Q&A: Girlschool

In 1978, one of the first all-girl bands known to heavy music formed in London, and now, as Girlschool's original frontwoman Kim McAuliffe puts it, “After 30 years, we are the longest running female rock 'n' roll band in the world!” McAuliffe, along with original bassist/vocalist Enid Williams, original drummer Denise Dufort and newest member (with 10 years of service) guitarist Jackie Chambers are still kicking out the hard rocking jams with a new album. Legacy is a diverse offering commemorating their anniversary and the death of original guitarist Kelly Johnson, who passed just last year. And they did it with a little help from friends like Motörhead's Lemmy Kilmister, Phil Campbell and Fast Eddie Clark, Twisted Sister's JJ French and Eddie Ojeda, and Black Sabbath/Heaven and Hell's Tony Iommi and Ronnie James Dio. See what Kim and Enid had to say about Legacy, their career highlights (so far) and their new outlook on life and music.

[Click the "Continue Reading..." link to listen to a playlist featuring the music discussed in this post.]

Rhapsody: What are some of your proudest moments in your 30 years as a band?
Kim: One that springs to mind was we were the first -- I think still the only? -- female rock band to headline Reading Festival. That was back in the 80’s. And a program called Top of the Pops was quite a big music show over here, so every band when they start off, that is the dream to be on Top of the Pops, so of course when we did that three times that was quite something!  And just getting the chance to and making the first record, because again that’s what every band dreams. 

Enid: We did a single with Motörhead in 1981 that went silver in Britain and Gold in Canada. And we just supported Iron Maiden at Wacken playing to maybe 70,000 people and it was wonderful! There’s still great stuff happening out there.

What does it take to have a long career in music?
Kim: We’ve got strong friendships so that’s probably what keeps it going -- if you don’t like each other, I don’t think you have much chance.

Enid: Yeah. There’s a lot of fighting too -- we don’t always agree and sparks fly and we get very passionate but we put that energy into the music. And we can be pretty feisty at times [laughs].

Did you ever think you’d be at this point where you’re still making music 30 years later?
Kim: Never, no, no, if you’d have said that to any of us all those years ago we would laugh.  But I don’t know where the time has gone; when we think about things we did and try to remember when that was, suddenly you go “well hang on a minute, that was 20 years ago!” You just can’t believe that time just passed like it has.  It’s frightening!

Enid: No!  [Laughs] I would be crazy! But I even left [the band] and was writing short operas and did musical theater in the West End where I was playing bass, guitar, keyboards, saxophone, drums -- that was my version of playing music: hit it, blow it, see what happens.

How did your reunion of sorts come about?
Kim: Well basically Enid still lives on the same street as me -- the same street that we lived in when we were little (we grew up together), so of course we still see each other. And so when we decided to carry on and make it through the 30 year mark, she was into getting back in the band again. Me and Denise [Dufort] have been in it since day one, and then Jackie [Chambers], the “new girl” we call her, because she’s only been in it 10 years now [laughs].

Enid: When you do theater, somebody else writes the show and somebody else directs the show. And as much as I love getting up in front of an audience, I much prefer writing the songs and playing them. And when my father died and with Kelly dying, it made me take a step back and go “ok, suppose that somebody said you were going to die in 2 years, what would you want to do for the rest of your life?  What actually matters to you?” and I decided that whatever happened, whether I made a living out of it or whatever, I would still get up and perform and write songs.  So around that point, Kim said, “do you want to come back and do some gigs?” and I thought well, I love gigging and maybe we can do some writing together. I think it was fated [laughs] like some kind of blood connection. 

Tell me about your new album.
Enid: We wanted to do an album to celebrate our 30th anniversary. We didn’t have any big plans and we started to record and found that we had a couple of really fast, sort of thrashy numbers which were like the punk-influenced New Wave of British Heavy Metal early days.  And then there are songs like “Spend Spend Spend” that are sort of a tribute to that 80’s glam rock/ metal influence and then there are other songs like “I Spy” which are unlike anything Girlschool has done before.  So when we listened back, we were like “Hey, it’s almost like a tribute to the 30 years of music that we’ve played, paying homage to where we came from and all the different periods that we’ve been through!”

Kim: And of course we’ve got a few special guests on it who we’ve bumped in to along the way, so it’s quite exciting.

