Badge Music Blog

Girls Aloud need a history lesson

It's finally happened. Girls Aloud have ripped up the inventive pop handbook and, in the name of our good lord Tesco, "gone 60s". In the video for new single The Promise, they've got big hair, thick eyeliner, Supremes dresses and Ronson-lite horns. They've weighed up Duffy's sales and Amy Winehouse's superstardom and come up with Stop by the Spice Girls.

Female artists should stop going girl-group. It's the default retro setting and the lady equivalent of the boys donning fedoras and suits and churning out swing covers. Girls Aloud's producers have always been capable of making exciting and innovative pop music, so it's disappointing that they've hopped on Duffy's gravy train. But all is not lost. If they really must go backwards to look forwards, here are some alternative female contributions to the rock'n'roll canon from which Girls Aloud's next album can draw inspiration.

1. Androgynous 80s pop

Cheryl Cole's shown her authoritarian side as an X Factor judge, so she'd step into Annie Lennox's boardroom-dominatrix shoes with ease. Add a sprinkle of Pull Up to the Bumper's synth-and-bass and they really could let the funky music do the talking.

2. Riot grrrl

"Suck my left one," urged Bikini Kill back in 1992, while Heavens to Betsy got angry and promised to "cut you up, gouge out your eyes". Girls Aloud could handle the aggression – Nicola told Chris Moyles to "shut the fuck up" in Heat magazine this week: "[People] are made to feel shit about themselves because they don't conform to how society wants them to be." Next stop, scrawling "slut" on her arms in eyeliner.

3. Early 90s rap

Sarah Harding dabbled in rap on their Walk This Way cover, but it was a touch GCSE drama project. Perhaps a crash course in the attitude of late 80s/early 90s rappers like Salt-N-Pepa, Yo-Yo, MC Lyte and Queen Latifah might make this a viable new direction.

4. The ladies of punk

The Girls were kitted out in punk gear for an NME feature, but they went down the New Look Sex Pistols road rather than paying tribute to the women of the era. If album number six took elements of The Slits, The Raincoats, Siouxsie, X and Lydia Lunch, added Xenomania production and Cathy Dennis hit, well, I think we'd be looking at something a little more interesting. Let's keep pop progressive, eh?

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