Fire Party
band
Fire Party was a post-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).
History
Amy Pickering was involved in the D.C. hardcore scene as a high school student at H-B Woodlawn. 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". Oman Emmet, previously known as Tomas Squip of Beefeater, named Pickering as "the mother of the revolution" for her role in what became known as Revolution Summer in 1985, and he credited Pickering with "setting a season into motion." "Revolution Summer" had been a phrase Pickering used in notes she sent out to people in the D.C. punk scene 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.
Before Nicky Thomas joined Fire Party, she previously played in bands such as Lebensluste and In Pieces.
Pickering joined with Avery, Samworth, and Thomas to form Fire Party which, according to Avery, "grew out of this really tight-knit group of people very much shaped by a very small music scene". The band made their debut in February 1987 at d.c. space and their set was dedicated to the recently deceased Toni Young, a former member of the bands Red C and Dove, as well as one of the few women of color in the D.C. punk scene at the time.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Fire Party” as band. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1418797. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1990, 1985 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fire Party” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.