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We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. By using our website and our services, you agree to our use of cookies as described in our Cookie Policy. Blasting into the post-punk consciousness with a tremendous debut album, the Au Pairs, fronted by lesbian-feminist Lesley Woods, played brittle, dissonant, guitar-based rock that shared political and musical kinship with the Mekons and especially the Gang of Four. The music was danceable, imbued with an almost petulant irony, and for a while, very hip and well-liked by critics. Unlike many bands of the day, however, the Au Pairs at least initially backed it up with searing, confrontational songs celebrating sexuality from a woman's perspective. Also, they took swipes at the conservative political climate sweeping England after Margaret Thatcher's election as Prime Minister. Occasionally, Woods' commitments to sexual and social politics made her sound inflexible, doctrinaire, and hectoring especially on their OK second album.
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But fifteen years earlier, two girls and two boys from Birmingham got together under the name of the Au Pairs, with bassist Jane Munro being the last one to join. I was on the periphery of the Moseley music scene and the other band members and I had a mutual friend, Martin Culverwell, who later became our manager. Lesley rang me. The four of us had a jam together at a room over a pub, and the rest is history. It was a fantastic time to be growing up, listening to the Beatles and the Stones, then later to Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Roxy Music and reggae. By now they had been playing a lot of gigs, including some sessions for the BBC some of the tracks from those sessions are available on the great anthology 2CD set 'Stepping Out of Line', which was released a couple of years ago. I had never realized that he had written lyrics about the mentality of a wife-beater… When you read about the Au Pairs nowadays, you always get the feeling that they were a very odd band even back then. When looking back on it, Jane agrees, at least kind of. In retrospect though, to judge by the number of people who remember and were influenced by the band, I guess we must have stood out — possibly down to Lesley terrifying the audience!
The Au Pairs were a British post-punk band that formed in Birmingham in and continued until They produced two studio albums and three singles. Their songs were said to have "contempt for the cliches of contemporary sexual politics" [2] and their music has been compared to the Gang of Four and the Young Marble Giants. Their first album Playing with a Different Sex is considered a post-punk classic with strong, sarcastic songs like "It's Obvious" and "We're So Cool" taking a dry look at gender relations. Other songs, such as "Armagh" with its refrain, "we don't torture" criticized the British government's treatment of Irish Republican prisoners in the troubles in Northern Ireland , which caused some controversy at the time. The band performed in for the concert film Urgh! A Music War.