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| Comes with chips! The 'slips 1982 |
My coffers are empty, which means no new Cartier telephone
dialling-pin for me this month, among other essentials. It also means no new
records. So chanelling the idea that when you’re hungover you tend to discover
amazing clothes you’d forgotten you owned, I went rooting through my vinyl hoping
to come across some forgotten gem that hadn’t troubled my ears for a while. And
I found the Gymslips’ first and only album. (I also found the soundtrack to
early ’80s lesbian classic The Legend of Billie Jean, but I won’t be writing
about that, no matter the merits of a
Pat Benatar ditty or five).
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| For your safety (well, it def weren't for theirs . . .) |
In the 1990s, those with a shaky grasp of history and sociology (i.e. the media) liked to blather on about The Ladette, as if never before in history had anyone with a vagina gone out, got drunk, chuffed a few fags and ogled men (or other women, for that matter). Oh, no. Never. Not until Cox and Ball did it. So it was talked up as a Zeitgeisty phenomenon. But The Gymslips were well at it over 30 years ago, creating cheeky, raucous, garagey glam-pop-punk while downing enough booze to dissolve an elephant’s body in.
The band, who rejoiced in the mellifluous 1970s proley princess
names of Karen, Suzanne and Paula (later joined by a Kathy on the keys), came variously
from the East End and Kent, formed the ’slips in 1980 and referred to
themselves, Richard Allen style, as ‘Renees’ - this being a late ’60s Hard Mod
term for girls of said subculture; the blokes were known as ‘Ronees’. In an NME
interview, Karen said that a Renee was a girl who got as much shagging done as
a bloke while also matching him for pint drinking, fag smoking, nose-picking,
farting, and the wearing of skinhead-style double denim. Atta Girl! Whether
they meant it or not, this was a form of working-class feminism, because being
unladylike is joyously feminist behaviour. Indeed, the sleevenotes of their
only album describe Renees thusly: ‘Diet: excessive alcohol, pie & mash.
Clothing: jeans, monkey boots, denim jackets. Habits: most disgusting things.” It was as if Beryl the Peril, Minnie the Minx, Sweary Mary and Pansy Potter the
Strongman’s Daughter and had met down the Roxy.
When The Gymslips are referred to, it’s often as the only
female Oi! group, which they weren’t. A case for them as the female Sham 69 is
just about plausible (Hurry Up Harriet?) but their boisterous, everyone-get-yer-stomp-on
yobette sound crossed with wistful and tender-yet-tough love songs posits them more
as some bastard hybrid of the Sex Pistols and the Shangri-Las. Still, being a
geek authority on late-’70s and early ’80s female punk and post-punk groups (yeah,
you bet I’m popular), I’m well aware of the lack of influence the ‘slips have when
compared to their contemporaries such as The Slits (Best Punk Band Ever),
Kleenex/LiLiPUT (Best Euro Female Punk Band Ever), The Raincoats (somewhat worthy, frumpy, inventive Godmothers of Grunge), the Mo-dettes (foul-mouthed, pop-punk dandettes
out for a lark), Dolly Mixtures (hyper-melodic, Mod-ish, middle-class girls, quite
good at harmonising), The Bodysnatchers (de Rude Gals of Two Tone) and Marine Girls (twee-as-fuck sixth-form-busking-society types and, amazingly, faves of
Kurt Cobain and the genesis of the redoubtably talented Tracey Thorn’s musical
career). And so they’re largely and unjustly forgotten. Mention their name and
it’s chirruping crickets all the way. Their lineage, you could say, spanned We've Got a Fuzzbox . . . to Kenickie, where the family line appears to have ended. But what
genes!
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| Bosoms, beer, binge, bed |
Their only album Rocking with the Renees was released in 1983,
and is a aural monument to sheer rollicking fun. Their forte was mainly
pumping, jangly mid-60s-influenced pop-punk, which had served Blondie and the
Buzzcocks so well (and no doubt helped secure their cross-generational appeal).
