Dammit, Let’s Celebrate Girlschool

I don’t like the words “music critic.” I don’t want to criticize.

Those of us who write about music should celebrate, proselytize, advertise our passions; we should shout or whisper, “This is what we love, this is what I have to let you in on, this is what you might have missed.” The main reason I should bloody be here is to say, “I am dying to tell you this.”

So, today I am dying to tell you this:

Girlschool, a band formed 46 years ago in South London and still (very) extant, are one of the most profoundly underrated bands of the last 50 years.

Yes, Girlschool.

Do you want to experience shouty-shouty-Oi!-Oi! Punk’n’roll the way it was supposed to be made? Then listen to Girlschool.

Listen, friend, follow me on this one, okay? Let’s assume this: if you imagine “Do You Love Me” by KISS and/or BTO’s “Hey You” played by Sham 69, Generation X or the U.K. Subs, that was basically the sound of classic grunge, right? (Play this out in your head, it tracks, seriously.). So, assuming that, I think it’s safe to say that Girlschool were pretty much the best-ever classic NW grunge band, except, you know, they were ten years too early and 5500 miles too far to the east.

Honestly, it hurts my heart that Girlschool aren’t recognized as one of the best punk rock bands of all time, and maybe, one of the best heavy metal bands of all time, too, though their brand of heavy metal is the KISS/Slade/Sweet/Lordi kind: full of slurpy hot fudge bar chords, wall-to-wall anthemic choruses (chorii?) and tumbling glitter rhythms; Girlschool play metal without all those dumb parts where the guitars go doodle-doodle-doodle-dee for four minutes between the good parts. (Which is to say it’s basically Sham 69, U.K. Subs, or classic Stiff Little Fingers.) And there’s a total lack of silly Ragnarok nonsense in the lyrics, too; instead, Girlschool’s lyrical text is just the kind of stuff you’d shout out in the pub when you were drunk or hungry or horny or happy. All of which is to say, Girlschool = punk rock – artiness + a serious devotion to Slade and Sweet; which is to say it’s grunge, only without that slight whiff of irony grunge always carried around in its’ Hello Kitty backback. (Put down that Hello Kitty backpack, it is not befitting a person your age.) Speaking of which, if you like Veruca Salt, you’ll love Girlschool. Got that? Good. (You could totally pass off “Volcano Girls” as a Girlschool song, except Girlschool’s hot/hoarse hard alto vocals are a bit stronger, and Veruca Salt probably don’t worship UFO.) I mean, it’s all just brisket-juicy riffs and shouted slogans at the end of the day, right, and we were raised to love that!

VIDEO: Girlschool “C’Mon Let’s Go”

Consistently — and Girlschool are very effing consistent — Girlschool sound like a Snickers Bar feels in your mouth. You know that FIRST bite of a Snickers Bar? — that’s Girlschool.  Girlschool’s extensive catalog (fourteen studio albums, four live albums, and an extensive list of EPs, collaborations, and compilations) reveal that Girlschool may have been the best glitter punk band who ever existed; they’re basically the missing link between classic dumbbell glitter — i.e., the simple, hooky and irresistible chants of Gary Glitter, Sweet, Mud, even Rollers — and late first generation britpunk/early Oi; or, as I’ll say again and again, they’re THE near-perfect grunge act that happened to come too early and too far away.

Now, for better and worse, because Girlschool happened to land their amazing thumpy Harleyship exactly at the time NWOBHM (the New Wave of British Heavy Metal) was ascendent, and because they looked the part (leather jackets and band an’ biker t-shirts), they got lumped in with that movement. This probably helped Girlschool to a certain extent (NWOBHM was getting a lot of ink in the U.K. circa 1980/81), and to this day, they still tour with NWOBHM stalwarts; but it also likely hurt them, in so much as it pigeonholed Girlschool, a loud bubblegum dropped-D punk rock band, into a movement they only belonged in culturally, not musically (they completely lacked the Valkyrie imaging, extended harmonized solos, and quick and quirky chord changes of most NWOBHM acts).

