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.