If you believe men and women play their instruments differently (and I do –
there’s generally a more rhythmic bent to the sound of an all-female band; listen
to the Slits and the Pistols back to back and you’ll get some idea of what I
mean) then the ’slips were refuseniks, as the driving riff that opens the first
track, Renees (“ See us walkin’ down the street – monkey boots upon our
feet!”) sounds like something Steve Jones would have no trouble with. There’s
no doubt they could play though - the drumming’s insistent, bombastic and fierce
and the basslines are hefty and Glam.
Still, there are a considerable amount
of half-inched riffs and melodies on there, which doesn’t do much to dispel the
stereotype of the East End tea-leaf. They’re forgiven though, as their joyous terrace-stomp
vocals have all the ballooning, shallow fun of a night on a sticky dancefloor
and the lyrics betray a what-the-hell hedonism that seems oddly antiquated (“Get
drunk! Get smashed! Get pissed! Get fat! We’re the Renees ’ere we come! One, two,
three and UP YOUR BUM!”) Probably one of the most fun "meet the band" intros
recorded since 'Hey, Hey We’re the Monkees!' Today, those lyrics would probably
garner a Parental Advisory sticker - or at least an NHS one. Still, the
following track is called Drink Problem, as if they felt they hadn’t already definitively
dealt with their reigning passion in the first one. This song is a shameless ode
to Drinking Irresponsibly and Loving It (“Whisky makes you frisky, gin makes
you sin, brandy makes you randy and rum makes you . . .”) OK, so it’s hardly Patti
Smith’s lyrical league, but it does put a huge smile on my face - not least
because I now can’t help but imagine Smith, fist in air, reciting those lines
in that deadly serious, Shamanic way of hers in some East Village café, 40 years ago.
They had their class politics and gender issues, riffing on the former on Barbara Cartland (“Poor old gal what a life she’s lead, with her stately home and her four-poster bed”) and the latter on Face Lifts, in which a sad, ageing housewife goes to see a surgeon with his eye on the main chance who tells her she’s an ugly old cow and to put her future in his hands. Agony aunts get short shrift in Dear Marje, as do pop stars who let you down by running to fat, drugs and LA (Wandering Stars). They also graced the world with a well ballsy cover of 48 Crash and Connie Francis’s taunting Robot Man (one in a long-line of songs from gals who won’t take second best, stretching from Sophie Tucker’s Horse Playin' Poppa to Missy Elliot’s One-Minute Man).
They
garnered many decent reviews and Gave Good Interview, too (“Nah. We’ve never had men yelling
‘Gerrem off!’ Probably because they’re terrified of what’s underneath...”) but they
sold few records, perhaps because they didn’t seem to know their strengths,
which really lay in ’60s-style shimmering pop tunes like Thinking of You and Yo-Yo, rather than their Rabelaisian if repetitive ladette anthems. The NME were surprisingly keen on them (“...refreshing antidote
to the conventional belles of the ball . . . ladylike they ain’t – and that is
their strength.”). I say ‘surprisingly’ because being bright, good-humoured
girls who said things like “We’ve paid our dues, but we still don’t get any
decent groupies – all wallies, no hunks!” set them decidedly apart from said
organ’s favoured alumni at the time, i.e. pretentious post-punkers referencing
Baudrillard in their lyrics or threatening to record concept albums about fascist
coups in Equatorial Guinea or somesuch. Sounds (NME’s main rival in the ’70s
and ’80s) supported them staunchly too - sadly, usually in the form of that
feeble excuse for a troglodyte, Gary Bushell. John Peel loved them.
However, they
split in 1984 owing to contractual problems, and Paula, the guitarist, recruited
a new line-up and began afresh. This new incarnation of the band produced a few
Peel Sessions and the new members looked and sounded more like a bunch of
backcombed Camden Palace acolytes – they were only the same group in name.
After they spilt Karen went on to join Oi-botherers Serious Drinking (natch),
and Paula went ska with the Deltones. These two even teamed up again as The Renees
and released a single titled He Called Me a Fat Pig and Walked Out on Me.
Minus a few teeth, you can bet.
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| Wotta cheek |
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