How did those collaborations come about?
Kim: Well it all sort of started off as an accident really.  We didn’t mean it to end up like this but what happened was Eddie [“Fast” Eddie Clark, formerly] from Motorhead who we’ve known for a long, long time said he’d play on it.  The next thing we know, Phil [Campbell], the guitarist from Motorhead, who lives literally half an hour away from where we recorded the album, came down for the day and then he played on it. And then we started thinking, “I wonder if such and such [would play?]” And we just kept phoning people who meant a lot to us in our career over the years and they said yes, so it’s amazing! We wrote all the songs, the other people are just guests on all of them, and I still find it amazing to think that Tony Iommi is playing guitar on one of our songs and Dio is singing our lyrics!

Enid: It’s such a privilege when people that you love and admire give up their time and want to come and play on one of your songs.  It’s the best endorsement you could ever have.

How has the death of Kelly Johnson affected the record?
Kim: We still can’t believe that she’s not here anymore.  She had a horrible last few months and she really went through it. It’s horrible to see someone you love and been with for 30 years go through something like that.  On the album we have written a couple of songs dedicated to her, and -- it sounds really weird – but we’re actually shaking her ashes as percussion on it.  She left us all these little urns of ashes which is just Kelly to do that, so we were in the pub one night and thought, we’ve got to get Kelly on here somewhere. And me and Denise were just having a laugh, like “what we should do is all take our little urns and shake them like maracas” and then before we knew it, we were actually doing it! So Kelly’s on the album as well, on the first song, “Everything’s the Same.”  Some people think that’s very strange but we thought it was hilarious and we know Kelly would have thought it was brilliant. There’s another song “Legend” that Jackie wrote about her, and “The Other Side,” that’s inspired by her as well.

Enid: It does make you think about the band and the music and your own life and where you’re going, and certainly the album is quite philosophical in some of the lyrics.  Girlschool has very much been kind of a party band over the years. There have been some pretty wild times, and there are quite a few songs about parties, sex, love, tour, adventures, and that’s part of who we are, but there’s also a depth to this album musically and lyrically.  We’re talking about Kelly’s death and contemplating our own death, and there are songs about how civil liberties are being eroded. Like, “Spend Spend Spend” is about the credit crunch. I think we’re maturing a lot, but we still have a lot of the same passion and a lot of the same energy that we had when we started.

What are your goals as a band today?
Kim: We hope that this album does really well and gets out there and we’ll continue touring and partying around the world.

Enid: Not to die [laughs].  No, I think that we feel very proud of this album and we want to get out and do some gigs. That’s our immediate thing because you put your heart and soul into something and you’re passionate about it so it would be great if the people that like our music get a chance to hear it and that we get a chance to play it to them.

Metal music was always a boys club, has any sexism affected you over the years?
Kim: I think we’ve been pretty lucky ‘cause all of the bands that we’ve played with over the years -- well they haven’t said it to our faces anyway --but they’ve been really cool about it and nobody’s ever really mentioned it.  I just think Girlschool is known now just for being us and not particularly for being a female band.  But my cousin and Enid’s brother, they both played guitar, but they didn’t want girls in their band, so we just thought, oh well we’ll do our own which is literally why we started an all girl band.

Enid: [Laughs] You’re asking the right person here.  The other 3 often say “oh no, we don’t have a problem with that” and to a large extent, we don’t.  Pretty much all of the bands that we’ve played with have been very supportive -- they’ve treated us like equals, they’ve been friends.  In the beginning we used to get lots of low expectations, but once people see that you can play, they tend not to treat you any differently.  In ’78 there just weren’t female musicians hardly at all, and now 50% of the guitars that get sold are sold to girls.  It’s absolutely brilliant.  You go to the internet and you’ve got thousands of female bands all around the world, so there’s been big, big changes.  We don’t get asked “what it’s like to be a girl musician?” quite as much as we used to [laughs]. However, a couple of years ago, we played this big festival in northern Europe and we’d gone on really well and wanted to go back again but they turned around and said “well, we’ve already got one female band.”  Its jaw dropping [laughs]; what century are we in?  So on the one hand things have moved forward, and yet you still have this traditional sexist attitude.  We only know about that particular situation because somebody passed it on to us, and you kind of think, well how many times have we been turned down for something and we haven’t heard about it?  You get something like that and you go, “there’s still a lot of work to do.” 

Do you have any advice for other girls trying to break into metal music today?
Kim: Yeah I say if you really want to do it, then get out and do it because it’s been a great 30 years.  It certainly beats getting a proper job anywhere, and I think if we can do it, then anybody can do it.