Vital Disorders - Prams. Live TV broadcast

Vital Disorders were from Norwich and, apparently, all had 'fish' related names, such as Suzy Salmon, seen here singing. According to her notes accompanying the YouTube clip, she usually played bass but isn't doing here for some reason.

I heard them via a mixtape made for me in the late 1990's by Julian Smith, a punk pen pal from Middlesex. We used to swap tapes: He did me 70s/80s punk and the contemporary old school punk scene, I did him riot grrrl and post riot grrrl bands and the thrashier end of the twee spectrum. This might not sound like there was much room for overlap, but there occasionally was, perhaps best exemplified by a mutual appreciation of Half Man Half Biscuit and the Bis version of X Ray Spex's 'Germ Free Adolescence'.

Girls At Our Best - Warm Girls (1980)

It took a a long time to track down any Girls At Our Best!, and I finally heard them via a mixtape sent to me by Andy Roberts (RIP) of Linus in 2003. I think they only released the one album, Pleasure, but they also released an absolutely classic split single in the form of 'Getting Nowhere Fast/Warm Girls'.

'Getting Nowhere Fast' has a great opening, reminiscent of the Pistols 'Pretty Vacant', and the vocals  are an endearing mix of deadpan, sarcasm and wry humour. It was later covered by The Wedding Present.

'Warm Girls' was more sprawly than riff led but equally deadpan and sarcastic. It was later covered by the Aisler's Set.

Although they were from Sheffield, they feel as though they had more in common with a band like The Waitresses than with anything coming out of Sheffield in 1980, and I think it's the vocal delivery as much as anything that makes me think that.

While bands like Dolly Mixture, Mo-dettes and Girls At Our Best! don't seem to have been massively valued at the time, the sonic legacy, whether it be C86, or later twee bands, or bands like Vivian Girls and PINS today, is obvious now.

The Selecter - On My Radio (1979) (HQ)

My Two Tone moment came quite late. I'd always loved The Specials 'Ghost Town' but hadn't really investigated that particular early eighties moment beyond that, until I heard The Selector's 'Missing Words' on John Peel one day.

Not long after that, in 1999, one of my uni flatmates at Bolton Institute (as it then was) went to a Two Tone night at the union, had a great time, and was inspired to purchase a series of Two Tone compilations, which she then blasted all over the flat. Given that I was usually subjected to The Corrs, Mansun, All Saints and Savage Garden at this point in the flat, Two Tone made a nice change. It was also amazing, given the dire straights that Bolton student union must have been in at the time, that they managed to hold a Two Tone night at all, let alone a decent one.

'On My Radio' is a perennial foot tapper at the very least, great to dance to and imbued with natural bounce. The best of compilations you can get for the Selector are good value and, if you get the Celebrate The Bullet album, it has the excellent 'Red Reflections' on it.

Au Pairs-Kerb Crawler.

The only Au Pairs record I've ever owned was a much battered second hand copy of their Live in Berlin LP, which I liked but found very bleak listening. I suspect the earlier singles, while intense, were slightly less bleak sounding.

In that respect, I could easily have included the hilarious (and banned by the BBC) 'Come Again' here instead of 'Kerb Crawler', but I like the energy of 'Kerb Crawler'. Listening to it now, for the first time in quite a few years, I was struck by how influential the guitar sound has proved to be, meaning it doesn't sound like a record from the early 1980s but more like Elastica or like some post punk influenced contemporary band.

Angela McRobbie touched on this a little when writing about the Au Pairs in the introduction to her book on girls and subculture, and at the time I couldn't hear it as strongly as I do now. Listen to the Au Pairs today though and you can tell that they were at least equally as influential as many of their contemporaries, and that that kind of clipped, choppy guitar work is everywhere now.

Delta 5 - Anticipation - TOTP

This performance by a (very lively) Delta 5 is from Top Of The Pops, suggesting by it's very existence that the early days of post punk gave bands rather more access to mainstream TV than you'd think.

My Delta 5/Au Pairs period began sometime in the late 1990s and my access to their material mainly came from bootlegged stuff other people had managed to track down, meaning that I am still, to this day, am not as familiar with either band's back catalogue as I would have liked at the time.

Now. of course, the post punk revival has been going on for so long and downloading and streaming are dominating music listening to such an extent that you can basically find any Delta 5 track you want with the click of a mouse, so I really do have no excuse.

Mo-Dettes - WHITE MICE - RARE VIDEO

The story of How I Came To Hear 'White Mice' By The Mo-dettes probably says far more about pre-internet underground music communities and forms of musical communication in the 1990s than it does about punk.

I first heard this song (the only song I heard by the Mo-dettes for a very long time) when it was put on a mixtape for me by Daniel, a fanzine writer from Knutsford who I briefly ran a record label with, in 1996. He had discovered it because it was on a mixtape he'd had from Vanessa, the singer in nineties twee pop band The Melons, who was old enough to have been into C86 I think, and whose music owed a lot to bands like the Mo-dettes and Girls At Our Best!

