Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna discusses getting the band back together and back on the road

March 2020: The band Bikini Kill was in Portland rehearsing for a world tour, which would kick off in Seattle following a successful run of reunion shows the previous year.

You know what happened next.

The tour crumbled, slowly at first as COVID-19 revealed itself to be a serious threat, and then everything all at once got shut down. Two years later, singer Kathleen Hanna laughs as she recalls that moment.

“Seattle was like the epicenter at the time,” says Hanna from the Pasadena home she shares with husband Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz of the Beastie Boys, where she’s preparing for the reboot of the Bikini Kill tour as well as the revival of a second group, Le Tigre, too. “It was called off a day and a half before.

“It’s such a strange kind of Groundhog Day feeling to be, you know, getting ready to pack the same costumes in the same suitcase,” she says. “Again.”

But so far, all looks good. Bikini Kill, after a warm-up show at Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown on Tuesday, April 26, formally relaunch its tour at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on Friday, April 29.

The band formed in Olympia, Washington in 1990 and is credited with sparking the riot grrrl scene, which combined punk rock, feminism, and politics into a kind of movement in the ’90s. By 1997, however, Bikini Kill was over.

Until 20 years later, when Hanna was enticed to join drummer Tobi Vail and bassist Kathi Wilcox for a once-off performance in New York City in 2017.

Hanna says she had been ambivalent about doing anything more with Bikini Kill. But she returned home excited to spend more time with these two women.

“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. “Like I just wanted to be with them because it felt really kind of – I mean, this sounds corny – but it felt really healing.

“And there was a lot of unfinished business in our band.”

Remember your Raincoats

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. Almost on a whim, they invited Hanna to join them.

“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. “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?’”

And so they did, though at first, Hanna says she wasn’t sure she wanted to do it. It was all the way across the country, and it had been so long since Bikini Kill had done anything.

“I was just kind of like, ‘It feels weird,’” Hanna says. “But then I was like, ‘It’s the (bleeping) Raincoats,’ and I’m going to get to see the Raincoats.

“I was like, ‘If this gets me into the show for free, let’s do it.’”

Shared history

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. (Erica Dawn Lyle is the band’s current guitarist.)

“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.’

“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. “We have such a large shared history. We went through so much together, and while it was happening, we weren’t really able to talk about it to each other.”

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.

“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. “And they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that was in Sweden.’

“Just like weird things, the memories that you have, where you’re like, ‘Did that really happen?’” she says. “And you’re with these people who were like, ‘Oh, yeah, that really happened.’”

Feminists vs ‘pig men’

During 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.

“It was a very weird band to be in,” Hanna says. “Because on the one hand, you’ve got three rows of girls singing every word like they wrote it themselves. 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.

“And you’re just like, ‘What’s happening?’” she says.

Male bands and their crews often weren’t much better. Club owners and their staff would often ignore their requests for everything from water in the dressing room to sound checks.

Hanna says she still hears stories from young women in music today of similarly abusive behavior.

“People literally a lot of times treat female musicians as if they just are not real,” she says. “Like it’s not even a real show.

“We’re not getting that with Bikini Kill because we’re older and more established,” Hanna says. “But I know that these things still go on.”

Some things have improved, though, she says. The #MeToo movement has taken small steps toward making the music industry a little bit safer for women in it.

“Women in music are standing up and saying this happened to me, and calling out male artists and all that stuff,” Hanna says. “I could write a whole book about #MeToo experiences. I’m not, but it’s great to see women speaking out.

“It’s been really inspiring for me to see young women saying, ‘This happened to me,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, something similar happened to me in my 20s, too, and I just kind of took the blame or thought it was natural.

“I didn’t know that stuff was wrong,” Hanna says. “I was like, ‘This is the price of admission.’”

Role models and dogs

When Bikini Kill in 2019 played its first full shows in more than two decades, the response was overwhelmingly positive.

“If anything, people were singing a little too loud, so I couldn’t hear myself,” Hanna says, laughing. “Which is not a bad problem to have.”

As for those who see her and Bikini Kill as their role models, Hanna says she understands and appreciates their feelings.

“I’m happy I got to be there for you, or my music was there for you at a time when you needed me,” says Hanna, who arranged for her early role models, the Canadian band Mecca Normal, to open some shows on this tour. “But it was all you. You brought meaning to us.”

It can be disorienting to be the subject of such devotion or admiration, she adds, so she works to keep a level head about it all.

“That’s why I try to spend a lot of time with dogs. Because they do not give a (bleep),” says Hanna. “They’re just like, ‘Feed me, walk me, cuddle me.’

“They’re not like, ‘Ooh, you changed my life,’” she says. “If my dog said that to me I’d be like, ‘Oh my god, I’m in hell.’”