I first heard the singles and B-sides like Politics which 4ZZZ played until they ran out of tracks and just started again. It was a little like how everyone loved the Flying Lizards' version of Money and how it was described as low-technology by the duo themselves. Girls at Our Best! sounded like contemporary technology, rock band plus keyboards and vocals playing songs with choruses, bridges and verses, but they swept their grimacing concerns under a carpet of jollity and solid rock music. Jollity? How punk is that meant to be? See what I mean? So, when they brought out an album I was there.
Big drums playing a square drive, a guitar palm muted without discenrable pitch. "One two, go to, Pleasure City Avenue!" chants out Judy Evans with perfect diction. Then the band kicks into the bouncy verse and sounds like The Sex Pistols led by Joyce Grenfell. "Decorate the walls and doors and make them all look nice. Take the cat out for a walk and help it kill the mice!" Strong melody and a voice that could make parades of girl guides stand to attention and words that might have been thought up on the spot by a six year old. "This is Heaven. We are good as gold we won't grow old when we're told." If you sang that in a Johnny Rotten voice it would sound naff, someone trying to be all punk 'n' stuff. But this band had a secret weapon. Well, secret until the vocals started.
Judy Evans was from Leeds like all the others in the band and spoke awl norwerthern, mind, and was known as Jo. But when she sang she became Judy and sounded posh, not middle class with a future in publicity and promotions, but to the manor born posh. Punk was all about sounding like yourself. Hearing kid's words with the attendant cruelty and bluntness of them, framed in a sweetened whimsy but belted out as though to an assembly of kids in blazers designed in 1895 is a throw off. You just don't expect it and it doesnt let up. Evans used two voices on GATB! recordings, this one and an odd, slightly off falsetto, usually in the middle eights. The middle eights were also stand-outs melodically form the rest of the songs, being in other keys or suddenly changed rhythms before folding back into the normal verse. The one for Pleasure contrasts completely from the rallying jolly hockeysticks of the verse and chorus, soaring above them in a kind of Rennaisance melody before sliding back down for another pep rally verse, warcry chorus and then a sudden stop.
Before you can take a breath it's Too Big For Your Boots which starts like a show tune with bamming chords, one to a bar as Judy starts off with gleefully naive lyrics: "Iiiiiiii will take a chaaaahnce on an advaaaaahnce with some romaaaaahnce ...." before tumbing into a strident ragtime two four with the big loud guitar band joined by a jaunty honky tonk piano. I'm Beautiful Now adds an electric 12 string in a firm but not showy way, reinfocing riffs by adding an extra sheen, especially when the gorgeous coda vocal descent repeats over the Eloise-style chromatic figure.
Waterbed Babies brings back the slashing guitar figures but takes the expected 1 4 5 chord progression out of the scheme and replaces it with something outside of keys. Over pounding tomtoms Evans uses her movie-ghost falsetto: "Rollingon rubber just for the three of us..." as it heads to a great big full-throated thumping chorus: "Waterbabies in the sea. Watermelons are for tea..." A glade is cleared for the middle eight in which ringing bright guitar chords sound over a rolling snare as the flutey vocal slowly dives before splashing up into a new verse. Fun City Teenagers pushes through a pop template from the mid '60s and adds a Dixieland clarinet. £600,000 is a more typical 1980 post punk rush with low-mixed shouted vocals, steep rise and fall chorus but a baroque descent in the middle eight.
