Our new trio Lesbian Raincoat developed a respectable local following. Even though we’d begun by mostly performing at lesbian clubs, we were starting to gain a wider audience in the alternative community. We made extra money selling merchandise at our gigs.
Melissa had designed a logo for us, a blue raincoat, and we used it for the cover of the demo CD we recorded in Adele’s mum’s garage and Melissa’s flat—mostly in the upstairs toilet. Melissa also designed Lesbian Raincoat badges and T-shirts. Whenever she could, she came with us to our gigs and took charge of our merchandise table. We’d started making high-quality prints of some of her paintings and sold those along with the art she had made especially for Lesbian Raincoat’s posters and flyers.
By now we also had a small but efficient street team of eager young women who believed in our sound, sold our merchandise, put up posters, and helped us run our website. We called them the Fesbian Leminists after a purple T-shirt I’d had in the seventies when the words “lesbian” and “feminist” were considered so outrageous they had to be encoded. We shortened this to the Fesbians. We made them special small, dark-purple Fesbian badges. In return, they came to all our gigs for free and got free merchandise, including limited edition recordings we only made available to them. They were encouraged to post these recordings on the Internet and share them as long as they didn’t sell them. Anyone posting our music for money on eBay was done. The Fesbians hung out at some of our rehearsals, which were still taking place in Adele’s mum’s garage in the afternoons.
I was listening to a lot of Ruts, trying to achieve that sharp, resonating Paul Fox guitar sound on a number of new songs. Nick studied “Segs” Jennings’ bass playing. Sometimes we did a killer cover version of “Jah War” at our shows, and Nick and I rewrote a version of the anti-heroin song “Dope for Guns” and made it specifically about Iran-Contra. How the US smuggled arms to Iran through Israel, armed the Contras in Nicaragua, then used the supply planes to traffic cocaine into the United States.
Mostly we played in London, but sometimes on weekends we would hire a van and Melissa would drive us out to gigs in other towns. In the north we played in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Edinburgh. There was even some talk of us signing with an independent German label called Scratchella. The demo of my song “Working for the Jihad,” which I’d posted on the Internet, had recently been released in Germany on a compilation CD by a small German label, Sterben im November, and had caught the attention of the women behind Scratchella. But Scratchella wanted us to record in Germany, and I couldn’t leave the country yet. We also postponed playing in Dublin and Paris.
In the midst of all this activity, I got an email from my sister announcing she was getting married. I downloaded the attached photo of an engagement ring with a bloody great, huge, massive diamond.
“Did she tell you the name of the exploited, probably-dead African who put it on her finger?” Melissa asked dryly when I showed it to her.
“Ta for saying that. I thought I was going crazy for a minute.”
“You’re writing your congratulations, of course?”
“She wants me to come to the wedding.”
“But you can’t leave the country,” Melissa said edgily, a hint of panic in her voice.
“Don’t worry, love,” I said. “I won’t go anywhere until it’s safe.”