Melody Maker May 16, 1981
GIRLS AT OUR BEST
City Poly, London
EVER in love with a band you probably shouldn’t have fallen in love with?
I reckon Leeds’ latest export, Girls At Our Best, seduced me unawares, ‘cos it’s all down here in my notebook – “untogether, off key, out of tune, at times over-derivative, at other times plain awful” and yet. inexplicably, I’m hooked.
Somewhere in this chaos beats a heart of pure pop gold, a ramshackle rediscovery of the Buzzcocks’ old territory punk prettied up for the radio.
The three-blokes-with-a-girl-singer line-up is bound to draw comparisons, but they’re nowhere near as powerful or pretentious as the Banshees, not as fickle or fragile as the irksome Altered Images, and they play a whole totally different ballgame to the Pretenders.
Judy Evans is the focal attraction with a Julie Andrews outfit straight out of “The Sound Of Music”, and a voice that wanders in and out of register without ever losing it’s essential grasp of cute, almost nursery rhyme songs like “Go For Gold”, “£600,000” and their crashing cover of that tired old crusading warhorse “This Train”.
James Alan (guitar), Terry Swift (bass) and Carl Harper (drums) provide basic, bull-at-a-gate backing and, like I said, the exact nature of their magic eludes me.
Funny, ain’t that always the way with true love?
— STEVE SUTHERLAND.