Side two begins with the closest thing this album of sub four minute tracks has to an epic. Heaven opens with a big guitar fanfare in a minor mode. A coupled six and twelve string grinding sheen has the grandeur of an old movie suggesting the middle ages. A stately pavane pace but delivered in hard edged rock style works like a seige breaking machine as Judy sings stridently about being out of sorts with the world around her, sometimes narrating as a toy: "Wake me up, revive me with your memory. I am only someone when the children think of me. I cannot exist without some vanity. Bring me back to life because I need some junk." Her own backing vocals are choral but schoolishly so, which in their own way add to the larger scale of the arrangement. A bubbling synthesiser beeps and blips with the chords as the guitars thicken and plain out for the chorus, delayed by a verse, crashes through: "Will you get to heaven if you like a drive-in movie? Will you get to heaven if you run a TV station? Will you get to heaven with advance publiciteeeeeeeeee?" Another verse and chorus repeat before the space expands even further with a slowly building instrumental section held together by drums and big bright barre chords. The synths bubble and grind before becoming a kind of ghostly choir of howls and eerie ringing, rising through as the guitars tighten and smash toward the final double chorus which then ends on a comically high falsetto note by Evans and the synth. As varied as the tracklist has been so far nothing has prepared the first time listener for this. It's not a sudden departure or even out of character but its committment, force and melodic riches push it further out. A great side two opener.
China Blue follows, a kind of whimsical picture of a China town with glittering guitar arrangements, breezy verses and a playground style chanting chorus. The verses are told from the point of view of Europeans travelling east and being wonderstruck but there's also a love song buried in the bouncing colour about living in a palace and inviting another to come and see her everyday. And in the middle of that there is the curious middle eight: " Oh why am I so beautiful?" Even in the Judy Evans style of playground song/Girl Guide rally this might sound conceited but in the setting of the sheen and splendour it's much more of a general cry of joy. If you want to do the Necker cube boogie it might also be Jo Evans sick to death of the attention given her from outside the band because of her beauty. No interview, even in those anti-mainstream post punk days, neglected to mention her looks. It can't have gone without a fight at the record company that the band refused to put her image on the cover art. That is not necessarily a naive stance, given the times. Kim Wilde got so sick of being asked about her sex life that she started asking interviewers for details of theirs. And this cry of pure melody, the "I" curling down like a falling ribbon, seems to meet this in the coda. And then the song ends on a penny. Bampf!
If you knew the B-side Warm Girls which included the line that gave the band its name (Youtube it, it's wonderful) your ears will prick up on hearing the riff for Fast Boyfriends. A barnstorm of overdriven gutiars and bell like doublings of guitar and keyboards smashes in like a fanfare. Judy comes in with an offer to dance but warns him that it's not a long term offer. "I hope you don't think I'm a freak but I always have to fall - in- love - once - a week." The second couplet of the descending melody verse is carried by male voice backing vocals which give a psuedo classical tint to it. The chorus bounds out with more interplay between male and female, "Oh oh here we come, fast boyfriends" Over "friends" Judy peals."Twenty-fours to takeaway." "Oh oh, again and then. "Last four mintues then turn away." The second verse is a series of girls who are living rapid and happy sex lives and the chorus lifts it even higher. A solo which like all the others neither shreds nor replays the melody leads with the same stuttered notes as the pre-chorus figure to a double chorus with a more complex vocal counterpoint. "Turn a-waaaaay." End. If this song doesn't remind you of your twenties I don't know what will. This number about a gleeful promiscuity told with female values (and, yes, written by Jo) can as easily be a protest as much as a hymn to hedonism.
She Flipped is the tale of a couple bound together by play which, if a little teasing, makes everything work. It's set in a kind of fairytale medieval castle where a jester has fun with his queen. Even then, there's a childlike perspective to it: "My elder brother he's an entertainer each day he has to go to court..." Those lines are sung over a solemn Rennaisance style ground of tremolo guitars, mounting bass and cymbals. After that introduction, you don't notice it happening, the band has accelerated to a clip and has been joined by a harpsichord which will be there for the duration. The next three minutes of pure joy are about pranks, tests and japes in what the younger sister sees as the world of courting where her hero brother wins against a drab world the attentions and then heart of his lady. The song is so bursting that the chorus is wordless, a big yelled da-daa-da-da-daa-da-da-da-daaaaaaah by the whole band which makes them suddenly sound like the Seekers on steroids. And then the instrumental break takes the promise of Heaven further with a full baroque workout of synth brass and strings counterpoint. And then because just going back to a verse or chorus would be drab the coda is new material, a falsetto chant: "Slip off your hose, your lips red and rosy, scarlet livery. Go out tonight, you walk on the other side, sexy chivalry. Buy me a shirt, take me on holiday, gentle rivalry" that gallops to the close, a sudden change of tempo with a slow minor figure on the harpsichord before Judy warns: "One day he'll get caught." Or is it court< like in the old anti-shoplifting ads? Doesn't really matter.
