Rock band Girlschool have a good time their 45th anniversary with new album | Music | Leisure

“I’d picked up the mic and bought an enormous electrical shock,” the Girlschool singer and rhythm guitarist tells me. “My physique was thrown backwards into the drum riser – the viewers thought it was a part of the present.

“Then instantly I used to be wanting down and seeing myself flat on my again. I used to be out chilly however I noticed every thing that occurred – everybody was shouting, a roadie kicked the mic. It was an out-of-body expertise.”

The possibly deadly accident on the Salt Cellar in 1981 didn’t cease her onerous rock bandmates from partying nevertheless.

“I used to be carted off to hospital and everybody else went again to the lodge and had an enormous knees-up,” Kim, 64, remembers. “I instructed them, ‘You’d higher come and get me within the morning’, however they didn’t flip up till the afternoon – they had been too bloody hungover.”

She will be able to chuckle about it now.

Their Danish heavy steel assist band Mercyful Destiny opportunistically blamed “Devil” for her near-death expertise; Kim prefers the extra logical clarification of an unearthed microphone.

Londoner McAuliffe was 21 when Girlschool’s first album Demolition charted in 1980. The all-woman quartet notched up a High Ten hit single months later with Please Don’t Contact, a collaboration with Motorhead billed “as Headgirl”. Their second album, 1981’s Hit & Run, peaked at 5.

The rock press and tabloid newspapers lapped up the lairy girls, relishing the photogenic distinction of darkish broody Kim and blonde rock goddess Kelly Johnson, their late guitarist.

The unique Girlschool line-up, with drummer Denise ‘Drench’ Dufort and bassist Enid Williams, headlined Studying Competition and toured with Deep Purple, Uriah Heep and Rainbow, injecting fiery femininity into heavy steel’s all-boys membership.

“I get a bit irritated with trendy woke stuff, girls complaining as a result of a person put his hand on their leg,” says Kim. “Males in our early days thought it was okay to seize you, and also you simply pushed them off or punched them out. We weren’t ‘scarred’ by it.

“Our form of feminism was about getting off your bottom and going for it, it doesn’t matter what anybody else thought.”

On tour within the USA, two male followers scaled a drainpipe to succeed in the lodge room Kim was sharing with Kelly.

“There was a knock on the window so I opened it and yelled, ‘What do you suppose you’re doing? Go away!’ Or phrases to that impact.

“None of us had been into one-night stands – we despised that facet of touring.”

Additionally they hated how some bands handled feminine groupies. “On one American tour, one woman saved displaying up, at all times on her personal. The roadies chained her to a radiator and left her there, and he or she turned up the following day at a gig miles away. What was that about?

“We noticed quite a lot of related behaviour. The ladies weren’t protected with a number of the bands. It was undoubtedly a special time.”

Girlschool – who celebrated their 45-year profession by releasing their critically acclaimed 14^th studio album, WTFortyfive? – grew out of Kim and Enid’s south London teenage covers band Painted Girl (who had a terrific lead guitarist in Deidre Cartwright). Of their early years they co-existed with the punk scene.

“We’d play heavy steel gigs and so they’d suppose we had been punks, after which play punk gigs and so they’d suppose we had been heavy steel,” Kim remembers.

“We supported Sham 69 in 1978 at Hackney Empire and bought spat at and booed. There was devastation. All of the chairs bought ripped up.”

Touring Europe at the back of a van “stolen” from Kim’s mother and father, they performed their worst ever gig “someplace in France”.

“We had been paralytic, we partied all day after which tried to play,” says Denise Dufort, 65.

“In Amsterdam, Kelly fell straight via the stage in the course of the soundcheck. The stage simply opened up. She landed standing up, nonetheless taking part in.”

Girlschool befriended native punk band the UK Subs — whose early gigs had been typically like a Wild West bar brawl — sharing a flat with a few of them after which an indie label, Metropolis Data, who launched their first single, Take It All Away.

Serendipity intervened once they emerged from a dingy Soho basement recording studio and ran into Radio 1’s John Peel.

He performed the music on air, it bought 7,000 copies and caught the eye of 1 Lemmy Kilmister. Snapped up as Motorhead’s Overkill tour assist, they had been signed by Bronze Data and lumped in with the burgeoning New Wave of British Heavy Steel.

Wimbledon-born Denise remembers Lemmy, who died in 2015, with affection. “I miss Lemmy, I liked him – all of us did. He had a depraved sense of humour. Someday he was hanging round our dressing room and when Kim left he put half a pig’s head in her guitar case. She screamed when she noticed it.”

Kim: “It seemed like a bloody human hand! Lemmy was one-of-a-kind. I keep in mind coming down for breakfast on tour and seeing him. I mentioned, ‘You’re up early’; he mentioned, ‘I haven’t been to mattress but!’.”

Denise: “I by no means noticed him eat on that tour, after which sooner or later he ate a sandwich in entrance of me. I used to be shocked. That was it although, by no means a meal.”

Rocker Dufort felt extra at dwelling on the steel circuit however says, “Years later I began to understand the Intercourse Pistols, The Conflict and the Stranglers.”

Girlschool’s chart run petered out with their fourth album, 1983’s Play Soiled which tried to ape Def Leppard’s cross-over US rock radio success. Producers Noddy Holder and Jim Lea of Slade threw in drum machines, synthesisers, and multi-layered harmonic vocals. Nevertheless it bombed.

Kim: “I’d by no means seen anybody drink themselves underneath a desk, till Noddy. He slid slowly underneath the desk and then you definately noticed his hand come again up like an alcoholic horror movie…”

Kelly give up in 1984, returning in 93, however died aged 49 in 2007 after a six-year battle with spinal most cancers.

“She was heat, light and really loving, fairly shy too – a wonderful soul,” says Kim.

Kelly’s remaining album with Girlschool was 2001’s Not That Harmless.

The present line-up is Kim, Denise, Jackie ‘Jax’ Chambers on lead guitar since 1999, and on-off bassist Tracey Lamb who has been again full-time since 2019.

Kim’s profession highs embrace Demolition charting and headlining the Studying Competition in 1981.

For Denise it was showing on High Of The Pops taking part in Hit & Run and “assembly AC/DC and all of them coming again to my mother and father’ home for an enormous social gathering.”

Occasion days are historical past, nevertheless.

Denise: “None of us actually drink anymore and we undoubtedly don’t do medication, it’d most likely kill us. I don’t even smoke cigarettes. Jackie retains herself actually match; you may see her ribs.”

Regrets? They’ve had a number of. Kim remembers Jimmy Savile kissing her hand – “he made my pores and skin crawl”.

Denise believes Play Soiled was under-rated. “If we’d executed it in America, it may need executed higher.”

However they agree the music enterprise has modified for the higher. “It’s lots totally different now for ladies,” says Denise. “We weren’t taken critically then and immediately we’re.”