Girlschool Release 1981 Reading Set

In many ways, England’s Reading Festival is the Eden, Elysian Fields and Tigris and Euphrates of all rock festivals; and in the 65-year history of this event, only once has a day of the three-day event been headlined by an all-woman band. Yeh, seriously, only once. 

That band was Girlschool. The year was 1981. 

Regardless of their status as a prominent participant, key ambassador, and happy survivor of the NWOBHM movement (and still making vital new albums and offering ass-kicking live performances), I have long argued that Girlschool should not only be perceived as a punk rock band, but as one of the very greatest punk rock bands. If a lot of NWOBHM aspired to be, ohidunno, Orf’s Carmina Burana, it appeared that Girlschool aspired to be Wagner played by 12 bonobo monkeys being egged on by the Cockney Rejects. (Note to self: Is “Carmina Banana” a good band name or a good drag name? Or both?) Girlschool — who traffic in something that’s somewhere been dumb/drunk Thin Lizzy or gloriously/catastrophically over-simplified Sensational Alex Harvey band, or, um, Bon-era AC/DC via Slade-y Suzi Quatro, or, uh, maybe Mott the Hoople with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (but the fun, sexy kind), yeh huh, which is also to say they are the U.K. Subs if the Subs were at the top of their game for 45 years – play chords as thick as your auntie’s gumbo (y’know, the kind you have to eat with a fork), executed with grins, swagger, and no regard to subtlety, coupled to sluicing, Sabbathian/Pistol riffs and terrace chant choruses. (Whew? I mean DEEP breath. Got all that that? If you were charting all that nonsense like one of those boards with a lot of pictures and red string on a crime show, I swear that rant would have made SO much sense.) See, I search high and low through the toppermost of Girlschool’s extensive catalog (including their extremely fine most recent studio album, 2023’s WTFortyfive?) searching for anything that sounds like what the punters would normally think of as metal; and again and again, I hear a band who have more in common with U.K. Subs, Sham 69, the Professionals, and first-album Generation X (and, of course, Girlschool’s mentors, Mötorhead). 

Ah, but back to the (extraordinary) album at hand, and a field in the southeast of England during the early Thatcher years. 

Finally, 45 years after the event, Cleopatra Records has released Nothin’ To Lose In Reading 1981, a live album of that historic — and, frankly, freaking phenomenal — Girlschool performance. Arguably, Nothin’ to Lose sounds better than any Girlschool studio album (sans studio finesse, it’s unapologetically a big, fat, thrilling punk rock album), and this style of music and execution – mid-tempo bar-chord-a-palooza with those kind of melodic/shouted dumb catchphrase vocals that the English have always been so good at – benefits from a lack of even the marginal slickery and over-dubbing featured on Girlschool’s (excellent) contemporary albums. 

And here’s a true damn fact: I’m chuffed to say that Nothin’ To Lose In Reading 1981 has, rather rapidly, taken a spot on my top twenty-five favorite live album list. Really. This sloppy, magnificent, over-floured caramel-drowsy beer’n’bourbon stagger of a punk rock album is one of those “ohhhhDamn, THIS is what it is supposed to sound like!” records: Nothin’ To Lose is a feral, simple, thrushed/thrashed gwroooar of power chords and martial drums, a no-skippies collection of riffs and spit and sweat and swagger. It’s also a document of one THE greatest punk rock bands at their peak (which is not to denigrate any of the subsequent exemplary Girlschool line-ups of the last near-half century; it’s just to say there’s some kind of wicked, gloriously childish gang-all-here magic to the circa ’81 line-up of Kim McAuliffe, the late Kelly Johnson, Enid Williams and Denise Dufort).

There’s another reason that Nothin’ To Lose is a rare treasure: well-recorded/mixed live albums of primo punk rock bands in their prime are sorely lacking (for example, there’s no first-rate, sonically effective, authorized live recording of Matlock-era Pistols, ‘77/’78 Generation X, 1981-model U.K. Subs, James-era Damned, or Etiquette-era Damned); in my (certainly limited) reckoning, only two indisputably authentic first line punk bands have released ruly great live albums that captures their primo-line-up in its’ prime: the Ramones on It’s Alive and the Saints with Live in London, 26th November 1977. (Honorable mention: Stiff Little Fingers’ Hanx!, which is about 88% there — the low-end is missing, and the floating toms are mixed weirdly high, okay? — and the phenomenal All Those Wasted Years by Hanoi Rocks…but we concede that’s giving us some wiggle room on the “punk rock” definition; but in a certain way, ’83-era Hanoi Rocks, sloppy, riffy, cocky, and ecstatic, have a lot in common with the Girlschool on display on Nothin’ to Lose). 

But let’s not get too punk rock nerdy here, and return to the cholesterol-clogging rock’n’roll food on the table: Nothin’ to Lose is Girlschool at their ass-kicking best: Slurping, sliding riffs punctuated with the occasional Lizzy-esque guitar wind-out, it’s mostly just chunky chunk-chunk-chunk chords framed by nail-to-the-floorboard drums  (the magnificent and vastly underrated Denise Dufort really holds this thing together; she plays with the thump’n’roll of Mick Fleetwood and the tight punch of Bobby Graham, all informed by the hyperactivity of Phil Taylor). The hoarse, low-endy chip-grease riffs are in service of a performance that’s sloppy/tight in a way that sounds like the deafening innards of a Satanic Mill yet ticks and clicks like a high-speed train…which is to say imagine early Jett/Blackhearts re-writing “Everybody Wants Some” over and over again. Sounds good, right? 

1981 was a very damn good year for Punk Rock in the U.K., regardless of the simultaneous emergence of Post Punk’s skeletal and arpeggiated atmospherics and NWOBHM’s serpentine, dentist-drill shrieks. The U.K. Subs’ Endangered Species, one of the greatest punk albums of all time, was released that year, along with utterly essential records by Discharge, Exploited, Stiff Little Fingers, the Adicts, and Gen X (and that’s before we even mention North American acts like D.O.A. or the Misfits). Now, 45 years later (but never too late), we have one of the best punk rock albums of that era at our fingertips: 34 minutes of charging, sweet and hot and fast (but not too fast) and sloppy (but the just-right kinda sloppy) riffing, shouting, slurping, anthemic, galloping punk’n’roll.  Nothin’ To Lose In Reading 1981 is a freaking joy, which, I swear to you, is punk rock played exactly the way you always dreamed it ought to be played. 

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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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