Victoria "Vicky" Aspinall is a British musician. She was the violinist in the English
post-punk
Post-punk (originally called new musick) is a broad genre of punk music that emerged in the late 1970s as musicians departed from punk's traditional elements and raw simplicity, instead adopting a variety of avant-garde sensibilities and non-roc ...
band
The Raincoats
The Raincoats are a British experimental post-punk band. Ana da Silva (vocals, guitar) and Gina Birch (vocals, bass) formed the group in 1977 while they were students at Hornsey College of Art in London.
Signed to the label Rough Trade, the ...
from 1978 to 1984. In 1992 she and Dave Morgan founded the
independent
Independent or Independents may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Artist groups
* Independents (artist group), a group of modernist painters based in the New Hope, Pennsylvania, area of the United States during the early 1930s
* Independ ...
dance label Fresh Records (not the post-punk label of the same name) initially for releases of their own
Lovestation
Lovestation are a British electronic dance music group formed by Vicky Aspinall in 1989, who subsequently worked with co-producer David Morgan. Gospel singer-songwriter Lisa Hunt has also appeared on several Lovestation records. Active througho ...
project.
Biography
Aspinall is a classically trained violinist, having graduated from the
Royal College of Music
The Royal College of Music is a music school, conservatoire established by royal charter in 1882, located in South Kensington, London, UK. It offers training from the Undergraduate education, undergraduate to the Doctorate, doctoral level in a ...
, London, in the late 1970s.
She was a member of Jam Today, a part of the Women's Music Movement that developed in the late 1970s, playing a hybrid of jazz and rock similar in approach to groups like
Henry Cow
Henry Cow were an English experimental rock group, founded at the University of Cambridge in 1968 by multi-instrumentalists Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson. Henry Cow's personnel fluctuated over their decade together, but drummer Chris Cutler, b ...
.
She joined the Raincoats after she noticed an advertisement which read "female musician wanted -strength not style" in a radical bookshop Compendium in
Camden Town
Camden Town (), often shortened to Camden, is a district of northwest London, England, north of Charing Cross. Historically in Middlesex, it is the administrative centre of the London Borough of Camden, and identified in the London Plan as o ...
. She has been credited, by
Gina Birch
Gina Birch is an English musician and filmmaker, best known as a founding member of post-punk rock band, the Raincoats.
Born in Nottingham, Birch attended Nottingham High School for Girls, and later the Hornsey School of Art, where she formed ...
of The Raincoats, with making the band more aware of feminist ideas.
[''The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era'' by Helen Reddington. Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007. p.142, ] Aspinall and Birch later formed the band Dorothy which was subsequently signed by
Geoff Travis
Geoff Travis (born 2 February 1952) is the founder of both Rough Trade Records and the Rough Trade chain of record shops. A former drama teacher and owner of a punk record shop, Travis founded the Rough Trade label in 1978.
Biography
Travis wa ...
to
Chrysalis Records
Chrysalis Records () is a British record label that was founded in 1968. The name is both a reference to the pupal stage of a butterfly and a combination of its founders' names, Chris Wright and Terry Ellis. It started as the Ellis-Wright Ag ...
.
References
1950s births
Living people
English violinists
English punk rock musicians
Alumni of the Royal College of Music
The Raincoats members
Women in punk
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