Club owners and their staff would often ignore their requests for everything from water in the dressing room to sound checks. Male bands and their crews often weren’t much better. “And you’re just like, ‘What’s happening?’” she says. And then behind them, you have these (bleeping) pig men who are trying to kill you and yelling, ‘Show us your (bodies)! Shut up and play!’ and throwing stuff at you. “Because on the one hand, you’ve got three rows of girls singing every word like they wrote it themselves. “It was a very weird band to be in,” Hanna says. “And you’re with these people who were like, ‘Oh, yeah, that really happened.’”ĭuring its first run, Bikini Kill often played shows where the audiences were split between the young women who loved them for their feminist lyrics and hard-edged punk music, and men who taunted them for the same things. “Just like weird things, the memories that you have, where you’re like, ‘Did that really happen?’” she says. “And they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that was in Sweden.’ “You’re able to go, ‘Do you remember that time that I got pulled off the stage by my ankles? Where was that?’” Hanna says. Now, though, they realized that only they could fully appreciate what it had been like in the tour vans and grungy punk clubs of Bikini Kill’s youth. We went through so much together, and while it was happening, we weren’t really able to talk about it to each other.” “And all kind of things that were dramas and personality impediments, they just kind of seemed to drop away, and our shared history stood in front of them,” she says. “It felt different, it felt better,” Hanna says of the Raincoats event, for which they played the Bikini Kill song “For Tammy Rae.” “It felt like we’d grown up, in a cool way, not in a way of like, ‘We don’t care about anything new.’ (Erica Dawn Lyle is the band’s current guitarist.) The band, minus founding guitarist Billy Karren, had fun that night, Hanna says, maybe more than they’d had in the ’90s when touring for a feminist punk band wasn’t always much fun at all. “I was like, ‘If this gets me into the show for free, let’s do it.’” “But then I was like, ‘It’s the (bleeping) Raincoats,’ and I’m going to get to see the Raincoats. “I was just kind of like, ‘It feels weird,’” Hanna says. It was all the way across the country, and it had been so long since Bikini Kill had done anything. “And then Kathi – I’m sure it was Kathi, because she’s like the secret, stealth, make-things-happen person – was just like, ‘Hmm, what if we did a Bikini Kill song and asked Kathleen?’”Īnd so they did, though at first, Hanna says she wasn’t sure she wanted to do it. “Tobi has a lot of solo material, so she was going to do one of her songs, and Kathi was going to play with her,” Hanna says. Almost on a whim, they invited Hanna to join them. Hanna says that the writer Jenn Pelly had written a book about the British post-punk band the Raincoats, and Wilcox and Vail had been lined up to perform for the book release party. “And there was a lot of unfinished business in our band.” “Like I just wanted to be with them because it felt really kind of – I mean, this sounds corny – but it felt really healing. “It was almost more about hanging out at first than the music,” Hanna says of the reunion that led to a brief tour, with three nights at the Palladium in Hollywood, in 2019. But she returned home excited to spend more time with these two women. Hanna says she had been ambivalent about doing anything more with Bikini Kill.
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