Regardless of that association with NWOBHM, when I approach Girlschool purely as a listener — and not someone considering their cultural context — I really do just regard them as a punk band, (very) closely related to hardpop/hardpunk gods like Sham 69 or the U.K. Subs (though Girlschool are far more consistent than either band). U.K. Subs at their best — that is, 1982’s Endangered Species album — is a kind of wonderful twin to Girlschool’s extraordinary first two albums, 1980’s Demolition and 1981’s Hit and Run; play ‘em side by side and you’ll totally see/hear this. I also hear a bit of Generation X in Girlschool; one of Girlschool’s biggest and best songs, “C’Mon Let’s Go” (off Hit and Run) sounds like Generation X playing Van Halen’s “Atomic Punk,” it really does. In an ideal world, because of their rather joyous blending of Sweet-like glam, first-generation punk bar chording and Oi-like football chanting, Girlschool really should have been seen as the next logical step in Punk, a red-meat and lager contrast to the skeletal absinthe of Post-Punk.

Girlschool were also sadly overlooked in the U.S. (though they retain a fierce cult, to this day). In the early/mid 1980s, MTV, radio and the American record industry didn’t know what to do with an all-woman hard rock/punk band who didn’t dress like Sunset Strippers and didn’t bend over backwards to make radio hits and mid-tempo ballads; and Girlschool apparently lacked the aggressive visionary management that helped Joan Jett overcome that very same problem and capture pretty much what could have been Girlschool’s constituency (like Girlschool, Jett basically worked in morphing classic glitter with first generation punk, while also dressing in street-basic, non-sexualized leather.)

I don’t claim to know what Mercury Records did or didn’t do right by Girlschool in the U.S. in the mid-1980s; but maybe another label would have done a better job marketing their catchy glitter/punk sound and understood that Girlschool’s “kohl-eyed biker-girl you shared a beer with at the Damned concert but then you lost her number” look was just as sexy as the fishnet and hairspray thing Mercury seems to have been disappointed the band couldn’t quite pull off. (For the record, it probably didn’t help that around this time Girlschool hit a bit of soft/weak spot with 1983’s Play Dirty and ‘85’s Running Wild, the two albums where the band undertook an ill-fitting experiment with more mainstream forms, pleasing no one and jeopardizing their core audience. But they make a very, very nice comeback with 1986’s Nightmare at Maple Cross, one of their rawer and more raucous albums, where they appear to go out of their way to make up for lost noise.)

And now, the most wonderous thing in this whole story: Girlschool’s latest album, titled WTFortyfive?, is pretty damn fantastic.  And 45 years on, Girlschool are still doing what they’ve always done best: chunky, simple, repetitive and catchy riffs; fat, snapping, rolling rhythms, half Bobby Graham and half Don Powell; chant-along choruses; a lot of Misfits-y/Cockney Rejects-y whoaaaa-ohhs; and they do it again and again and again (and no effing ballads). WTFortyfive? is basically T Rex meets Fu Manchu and it’s a barrel of fun. (For the record, Girlschool 2025 retains two members from the group that recorded Demolition in 1980: bandleader/guitarist/vocalist Kim McAuliffe, and drummer Denise Dufort, who is one of the most consistent, and underrated British rock drummers of the last half century.). At least four tracks here — “Barmy Army,” “It Is What It is,” “Are You Ready,” and “Born to Raise Hell” —  are as good as anything the band has ever recorded.

Again and again, WTFortyFive? says, Attention Must Be Paid to Girlschool, the Glitter Punk Champions of the Universe, and dammit, they still have it. So let’s show them a little love, okay?

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Tim Sommer

Tim Sommer is a musician, record producer, former Atlantic Records A&R representative, WNYU DJ, MTV News correspondent, VH1 VJ, and founding member of the band Hugo Largo. He is the author of Only Wanna Be with You: The Inside Story of Hootie & the Blowfish and has written for publications such as Trouser Press, the Observer and The Village Voice. Learn more at Tim Sommer Writing.

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