This taping of tapes from tapes received was quite common at the time. Sometimes I'd even get a mixtape off someone which contained a fourth or fifth generation bootleg of something I'd taped off Peel, which had done the rounds of four or five other people's tapes before coming back to me. I could always tell because, aside from the deterioration in sound quality, there would be the same bit of dialogue abruptly cut off at the end of the track.

'Home taping is killing music?' not at the primitive sound quality levels we were operating at it wasn't , if anything, it introduced us to bands we would  never have heard and kept us going until those bands were rediscovered by tastemakers and their back catalogues reissued for us to buy. In 1996, the chances of legitimately finding a 7" of 'White Mice' were unlikely at best.

Dolly Mixture - Been Teen

This was the first Dolly Mixture song I ever heard, and it was courtesy of Mark Radcliffe and Mark Riley in their Mark'n'Lard period doing the graveyard shift on Radio 1.

For a long time, Dolly Mixture haven't really featured in punk or post punk histories, but are now being written back in thanks to people like Helen McCookerybook.

At the time I wonder if people thought they were a bit pop and a bit twee, and not to be taken seriously? They were very, very young at the time and they came from Cambridge I think which probably didn't have a particularly large punk scene, so all of those factors might have made it more difficult.

Two of Dolly Mixture feature in Gina Birch and Helen McCookerybook's She Punks film, and they provide some very funny moments in what is, at times, a very funny film.

X-Ray Spex - Artificial

This performance of 'Artificial' from the Old Grey Whistle Test was used as part of the UK punk episode in the BBC2 series Sounds of The Seventies in about 1993.

We watched Sounds Of The Seventies as a family on a Saturday night, much as we had with Sounds Of The Sixties a few years previously. When it came to the punk episode though, mum and dad quietly left the room and got on with other things. They returned about 25 minutes later to find us cross legged on the floor in front of the TV, singing along to Joy Division's 'Transmission', a song we'd never heard before but had got the gist of as it went along.

Unfortunately, when the series was repeated, they had to lose about five minutes from every episode, meaning a song got cut each week. It became a kind of game to try and remember each week which one we'd lost. When it came to the repeat of the punk episode, it was this clip that found itself on the cutting room floor.

Penetration - Don't Dictate

This performance of 'Don't Dictate' takes place at the Electric Circus in Manchester's Collyhurst district, and probably dates from 1976. It is the clip referred to by Liz Naylor during the punk women panel at Stoke Newington Literary Festival in 2016, in that it's definitely the right venue and Pauline Murray is clearly performing amidst a "tsuinami of gob" and, ooh, it looks grim.

Gobbing issues aside, this a great early punk live clip.

I first heard 'Don't Dictate' on one of those punk compilations that were released in the early 1990s' to cash in on the punk revival. A lot of the tracks on said compilations were dreadful, or not really punk, or the arse end of punk. So, not always that useful for those of us just discovering punk and trying to learn more about it. Sometimes though, if you persevered,  you could find some real gems amidst the crap. This was one of them.

KLEENEX ü 1979

This was the very first Kleenex song I ever heard (Peel again) and it remains my favourite of their songs.

Much revered by Greil Marcus, Swiss band Kleenex later changed their name to LiliPUT and have, over the years, become something of a cult band.

I have to confess, the time I purchased the Kleenex/LiliPUT best of CD is the only time I've ever impressed one of the staff at Piccadilly Records with my musical taste. I was a bit too stunned at the time to take full advantage of this, and it's never happened since.

The Raincoats "No One's Little Girl"

This was the second Raincoats song I ever heard, again, on the Peel show. He played it following Kurt Cobain's OD in Rome in 1994, in a sort of 'get well soon Kurt' kind of way. It does seem a very odd choice in that context but, given Cobain's avowed appreciation of the Raincoats, perhaps not as odd as you might think.

This is probably my favourite Raincoats song.

The Raincoats // The Void

This was the first Raincoats song I ever heard and, again, it was thanks to John Peel. He got Hole in for a Peel Session in 1993, and one of their tracks was a cover version of 'The Void' so, a few days ahead of the Hole session going out, he dug out the Raincoats original version, which appears on their debut self titled album from 1979.

I liked it because it sounded so strange and discordant, and slightly mournful, and I liked the slightly skittery nature of it as well. I don't think any of those qualities translated with the Hole version but then, that might have been the point.

The Slits - Love And Romance (John Peel Session rec: 19.9.1977 / broad: ...

This was the very first song I heard by The Slits. It was featured, fleetingly, in a Radio 1 documentary about Peel Sessions in 1992. As with the Banshees early Peel sessions, the first two Slits sessions are considerably rawer and faster than anything they laid down on vinyl.

Both of the Slits Peel Sessions were regularly re-visited by Peel, which was lovely during the Riot Grrrl years as it meant I had a least one mixtape where the Slits 'Vindictive' was sitting next to Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear Peel sessions tracks, and other similarly stroppy punk stuff from across the eras.

The version of 'Love and Romance' that was finally recorded (as part of The Slits debut album, Cut, in 1979) is very different to this version, and while it does work, I still love this version.

