Pleasure- Girls At Our Best!

Considering the Jupiter-sized egos usually involved, it’s inevitable that there’s always been plenty of room for self-mythology in music. For two decades and more, it’s been an article of faith in hip-hop but can be traced at least as far back as Bo Diddley, who pulled off the remarkable trick of repeatedly deploying the third person without ever appearing deluded. The Beatles dabbled briefly but memorably in it on Glass Onion and practically every Clash album contained at least one ode to their own legend but what all these had in common was that their mythology either already existed or proved to be self-fulfilling.

This was somewhat less the case with Girls At Our Best!, whose approach appeared to be that if they didn’t mythologise themselves  nobody else would – but was more likely a satire on self-proclaimed legends who were often within their rights to bluster as they did  but could come over a bit daft at the same time.

It all began on Warm Girls, one half of their debut double A-side from 1980.  Discordant and tuneful in equal measure, and  a grotesque caricature of beauty pageants (no one would now even consider writing a line like “I love mental  children”, owing to a combination of  understandably but over-zealously heightened sensibilities and the utterly devalued, bankrupt currency of irony), it ended with a repeated refrain of the band’s  name, followed in the fade-out by a tantalising preview of the song’s sequel (and, with poignant symmetry, GAOB’s final single) Fast Boyfriends.

The other side,  Getting Nowhere Fast, is their best remembered song,  at least partly because of the Wedding Present’s cover from their single-a-month camapign of 1992, but it’s actually fairly untypical, being rawer and scruffier than the rest of their repertoire, while singer Judy Evans pretty much chants the lyric without going anywhere near the stratospheric registers which would become her trademark.

Fast Boyfriends wouldn’t emerge for another year  and a half, when Pleasure was launched to a public who would have been ungrateful if they weren’t so oblivious. Neither song from the debut single appeared on the album – but they were on the lyric sheet, along with  the equally absent and equally magnificent follow-ups Politics!/It’s  Fashion and Go For Gold. It’s as if GAOB knew their tiny-but -massive output – which would amount to just 18 songs, including a cover and a medley – had to be seen as a whole, not an immaculately sculpted oeuvre but every facet of a sparky, at times infuriating  but ultimately downright lovable personality.

With a profoundly English perspective on Blondie’s Manhattan scuzz, GAOB were ultimately left at the gates by Altered Images in the race to take sweet but skewed pop to the  masses but it really didn’t matter as GAOB were a cult in the truest sense – comparatively few people knew about them but just about everyone who did loved them fervently and embraced the shockingly compulsive da-da-da chorus of She’s Flipped,  the aural bouncy castle (a compliment, trust me) of Waterbed Babies and that self-mythology again in the Ants-pulsed sales pitch of £600,000.

This song, combined with the free, more innocuous than it sounds Pleasure Bag (a paper bag with postcards and stencils containing a photo of the band) and the CB radio celebration of Fun City Teenagers, as well as the Stars On 45 medley they did for a Peel Session, lock Pleasure, and GAOB as  a whole, as firmly into 1981 as an episode of Not The Nine O’Clock News. Mercifully, they left the song about the Rubik cube to the Barron Knights but ceased to exist some time in ’82, vanishing like a neighbour on a moonlight flit.

Their lack of success means that there’s no place for them on the sorrowful parade of ’80s nostalgia tours, where the notion that there’s something inherently amusing about the music of that benighted decade is pandered to in an ever downward spiral, but it also means they can be remembered, discovered and cherished unblemished and intact. One day they’ll get caught… (PG)