Fire Party were an emotional hardcore band from Washington, D.C. They were together from the autumn of 1986 to the spring of 1990. The band members were Amy Pickering (vocals), Natalie Avery (guitar), Kate Samworth (bass), and Nicky Thomas (drums).
Amy Pickering had been involved in the D.C. hardcore scene as a high school student at Woodlawn High. She then went on to work at Dischord Records. On her first day of work there, she tore down a sign that said "No Skirts Allowed".
Fire Party released a six-song self-titled EP, an eight-song album and a complete discography on Dischord. They played some Midwest shows with Scream, and in early 1988, they toured Europe with them.
Despite their small discography, Fire Party, along with related "Revolution Summer" bands like Embrace and Rites of Spring, had a lasting influence on the artistic direction of American punk. Apart from being an all-female band, a rarity in hardcore punk music, drummer Nicky Thomas was also one of the few African American women involved in the hardcore punk music scene.
"Revolution Summer" had been a phrase Pickering used in notes she sent out to people to reflect "a climax, the end of something" and to re-inspire punks in D.C. It led to events like the punk percussion protest which protested Apartheid in South Africa and President Ronald Reagan. Tomas Squip of Beefeater credited Pickering with "setting a season into motion."
Famous quotes containing the words fire and/or party:
“For it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)