Katie Gately on the Inspirational Power of Post-Punk

Ever since coming to Los Angeles to study sound design for film production, Katie Gately has been on an upward curve. An obsessive sound recordist who takes every opportunity to capture the noises she hears around her, Gately soon tired of film work and began to devote her time to music-making.

She made her musical debut in 2013 with a cassette for Blue Tapes created entirely using chopped and manipulated homemade sound recordings, before delivering a series of acclaimed experimental releases for Public Information, Fat Cat Split Series and FET Press. Her work caught the ear of Björk, who asked her to remix “Family” in 2015.

Gately signed to Tri Angle Records in 2016 to release her debut album, Color. A musical progression that saw her mine pop and electronica influences as much as her beloved sound design and field recordings, the album was notable for embracing the subversive, no-holds-barred ethos of post-punk.

In this edited excerpt from her Headphone Highlights with Frosty on Red Bull Radio, Gately runs down her ten favorite post-punk songs, explaining the empowering nature of female bands and the inspiration she took from the scene’s “subversive,” anything-goes ethos.

Post-punk was the gateway drug for me into a lifetime of music addiction. What I love about it was that it threw all convention on its head: the way the instruments were used, the bass being louder than the guitar and different influences, such as dub. It was also more intellectual than punk because people seemed to be referencing the fact that they read books.

At the same time there were so many women that suddenly were forming bands and playing all the instruments, which wasn’t common before punk. On top of that, they were singing in these husky, powerful voices and they were taking no prisoners. This whole time period was very inspiring to me all around.

In terms of my own aesthetics and my own music, I think the instrumentation’s wildly different [to post-punk], but I started making music in defiance against traditional film soundtracks. In film the voice is the most important element – the sound effects are spread out and the sound is submissive to picture. In post-punk the voice is important, but the bass could be just as loud and the guitar, which is typically like the sort of sexy leader of the band, is thrown to the side. It was a very defiant period in music and that resonates with me.

It’s the essence or spirit of it that resonates so much. I like to hope that some of the fearlessness and experimentation comes through, because it has certainly influenced me. I listen to this music more than any other kind of music, so I know it must in some way

I think sometimes the percussion gets quite metallic and noisy on some of these records and that definitely has influenced me. A lot of the women singing on these songs have directly influenced me because I feel like they sang just to please themselves – it was not about a high, pretty soprano. I’d love to be able to write basslines this good, but I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen.

This was recorded at This Heat’s first John Peel session in 1977. I started to look for this band because I had this incredible teacher in my freshman year at college who said, “You need to listen to This Heat.” His name is Theo Cateforis. He taught a popular music class and has written books, including one about new wave called Are We Not New Wave? I ultimately did an independent study with him on post-punk. We did a radio show together in college – it was hilarious. Him and his wife were the coolest people I’d ever met.

He had introduced me to Joy Division and other bands, and I thought, “Oh, This Heat, that’s a cool name.” This was the first song I heard by them, and I was floored. I couldn’t believe that this kind of music was ever made. It was just so off the wall, unhinged but with such conviction. It’s one of my favorite songs ever.

This was on their second LP out in 1981. I originally heard their first record, Entertainment, [and] I loved it, but when I heard this record it excited me. There was something about the spaciousness of the record, the really heavy bass and the danceability of the songs. It was funkier. This song has this stilted beginning and then it almost falls into itself, like the rhythm has to happen. It’s like gravity pulls you into it.

I don’t really know what the vocals are about. I know they are a political band, but for me it was the aesthetics of what they were doing, with the guitar sounding like this strangled cat, the bass leading the way and the catchiness of the lyrics. It was like nothing I had ever heard before. It was this perfect balance of fun and headiness. This closes out the album and I think it’s one of their best songs.

This opens the album and starts off with this creepy, bug-like sound. For years I didn’t know what it was and so I looked it up. It’s the sound of someone’s wristwatch with, like, a bunch of delays on it. Then Martin Atkins starts drumming and it’s like the biggest, craziest drums I’ve ever heard. Whoever was the engineer did an amazing job. John Lydon’s lyrics and singing are so alienated, funny and unfiltered, and the guitar parts are just like noise strands traveling through the stereo image. I don’t think there’s bass on the song – just drums, vocals, guitars and weird effects. It’s an incredible album opener and definitely the best drums I’ve heard.

Everything about Public Image Ltd. just turned me on because when I first heard them I was expecting something like the Sex Pistols. Then I heard this record and thought, “How in the space of a few years does someone make such a [musical] shift?” The fact that major labels put out music like this is so incredible to me. I guess it was a different time, but there is literally nothing commercial about any of their first few records. They’re just insane. They went into the studio and improvised. There was no planning but it was incredible, it totally works.

