Various – GRLZ, Women Ahead of Their Time (Crippled Dick Hot Wax)

It’s the stories behind the songwriters that makes this album an artefact. As Vivien Goldman says in the liner notes, “Most of the voices here blossomed, bloomed, then flared out into free-fall like bright fireworks.” Which makes hearing stuff like The Slits’ I Heard It Through The Grapevine and Anna Domino’s Zanna even more important.

There really were a lot of breakthrough female artists in the early eighties, writing and presenting pop music in truly new ways. But have things really changed if you’re new and exciting and female? Or are we stuck in a compromise where the path to success – and we should ask Jem – is just to be the new Dido? “There was a high turnover among these girl groovers who,” Goldman writes as if ’83 was ’06, “found touring a hard combo with motherhood, or the pressures of eternal infancy thrust upon female pop performers just too much of a pain.”


This review also published in: Record Collector