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.