I love the way a lot of songs by Wire start simple and you think they’re just going to chug along, but then something very unpredictable happens. In this song the rhythm and the guitar and the beat pretty much stay the same, but the vocals go from being sort of monotone at a normal level, to insane cackling like someone’s drowning in a bathroom somewhere. The contrast between the steadiness of the beat and the unhinged vocals is so wonderful. I love everything Colin Newman did, really beyond Wire, but this record is my favorite record by them.

I love this song because the verses are very stilted and serious, and then the chorus is very catchy. It almost sounds like two songs placed together, but the transition fully works. I feel like their records were so diverse. Some of it was super playful and joyous and some was more serious.

It wasn’t until later I found out that this song is, I think, about a case during the time [the album was being made] of a military guy who raped someone and then got away with it because the military brushed it under the rug. It’s a very political song and yet so catchy. That’s so hard to do. I can only think of maybe ten songs off the top of my head that do that really well and this is one. I don’t know how political the Raincoats felt themselves to be, but this song has always stuck with me for being able to be serious and intense, but still fun. The percussion in particular is incredible. It’s all over the place.

LiLiPUT is probably my favorite female band of all time. I remember looking them up and they all had short hair and were wearing pants. I was very much a tomboy as a young girl and didn’t see a lot of female musicians who were like, “I’m wearing what’s comfortable, not what you think looks good.” There’s some cool music videos of them online and they’re not really doing any kind of performance, just the song. They seem like they were the coolest people. I wish I could have been a teenager when they were teenagers.

I love this song so much because the vocals sound like farm animals. The vocals are all over the place: they’re layered, they’re panned crazy, I don’t know how much they were written. There’s a little bit of a guitar but it’s kind of off to the right and it’s acting percussively. The bass and the drums are much more the focal point. In the second half there’s a catchy line that’s repeated over and over. It kind of feels like it predates what Frank Black was doing in the Pixies. They’re definitely one of my favorite bands.

This is a band that I discovered on my own while trying to find more music from this period. They weren’t a band I had heard or read a lot about and they’re brilliant. This song in particular has four sections that feel like tangents that are somehow connected. Like this dark piano stuff, then this almost out of time chorus stuff, and then the end is like a folk song. It’s all over the place. I just love the kind of balls it takes to make a song that’s basically four or five different kinds of songs put together.

I think the Passage had a mildly successful hit song, but this record by them stuck out to me more. It is dark and fun at the same time, a lot like all of these other bands. I think they deserve more of a shout out – they were really incredible. Dick Witts, who founded the band, is now a musicologist in the UK. He was professionally trained as a percussionist even though the percussion is so weird on their songs.

I believe this was just a single that they put out on their DIY label. When I first heard it I thought the vocals and the guitar were from two different songs and someone had just edited it together. It sounds so disjointed. Then I looked it up and the guitarist and the vocalist are the same person, so I was like, “Oh, someone’s brain did this on purpose. I can’t believe it!” I’ve still never heard anything else like this. I never really got into the rest of their music because they became much more of a straightforward pop act.

Some people consider this to be one of the first post-punk songs. Whereas with some other songs the chorus and the verse contrast, this is contrast all the way through. It’s like angular dissonant guitar, then this very seductive kind of pop star voice and a groove that feels like reggae. I don’t know what it is, but when I first heard it I couldn’t believe somebody had made it. The only way I could come up with something so wonderfully disjointed is to just randomly put things together.

The Au Pairs were probably the first female band I discovered from this time period. I totally fell in love with the lead singer Lesley [Woods], whose voice sounded like a male tenor. It was so low and she sounded very bossy and intimidating, which she had a reputation for being. The lyrics always seemed to challenge being put in a box and gender norms. She was, I think, one of the earliest openly lesbian people in a band.

This track in particular I love because it’s super danceable, super political, and then in the second half it’s like a jazz freak-out with shouting and screaming – blood-curdling screaming over crazy woodwind and brass instruments. At the end she just screams, “Shut up!” I discovered this at 18 and it blew my mind, because the stuff I was hearing at that age was easily accessible music that was not subversive in any way. This still sounds subversive today.

I think I discovered Bush Tetras the same day I discovered the Au Pairs. They had similarly powerful female vocals and they had great basslines and great grooves. This song in particular I love because I think it’s halfway into the song when the vocals come in. I love it when songs do that, when they let the vocals leave early or arrive late. They’re the only band from New York or the USA on this list, I think and I don’t know why that is. I grew up in New York and in the summer that I first discovered this band I would walk over the Brooklyn Bridge listening to them, just thinking about how they had been in the same space.

I love the dagger-like guitar sound used by this band. I think the lineup of the band may have changed a bit, but the vocalist has always been this woman called Cynthia Sley. She just had this great, seemingly improvised, kind of monotonous [hybrid of] talk and singing. She was always between talking and singing. They’re a really distinct band. The compilation Boom In The Night (Original Studio Recordings 1980-83), featuring a lot of their early stuff, is one of my favorite records.