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Gina Birch has been creating punk art her entire life—but she’s just getting started. What could be more hardcore than dropping your first solo album at 67? She became a legend with the Raincoats, the London punk band she started in 1977, four renegade women inventing their own kind of racket. But she’s got that same rebel spirit on her new solo debut I Play My Bass Loud, on Jack White’s Third Man Records. It’s a statement of purpose, and one of the year’s freshest, funniest rock albums so far.

Celeste Bell on her film with Paul Sng, Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché: “What we set out to do is address universal themes that we can all relate to, whether you’re a fan of X-Ray Spex, Poly Styrene, punk music or even interested in music at all …” Photo: BBC Arena

Celeste Bell and Paul Sng’s Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché (BIFA Best Independent Documentary and Discovery Award winner), co-written with Zoë Howe, with Poly voiced by Ruth Negga (Rebecca Hall’s Passing and Oscar nominated for Jeff Nichols’ Loving) features some of the most creative talent of the late Seventies, early Eighties London, including X-Ray Spex members Paul Dean and Lora Logic; Neneh Cherry, Don Letts, Pauline Black, Vivien Goldman, Ana Da Silva, Gina Birch, Thurston Moore, Youth, and Vivienne Westwood sharing their remembrances of Poly Styrene off-camera, while we see brilliantly chosen and socially...

Vivien Goldman was a pioneering London punk journalist in the 1970s, covering bands like the Slits and the Raincoats, dabbling in music with her indie dub records. Now a professor at NYU, Goldman tells a fascinating tale in Revenge of the She-Punks—as she calls it, “A Feminist Punk History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot.” It’s the freewheeling tale of how radical women who could barely play their instruments ended up changing the world. “Punk was exciting and it was doable,” the Raincoats’ Gina Birch tells Goldman. “I thought,...