The girl group is reverting to a more classical form after the drugs and death excess of Hole and Elastica, the plasticity of the Spice Girls and the muscular commercialism of Destiny’s Child. In New York are the Dansettes, three white girls who hang out at record fairs and sing soulfully on the debut single
Oh My. Closer to home, in Brighton, are the Pipettes. They are not the first group to revere the polka-dot dress and invoke mythical names such as Spector, Goffin and King, but, with their new single
Dirty Mind, they are likely to become one of the most successful. They philosophise about the female and renunciate rock. The “B” word is never mentioned: for these girls, the Beatles ruined pop music.
On stage the Pipettes are all choreography and polka-dots. It could be a joke — overcooked kitsch — and you’d head for the bar if it wasn’t for the songs: We are the Pipettes (it’s hard to get closer to true Pop Art than writing your own theme tune), the yearning Tell Me What You Want and I Like a Boy in Uniform — school uniform, that is.
What looks like window-dressing is a reaction to the non-performance, non-image weed-rock of Coldplay, Keane, et al. The look and the moves (slightly gauche, pretty white) are also deliberately removed from the powerplay of R&B girl groups. Girls like to dress up and have fun. It’s that simple.
Rose Pipette blanches at the suggestion that this could be seen as remotely political. “Definitely not. I mean, because of the way we dress we immediately attract a certain kind of attention. We want to stay in control of that, but we want to be feminine. We like Bananarama’s attitude,” she adds, alarmingly.
“I dunno,” deadpans Becki Pipette. “No, we are not political. Only in as much as we subvert the norms and turn the standardised music form of the guitar-as-phallus male rock group on its head.”
In a bar on the Lower East Side earlier this month, a succession of Pipette heroines took the stage and revisited their youth: the pre-Beatles golden era, when girls harmonised together and spilt their teenage hearts in song. The best 120 have been collected on a box set called One Kiss Can Lead to Another, which is just about the only thing I’ve listened to for a month. Raw emotion, the amplification of everything that cuts you deep when you’re 16 years old. Alongside the Cookies’ Margaret Ross and the Crystals’ La La Brooks was Arlene Smith, the singer on the Chantels’ sobbing Maybe in 1957, commonly regarded as the first girl group single. How did it differ from other R&B records of the time? Smith was 16 and sang it as if her life depended on it. Even now her intensity can make you catch your breath.
Watching the New York show with wide-eyed wonder is a woman with long blonde hair who sings along, occasionally clapping, with a melancholy expression. This is Mary Weiss, singer with the Sixties girl group the Shangri-Las, the band who wrote the book on angst. On paper it could look kitsch but Weiss related wholeheartedly to the words she sang, her empathy was frightening. No situation was too extreme for the Shangri-Las .
“It’s kind of a forgotten era,” says Becki Pipette. “Pop is a feminine music form, it always has been. Elvis was the last male singer who understood that. Everything since the Beatles has been so male-dominated. Our key era is 1957 to 1963 — we realised all the themes and ideas are women’s issues.”
The Pipettes don’t see themselves as retro in any way. Of course, they are. Girl groups who have harked back to the golden era to create something new haven’t previously used Farfisa organ and matching polka-dot outfits as props. Eighties groups such as Dolly Mixture matched melancholic Shangri-La pop with frocks and Doctor Marten boots. Then there were the Go-Go’s, whose solid gold singles Our Lips are Sealed and We Got the Beat were the perfect marriage of Shangri-La whine and spangly New Wave production.
What makes this new generation different is the sense of liberation. Before the Beatles no one questioned whether the girls wrote the songs or played on the records. It was irrelevant. It was pop. The Beatles created the macho, self-contained rock group that has been a model ever since. You have only to think of the ridicule heaped on the Bangles or the Go-Go’s in the Eighties to realise why the ultra-agit Riot Grrl movement of the Nineties had to happen. Becki Pipette was as inspired by Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and the British band Huggy Bear as she was by the Chiffons. “Huggy Bear had boys in the band, too. It wasn’t: ‘Hey! We’re women!’ We don’t feel we have to pick up a guitar and show our worth.” ()
The Dansettes’ inspiration is a little different. They got together in 2003 as a one-off event at a soul club; Jaime Kozyra, Jennie Wasserman and Leah Fishman are all DJs and vinyl collectors. It seemed like second nature. Like the Pipettes, they have an anonymous all-male backing group, one of whom writes the songs. All three take turns on lead vocals.
“We definitely nod to Sixties girl groups when it comes to our look,” Kozyra explains, “and co-ordinated dance moves. But our sound is more mid to late Sixties rhythm and blues — Chess, Stax, Atlantic and that Southern New Orleans sound. For inspiration, I look to Etta James and Betty Harris.” They define their sound as Mod Americana, meaning that they are “connecting the origins of American soul music and the British manner of appreciating it.”
For the original groups, there was no Riot Grrl or independent record labels to lean on. By any standards, the Shangri-Las run of hits should have set them up for a cosy retirement. Instead, when they planned to appear at a Palisades Park reunion show in 1989, they were stopped by an injunction. Apparently they no longer owned the rights to the name “Shangri-Las”. The Shirelles, the Cookies, Reparata and the Delrons, they all have similar horror stories to tell.
Not so for the New Wave. “The songs and the image are fully formed,” Becki says. “Any label we signed to would have had the package already there.” Memphis Industries, hip home to the Go! Team, Field Music and Absentee, signed the group after two handmade singles.
Kozyra of the Dansettes is also unsurprised by the amount of attention these new girl groups are commanding. “The sound is enduring, people appreciate it just as much now as they did 40 years ago.” Becki is more direct: “We’re not silly manufactured tarts. We’re pop, and that’s not a dirty word.”
If the message seems as apolitical as a Cyndi Lauper hit then maybe that’s because we’ve come out the other side: 40 years of girl groups paying their dues have finally negated what the Pipettes regard as the Beatles’ malignant effect. Their website manifesto hits it on the head: “Let’s see what new histories we can write together.”
The Pipettes single Dirty Mind (Memphis) is out now.
The Leaders of the Pack
THE SHIRELLES Hit No 1 with Will You Love Me Tomorrow in 1960. Opened the door for female high-school harmonists. The Beatles covered two of their songs.
THE RONETTES Spotted as dancers by producer Phil Spector. He hand-picked songs such as Be My Baby that lead singer Ronnie would sing back to him.
THE BREAKAWAYS The British response, decked out in Honor Blackman-style black leather. No hits on their own but sang on myriad hits, from Burt Bacharach’s Trains and Boats and Planes to Cilla Black’s You're My World.
THE SHANGRI-LAS This Sixties pop-art foursome from Queens, New York, chewed gum for a living before recording their first hit, the spooky Remember (Walking in the Sand).