Siouxsie and the Banshees - Metal postcard

This is a clip from 1978 of the Banshees performing on the Old Grey Whistle Test (or, as my friend Clare Mullady always called it, the Old Grey Bob Test). My hunch is that it probably dates from the the end of the year, around the time their debut album, The Scream, was released.

I have to say, The Scream was more or less ruined for me because it was years and years before I managed to track down a copy and, by then, I'd heard (and loved) the 1977/1978 Peel Sessions LP. If you haven't heard that LP, it's basically the blueprint for The Scream, with most of the songs featuring on that album or else being released as stand alone singles in that period. Only the Peel session versions are both rawer and much, much faster. I couldn't get my head around how slow The Scream felt in relation to the Peel Sessions, and while I do like it, I also still prefer the Peel Sessions.

The Peel Sessions LP was my first punk record. It was bought for me by my sister in about October 1992 after we spotted it in Double Four Records in Stockport. Despite it being purchased as a Christmas present, my sister, very generously, let me have it early. There followed a delightful week in which we played it over and over again very, very loudly while jumping up and down a lot. Mum and dad were less delighted and, after a week of this, mum intervened and  the record was taken off me and wrapped up for Christmas. I think she was hoping the novelty would have worn off by the time I got it back in late December: It hadn't.

As to 'Metal Postcard' the song, the version you'll see above is played at the speed it is played on The Scream, enhancing it's brooding menace. The lyrics were inspired by a montage of anti nazi propaganda by the German Dadaist John Heartfield ('Hurrah, die Butter ist all!', Arbiter - Illustrierte - Zeitung (AIZ, Prag) 19.12.1935, S.816. Kat-NR. Z92) which I always thought was a somewhat random choice of inspiration, until I (very recently) discovered, via Jon Savage's chapter in the Linder book, that there had been a big Heartfield exhibition in London at the ICA in 1976, and extrapolating from that, this may well have been the event that introduced a number of the London punk set to Heartfield and to Dada.

Punk women, as promised...

As promised, I have organised ('curate' is such an overused word... and it seems a little ambitious sounding for what I'm doing in this case) a series of punk women clips from YouTube for your delight and delectation.

Because I missed punk entirely (by virtue of not being born until 1979) I will be posting clips in a personal chronological sequence rather than an actual chronological sequence. Ie, the artists are arranged in the approximate order in which I encountered them and their music, not by order of when the various performances or recordings happened.

I was going to do 'Eighteen songs for 2018' but by the time I'd hit twenty clips I was thinking 'Why stop at 18?' so there's more than that now. About 25 I think.

I've also cast my net beyond the UK and have strayed from the 1975-1978 period. As such, there are French, Swiss, Canadian and US artists coming up as well as artists who would be considered post punk rather than punk. I've tried to ensure that you get a mix of famous and not so famous punk artists as well because I think it's really important not to be lazy when compiling these kind of audio visual lists and, if I can do, introduce you to people you might not have come across before.

As well as giving my inspiration a boost and reminding me why it was I embarked on this whole punk women odyssey in the first place, I think it's necessary to sound a klaxon for women and punk every few years, just to ensure they aren't forgotten about... again...

Wild Ones - Invite Me In (Ring Road Live Sessions)

This live take on 'Invite Me In' reflects the more thoughtful/introspective end of the current F-Word playlist. The recorded version can be found on Mirror Touch, which was one of my favourite albums of 2017.

Gaptooth (feat. Sisters Uncut) - They Cut We Bleed

This incendiary device of a song has a starring role in this months F-Word playlist.

I hadn't actually planned to do another political/agit prop type playlist after the last two as I sometimes wonder (despite the F-Word being a UK feminist website) if people perhaps get a bit fed up with all my stroppy music selections. In the end though, the finished playlist is a bit agit prop-y (initially at least) and this can be seen to be a reflection of where we are at the moment, society and feminism wise.

My original themes/touchstones for the February playlist were going to be love and winter weather (well, it is February after all...) but it ended up being more the sinister/realistic end of the love song oevre, including Florence + The Machine's 'Various Storms & Saints', which neatly covers both the love and weather angle and is one of my favourite tracks from the How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful album.

You can read more, and listen to the playlist (if you have Spotify), over on The F-Word.

Raincoats - "Lola" featuring Viv Albertine

This is to keep you going until I have my punk videos organised properly.

A rare live collaboration between The Raincoats and the then fairly newly solo Viv Albertine.

Punk women research and fact checking

I'm currently in the process of extensively re-writing my book proposal for the punk women book, and I've discovered an alarming number of instances where I haven't got dates for things that happened.

Some things I'm going to have to email my interviewees about, but other things - like gig dates/tour dates for some of the very big punk bands - are in the public domain and can be tracked down relatively easily.

You see before you some of the books I've been using to track down dates for things, though I will also need to trawl some newspaper archives and online resources as well.

On the women and punk tip, I also feel it's time to do some YouTube clip posting again and shine a light on some of our 1970s and early 1980s punk women, so keep an eye out... it's on the way.