The Maximum Joy frontwoman’s career was cut short by assault and trauma. Four decades on, she is back with an album full of hard-won hope

For a long time, Janine Rainforth thought her touring days were over. Her last full-length album, Station MXJY, was released in 1982 with Maximum Joy, the band she co-founded as a photography student and aspiring vocalist in Bristol. That debut, a cartwheeling, sax-streaked opus part-produced by dub wizard Adrian Sherwood, marked the band as post-punks of promise. They boasted ex-members of the Pop Group and Glaxo Babies, two of Bristol’s best-loved bands. European tours followed, along with a clutch of underground hits – Stretch, Silent Street, Searching for a Feeling, the Denis Bovell-produced single Why Can’t We Live Together – but Station MXJY would remain their only album, a cult favourite.

Today, almost four decades on, Rainforth has returned. These days, she’s recording with the original Maximum Joy drummer Charlie Llewellin and a cohort of “new blood” as MXMJoY. They have a debut album, PEACE – made with David McEwen and released via Rainforth’s London Field Recordings label in February – and live dates this summer, including a spot at Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide festival. But being back in view means Rainforth, speaking down the line from her home recording studio in London, is grappling with a question she’s struggled to answer in the years since Maximum Joy imploded: what happened?

“I find it awkward and painful when interviewers ask those questions,” she says, “because it puts me in a position where I’m still covering things up, and ultimately, colluding against myself. I don’t want to do that any more.” Rainforth’s account, told haltingly over several phone conversations and emails, is that she is a survivor who is only now coming to terms with the violence and trauma that cut short her early career.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I kept singing at home’ … Rainforth.

Bristol was a booming enclave of youthful rhythm when Maximum Joy came of age: late-night blues parties and sound-system revelry, an ebullient riposte to the grey misery of Cold War paranoia and Thatcherism. “There was an explosion of creative expression: poetry, performance, music,” says Rainforth. Rastafarians and art students would rub shoulders while music heads from all walks of life hung out at the Dug Out nightclub on Park Row, where the famous Bristol sound would develop the following decade.

The brash, snarling energy of 70s punk was morphing into something more elastic, an avant-garde cocktail of reggae, dub, free jazz, hip-hop, Afrobeat and disco. Maximum Joy turned this magpie bricolage to their own thrilling ends in wild, punk-funk jams and spacious, jazz-infused dub. A deal with New York’s no-wave label 99 Records followed, and although their song Stretch went on to receive regular rotation at underground clubs like Danceteria, the band never quite reached the Big Apple (possibly because of visa issues). Instead, they toured Europe. They played at a venue near Auschwitz and to long-bearded bikers, in Berlin squats and at various small-c communist festivals in Italy. “They were such incongruous bookings, but fantastic fun,” says Rainforth.

It was after this that Rainforth says she was attacked by someone in the music industry, in an assault she describes as rape and attempted murder. It was the worst in a “series of incidents” involving this person, she says. She remembers her attacker as an “erratic, domineering” character, a perspective she says was shared by others who knew him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rainforth, left, with MXMJoY at the Moth Club, London, in 2018. Photograph: Peter Tainsh

Addressing the impact of the attack was an “inconvenience for a lot of people, because we were on the verge of big things”, she says. Maximum Joy ploughed on, propelled by hype and ambition. But Rainforth says these “incidents” continued. She felt unsupported by her bandmates, and quit the band she had cofounded, a band she remembers as “my purpose, my career, my present and my future”.

A replacement vocalist was drafted in, but Maximum Joy didn’t last long without their frontwoman. Rainforth made a stab at starting a new band, Leonard and the Cats, with members of Pigbag and the Cortinas, but the group petered out after cutting their first single. The studio, once her haven, came to induce crippling anxiety. “I began to freeze whenever I was about to perform,” she says. “The rehearsal room, the studio, the stage. I would shake, violently. I couldn’t understand what was happening. Even though I wanted to [sing], I just couldn’t make it happen. Somehow, my body was betraying me.”

Only now, three decades on, has Rainforth made the connection between the attack and the psychological effect it had on her as a performer and person. It affected every part of her life. She retreated, stopped socialising. Shame, embarrassment and confusion snowballed until she internalised it, convincing herself she was somehow flawed, to blame, incapable. “I kept singing at home and writing a bit, but as a career it all just stopped.”

Rainforth sought refuge with relatives in France. Returning to the UK a year later, she settled in London, picking up photography again before working in film and radio production. She started a family. Music, however, remained sealed off. “I just buried that part of me,” she says.

Maximum Joy was no more, but a steady stream of fans and industry heads kept their music alive in sets, mixes and compilations. When the post-punk revival rolled around in the mid-00s, with a new emphasis on excavating the historically overlooked contributions of women, interest in Maximum Joy only increased. The job of licensing their back catalogue fell to Rainforth, prompted by rerelease requests from several labels. A compilation, Untitled, came out on Crippled Dick Hot Wax! in 2005, followed by a Japanese rerelease of Station MXJY in 2008.

Revisiting the music and giving interviews has meant revisiting her trauma. Sometime around 2009, Rainforth tentatively began to think about telling her story before realising she wasn’t ready. “I wish I’d had a chance to talk to someone qualified at the time,” she says. “It was 30 years ago. Things were still very sexist then. There was this unspoken rule that you just didn’t talk about these things.” Instead, she began writing again, working on solo material. She took singing lessons, and found they were therapeutic. When Mark Stewart invited her to support Pop Group in 2014, it was the breakthrough she needed to begin performing again. “I was terrified, but I had some very good people encouraging me along the way.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: London Field Recordings

In 2015, she reunited with ex-Maximum Joy members Tony Wrafter (sax, trumpet) and Charlie Llewellin to play Bristol’s Simple Things festival, which led to more gigs. (Llewellin now lives in the US and they make music together via email.)

Exploring power, desire, injustice and surival, PEACE is less brassy and more grounded than their original sound, creating a lush and moody palette with an electronic frisson. If Maximum Joy sounded like unfettered elation, then MXMJoY sound like hope: resilient, probing, hard-won. It’s clear Rainforth struggles to name the things she’s survived, and her feelings around them. “I definitely compartmentalised [the assault],” she says. “I didn’t realise just how much until I dug out the diaries I’d kept of that time.”

Performing live again, with autonomy and intention, is a personal triumph – one she’s still processing. “I have to keep pinching myself,” says Rainforth. “It’s been a rocky road for me. Being back feels like a miracle.”