In December 1978, five months before a London music weekly hung a name round the whole movement, a seven-inch called "Take It All Away" went out on City Records with no advance behind it, no manager and no producer anyone had heard of. The four Londoners who had put their own wages on that pressing were Girlschool.
In the stamp trade an overprint is a line of type struck across a sheet already printed and gummed, a new value or a new country driven over the old plate in an afternoon because nobody has the months an engraver would want, and the strike goes in hard enough to emboss the back of the paper. From that moment the catalogue lists the thing by its overprint. The stamp underneath becomes a footnote inside its own entry.
One word was struck across every record the women of the NWOBHM made, and it was struck by the same weekly papers that were otherwise counting catalogue numbers and pressing runs with real care. The machinery under those papers had no opinion at all. A plant took cash, a label took a tape, and neither asked whose hands were on the guitar. The circuit that made all of it possible, the clubs, the fanzines and the cheap plants, is where it sits in the story.
The women of the NWOBHM paid for the first pressing themselves
Grown out of Painted Lady, the covers band Kim McAuliffe and Enid Williams had been running around south London since 1975, and completed that April by Kelly Johnson on lead guitar and Denise Dufort on drums, Girlschool went onto the pub circuit under its new name with a rhythm section harder than most of the bills it played on. The single came before the contract. That was the order the whole wave worked in.
The touring settled the rest. Opening for Motörhead through 1979 put the band in front of the exact audience that bought seven-inches at the door, and the signing followed. The London independent that already had Motörhead on its books, with distribution, a press office and a decade of hits behind it, was Bronze, run by Gerry Bron, and it put the band under contract in 1980. This was not one man with a telephone and a box of stock. It was a company that knew what to do with a loud record made quickly.
Released by Bronze in June 1980 and taken to number 28 on the British album chart, Demolition passes every test the period applied to a debut: songs cut quickly and left rough, a cover of Gun's "Race with the Devil", pressed as a Bronze single that July and played faster than the original, and a guitar sound with no polish laid over it anywhere. It is a NWOBHM album by construction, not by association.
"Emergency", pressed as a Bronze single in January 1980 months ahead of the album, is the clearest three minutes of the case. The lead guitarist whose phrasing carries every record of the Bronze years was Kelly Johnson, and her break goes through the chorus the way a dropped cigarette goes through a nylon shirt, a hole clean through it before anybody smells the burn, and the song under it is a straight NWOBHM riff played at the speed the circuit demanded. Nothing on the record asks for an allowance.
What Bronze bought, and what it charged
The producer Bronze put in the room had already cut the loudest record on its roster. The engineer who had recorded Ace of Spades for Motörhead in 1980, and who was handed this band the following spring, was Vic Maile, and Hit and Run went to number five on the album chart in April 1981, level with the Headgirl EP the two bands had taken to the same position in February. Two top five records inside three months. No other act of the wave managed that in 1981.
The title track is the band at full stretch: a riff built on a downstroke, a chorus pitched for a hall rather than a radio, and a mix in which the bass is loud enough to be a second guitar. Maile recorded what was in front of him and added almost nothing. The record still sounds like four people in a room.
Two top five records inside three months. No other act of the wave managed that in 1981.
Then the label began to steer. Nigel Gray, who had just produced the Police, took the desk for Screaming Blue Murder in 1982, with Enid Williams gone from the bass and Gil Weston in her place. Play Dirty followed in 1983, smoothed by two men brought in from Slade, Noddy Holder and Jim Lea, who filed the corners off a band whose whole value had been the corners, aiming at an American market already buying a glossier product out of California. The chart returns fell from twenty seven to sixty six. The band did not.
Rock Goddess came up through the same clubs
The second all-female band of the wave was called Rock Goddess, and the two sisters who started it in Wandsworth in 1977 were still children: Jody Turner, on guitar, was thirteen, and her sister Julie, on drums, was nine. Their father, who ran a music shop and later managed them, kept a room for them to rehearse in. They spent the whole rise of the wave gigging around London before a major moved. A&M signed them in 1982, five years in.
"My Angel", the single that reached number 64 in 1983, is a wave song down to the gallop in the verse, and the album around it, recorded with the bassist Tracey Lamb in the line-up, is closer to the Neat roster than to anything A&M had in its cabinet. A major had bought a club band and then discovered it had bought a club band.
| Record | Label | Released | UK peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| Girlschool, "Take It All Away" (single) | City | December 1978 | Did not chart |
| Girlschool, Demolition | Bronze | June 1980 | 28 |
| Headgirl, St. Valentine's Day Massacre (EP) | Bronze | February 1981 | 5 |
| Girlschool, Hit and Run | Bronze | April 1981 | 5 |
| Girlschool, Screaming Blue Murder | Bronze | 1982 | 27 |
| Rock Goddess, Rock Goddess | A&M | 1983 | 65 |
| Girlschool, Play Dirty | Bronze | 1983 | 66 |
What the word cost
The word went on at the first review and never came off. Both bands were written up against each other rather than against the roster they were actually on, photographed for the picture rather than the playing, and asked in interview after interview the one question no trio out of Newcastle ever had to answer. A muster of several hundred bands was being sorted by region, label and tempo. These two were sorted by one word.
A chart return is the only review nobody can rewrite ten years later.
Declan Rourke, KaosMetal
What it cost is visible in the trade, not in the sleeve notes. Bronze answered to Gerry Bron and A&M to Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, no different from every other label the wave dealt with, and the two bands that did get out were filed under novelty rather than on the roster, which is why a band with two top five records in one quarter of 1981 has never once been called a standard-bearer of the period.
The records themselves kept working. Girlschool has toured and recorded without a long break since 1978, released WTFortyfive? in 2023, and lost Kelly Johnson, who left the band in 1984 and died of cancer in 2007. Rock Goddess re-formed and made This Time in 2019 with Jody and Julie Turner still in it. The catalogue is in print and the singles change hands for real money.
Judge the period the way the period judged everybody else, by pressings, contracts and chart returns, and the record shows both bands inside the wave rather than beside it. That is the same test applied across the British heavy metal bands, and it is the only one the trade ever really used when the money was on the table.