Goodbye to That Jazz starts with a spiky guitar riff that gives way to a happy melody about something like patriotism but it's a kind of Syd Barrett patriotism: "We will all applaud when the final curtain falls, wave our little flags. Standing up to pray to the soup of the day. I say goodbye to that jazz." This gives way to the kind of backspringing baroque movement we've already heard in She Flipped whereby a chord progression modulates per bar between major and minor (e.g. A minor to D-minor to G to C to F to A minor to E etc) that everyone who likes what they hear in Bach or Italian composers from the 18th century or even just others who discovered it and made use (like in California Dreaming). It's no more a lift of old music than a swift alternation between a fifth and a sixth is a lifr from Chuck Berry, but make use of it and you suggest instant J.S. Bach. Here is is delievered apace in a chorus that is somewhere between a travelogue and an appeal to worldwide solidarity against stuffy old regimes. The middle eight modifies this adding a chirpiness as Judy sings: "No traditions anymore, no time for Anne Boleyn..." before returning to the chorus and the first full band fade of the album (not counting the mini fade of the drums on £600). Yet another sudden stop would have felt like a let down. The slow fade feels like a goodbye, the circus clopping slowly out of town. If you've been listening from the first track to now youre probably ready for a good lie down and a cup of tea, white with one.
And that was it, almost. GOAB! released one more single Go For Gold which sounded like a demo for the album. After a short and unhappy American East Coast tour the band dissipated nevermore to unite in the name. Everything they released charted in their native U.K. and their legacy was taken up and smothered in polish with the likes of Altered Images, Bow Wow Wow and the like which diluted so fully that by the other, more boring, end of the decade that the thread was barely visible in Fairground Attraction's Perfect or anything by the likes of the Housemartins.
But Girls at Our Best don't deserve to be buried under the tide of twee that came after them. The band that responded to fellow loiner band Gang of Four writing a song called Entertainment about politics by writing a song called Politics about Entertainment is the same one that on these grooves puts group sex into a ditty about waterbed babies or being nice to a cat so it will kill mice. None of the bands in their wake could boast such complex and thoughtful guitar orchestrations, constantly melodic bass and still sound punk (or use clarinets and harpsichords and get away with it). That's before you get to the band's own art which splattered Cultural Revolution imagery in the colours of Never Mind the Bollocks over both sides of the cover. Uni Student flyer or what? GOAB! didn't line up behind Ultravox and Human League and go synth pop, there was still too much to say in rock. And then because the way they said it what came out wasn't the by then weary grind of punk but a steroidal shaking blast of joy that sustains, song after song, for two sides of an LP. Capping all that off is the persona of Judy. As Jo she was one of the characters of the local scene getting in amongst it bvut as Judy she found something that was all wrong to put to the slicing guitar attack of her band and press it hard until it worked. This effect, The Sex Pistols in Wonderland or The Famous Five Go to the Miner's Strike, still hits, it's still strange and grabbing. For me, that breathy shout at the start of Pleasure stretches a smile across my face that doesn't let up until I press stop or hear the whole thing. Which is why, along with the likes of Porcupine, Colossal Youth, Kaleidoscope, Prayers on Fire, Murmur or Evol and so many more, it is among my favourites of its decade and one I'll always have a copy of in some form. Right now, without it playing I'm mentally singing along:
Go to Toy Town with Taiwan
Welcome home to Pakistan
See my sister in Siam
Please to stay with me in Japan
We are in Ethiopia
Going out with Arabia
Stay the night in Bolivia
Entertaining in India
Goodbye to that jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaz
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