them after the soundcheck for their show that night. I was painfully nervous about the whole thing; I’d been prepping questions and psyching myself up for weeks prior. It was a real battle to maintain a cool and slightly detached journalistic air. 

They wanted to eat while we talked, so we set off walking along the streets of Montreal trying to find a restaurant near the venue. I was still fighting to stay calm. We passed a restaurant with brightly colored signage and they stopped to consider it. 

“Oh no.” Lawyer Dave shook his head. “It’s a vegan restaurant.” 

“Oh.” Golightly was disappointed. She turned to me. “You’re not a vegan are you?” The sneering attitude was the same one I’d admired on recordings, when it was directed at no-good exes and catty gossips. Finding myself confronted with it face to face was mildly terrifying. 

“No, ma’am.” I shook my head, emphatically. 

I’ve been vegan since 1995, but whatever. I wasn’t hungry. 

Eventually we found a meat-filled restaurant and sat down. My heart rate finally slowed as we worked through my prepared questions. What I wanted the most was to hear about Thee Headcoatees, but I wasn’t going to push. Not everyone wants to talk about the past. 

As the conversation rambled along different paths, we eventually found our way to the Medway scene and Golightly, now relaxed and more friendly, launched into a series of stories about touring and recording with Thee Headcoatees including some very frank details about the eventual falling apart of the band. By the time they were recording Punk Girls, according to Golightly’s timeline, the band members were already not getting along. She’d been working on solo projects, and she only ended up as the lead vocalist on two of the album’s twelve tracks. 

The part of that conversation that has stuck with me over the years, was Golightly’s comment that when Thee Headcoatees played with Thee Headcoats or other all-male bands, the audience was always ready for some fun when the four women singing catchy, sassy garage punk took the stage. Their energy as a band seemed to create a bubble that kept away some of the negative experiences of those shows — the fights, the drunken mishaps, the internal gripes. I’ve seen Golightly play solo a few times now, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing that I could have been in the audience at least once when Thee Headcoatees were all together causing a riot of fun in a grungy English club somewhere. 

This band of women creating music in a space that seemed untouched by elements beyond themselves and their cozy scene very much parallels my own experience with punk in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Insulated from the Blink 182s and NOFXs of the world, I moved into punk fandom through the insulated tunnel of Riot Grrrl. I was able to broaden my experience with punk from that safe starting place. A place where women were on stage playing music and, if only for a few moments, welcoming everyone into a world full of grit and warmth and joy. 

Jennifer Whiteford is the author of the novel “Grrrl” and a regular contributor to Razorcake Magazine.  She lives in Ottawa, Ontario with her partner, children, dog, and record collection. Her latest novel “Make Me a Mixtape” is currently on submission to publishers.

Twitter: @jenniferw613 // Instagram: @Jenniferwhitefordwrites