The Raincoats / The Raincoats / 1979
Lola
wry, disoriented, tender underneath the confusion
The Raincoats' version of the Kinks' 1970 hit keeps the original words intact but changes everything about who is speaking, turning a straightforward story about a naive young man's encounter with a gender-ambiguous woman into something stranger and more self-aware. Sung by a woman, the narrator's own gender becomes uncertain, which loops back into the song's own obsession with categories collapsing.
gender ambiguity sexual awakening performance of identity desire versus confusion cover-version reinterpretation
Who's speaking
A narrator recounts a night meeting someone named Lola, whose gender presentation defies easy reading; the narrator addresses the listener directly, recalling the encounter with a mix of naivety and retrospective clarity. Sung by a female vocalist, the narrator's own gender is thrown into question, doubling the song's central uncertainty.
What happens
The song moves chronologically through a single night: a chance meeting in a club, dancing, physical intimacy, a moment of panic or retreat, and a resolution where the narrator settles into acceptance of what happened and who Lola is. The arc ends not in scandal but in a kind of contented ambiguity.
How it's built
Built on the original's verse-chorus pop structure, with the title name chanted and stretched into a near-mantra in the choruses. The repetition of the name and its broken-down spelling functions almost like a spell being cast, while the verses supply narrative detail in a fairly conventional storytelling mode.
Section by section
Opening verse
The meeting is staged like classic pop romance -- a club, champagne, a dance -- before the narrator immediately flags something off in the voice of the person he's meeting, setting up the confusion that drives the rest of the song without yet naming it directly..
First chorus / self-description
The narrator's confession about his own physicality works as a kind of deflection, letting him process an overwhelming encounter by focusing on his own inadequacy rather than directly confronting what confuses him about Lola.
Gender-noticing verse
“walks like a woman and talks like a man”
This is the song's clearest statement of its central puzzle, delivered almost as a shrug rather than an accusation -- confusion registered, not condemned.
Retreat and return
The narrator's brief physical flight -- pushing away, falling to the floor, then choosing to stay -- reads as a compressed crisis of desire and self-recognition, resolved not through explanation but through a decision to accept the moment as it is.
Late refrain
“except for Lola”
The song generalizes its private confusion into a claim about the whole world being mixed up, then carves out an exception for Lola specifically, suggesting she alone is somehow resolved or certain even as everything else is chaos.
Closing verse
The narrator's declaration of his own manhood, paired with the claim that Lola shares that identity, refuses to resolve the ambiguity cleanly -- it reads as either a punchline or a genuine, if clumsy, statement of solidarity.
Craft
- spelling-out refrain
- Breaking the name into letters slows the listener down and treats identity itself as something to be spelled, checked, confirmed -- appropriate for a song about a name and body that don't match easy assumptions.
- understatement
- The narrator repeatedly qualifies himself as not the most physical, passionate, or masculine guy, using self-deprecating hedges that make his eventual acceptance feel earned rather than declarative.
- gender-play through vocal casting
- With a female singer voicing a narrative originally coded male, the song's insistence on stable categories (man, woman) is undercut by the performance itself, before any lyric even gets there.
Reading it
Read straightforwardly, the song is a bar-encounter narrative about a young man attracted to someone whose gender presentation he can't parse, ending in his acceptance of both her and his own uncertain masculinity. The Raincoats' choice to cover it without changing the pronouns or narrative details, sung by a woman, adds a layer the original didn't have: the song becomes a woman narrating desire for another woman while using the language of male confusion, which either satirizes the original's anxious masculinity or opens the lyric up as genuinely available to any speaker regardless of gender. Both readings coexist; the band doesn't resolve it, which seems to be the point of choosing this song to cover at all.
Context
This is a cover of the Kinks' 1970 single, itself already famous and controversial for its ambiguous portrayal of a transgender or gender-nonconforming character named Lola. The Raincoats, an early post-punk band associated with a DIY, feminist-adjacent sensibility, recorded it for their 1979 debut album. I don't have confirmed details on who specifically sang lead on this track or any stated intent behind the choice to cover it, so claims about the band's motives should be read as informed inference rather than documented fact.
Listen for
- how the vocal delivery treats the spelled-out name -- playful, deadpan, or unsettled
- whether the singer's voice reads as embodying the narrator or commenting on him from outside
- the moment of physical retreat and how the vocal performance handles that shift in energy
- how a female vocalist singing lines about masculine self-doubt changes their weight
- the closing repetition of the name and whether it resolves or just trails off
About The Raincoats
The Raincoats are a British rock band formed in 1977. They were founded by Ana da Silva and Gina Birch while the two were students at Hornsey College of Art in London.
1977 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue