A bright four four thump on the drums for two bars then a very 80s chugalug of palm-muted electrics which play a little off each others tuning like a light chorus pedal. A very articulate bass joins in over a quiet but solid organ wash. So far it sounds like a song from the year before, Fischer-Z's So Long (which deserves its own post); same beat and sequence of instrument entrances on the soundstage. But then you know it isn't as instead of the pained strangled tenor of So Long we get a angelic arpeggio high on the fretboard, clean and pealing. And we're in.
Belinda Carlisle's cut glass soars above this like a dove in a Renaissance painting talking to her lover about the rumours and fabrications that surround them. Well, those no-lifes would say that, wouldn't they? The great void around us can return to the primordial swamp for all we care as we are refulgent star system beyond it. So let them talk. Bugger 'em. Our lips are sealed.
The chugging tri-chord drive is typical of its time and the pez-candy 60s sweet but sharp is also very post-punque-pop but there's more and better than this going on here. First, Carlisle's vocal is so crisp and tightly wrapped around the words that in moments when she lets it break it's like seeing a crystal vase with a scratch. She might sound and look like a cheerleader but this is someone who has survived pain. Now, the whole grimy swell of gossip and slurring of the herd greys out into a gibbering fade.
Chorus: up to the minor third (played as a bold major) back down to the tonic like Beethoven's Fifth (really, same key, too) then right out of whack to a flattened fifth, a ninth and then back to D. "Pay no mind to what they say, it doesn't matter anyway." That statement is sung in choir, defiantly out of the song's scheme but fitting perfectly within it. "Hey hey hey", in sheer joy, "our lips are sealed." This will often just slam in without a pre-chorus as though she has to tell him to be strong.
The middle eight floats in with a holding pattern on the bass and choirgirl falsetto descends through a beam, cradles his head with light and sings: "hush my darling. Don't you cry. Quiet angel, forget their lies." A mini snare roll and the final verse bursts back into light with the words of the first verse descanted by the angelic call from the middle eight gleaming through, echoing the verse lines. And then two choruses in a row which bear the chant of the title on their force. Never has worldliness sounded so fresh and life-affirming. This is pop supreme, as tiny as a note passed in class and as big as high school.
The Go Gos emerged from the L.A. punk scene at the end of the seventies with a good enough live reputation to swing a support spot for The mighty Specials on their first U.S. tour. Specials' vocalist Terry Hall and Go Gos guitarist Jane Wiedlin found each other but had to keep it secret as both were in other long term things. This song was the child.
Terry Hall did a version of it later with his post Specials minimalist outfit Fun Boy Three. It's a sombre outing emphasising the fragility of the situation; Hall's delicate tenor calling out over a wash of fifths in the wordless backing vocals, electro drums and sparse piano and, towards the end, a quiet funk figure on a guitar. At the time you were meant to prefer it for its sparseness and anti-pop dourness but really that's more from the Go Gos' original having crossed from their indyness to charting band (and probably because everyone was sick of it by then). I liked the difference but will never prefer it over the original.
The Go Gos were picked up by The Police-related indy label IRS at this time who funded their first album and got Blondie producer Richard Gottehrer behind the desk. Bratty and distrustful of the music industry they nevertheless put in a solid album which still sounds fast and new and toured it. The cover reversed the push to glamour that the record company wanted by putting the bubble bath pictures on the back and an ugly-palette desaturated picture of the band wrapped in towels with face cream on and called it Beauty and the Beat. With their punk credentials (Carlisle had been in the legendarily obscure Germs for about a fortnight) IRS of course allowed all this as it was funny and it worked either way.
The band were disdainful of music videos at the dawn of MTV (we knew about them here locally and from the UK through Countdown which was wall to wall with them from the mid seventies) but IRS insisted. The result is odd. Shots of the band miming it in a practice room would have done it but cut through this is the band as Valley girls riding through the town and shopping for lingerie and then splashing around in a fountain. Belinda Carlisle occasionally looks like she'd rather shrink into the upholstery of the car which with a lead vocalist is like hearing a guitarist asking a mixer to turn it down. For all their reservations about falling into the machine with a song commercial it still works. There's nothing punk about it but in those post years the term itself had as much cred as saying ballsy or raunchy. It looks like they're a working band who can do the hokey kokey with the organisation to get their songs to the world. At the very worst they come off as goofy but that only works seeing it now.
For me it's late 1981, getting the LP at Rockinghorse in Brisbane and packing it in my luggage for the journey north on the Sunlander for the Uni summer holidays, escaping my brother's slice of hell marriage for two months of laze and parties in sunny Townsville. Among the Gang of Four, Joy Division and Talking Heads, this burst through the Monsoon rain to light the splashing tempest in the pool by the patio. Now and then in the brilliance of the joy there was the poignancy and real ache that scraped the blinding clouds that felt like the danger of being nineteen and free. More than the cinema gloom of Echo and the Bunnymen or Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark it was this and the rest of the album that tapped me on the shoulder.
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