A GIRLSCHOOL FOR HEADBANGERS!

In a rehearsal room on the southwest London suburb of Putney, Girlschool lead guitar player Kelly Johnson and rhythm guitarist Kim McAuliffe are swigging from bottles of German beer during a break in their efforts to write a number of new songs for their third LP, a record they are sporadically making, with the assistance of former Police co-producer Nigel Gray.

Down the corridor, in what Kelly and Kim refer to as “the common-room,” drummer Denise Dufort and new bass player Gil Weston are watching this week’s British chartmovers on Top Of The Pops.

Disturbed only by the occasional rumble of trains on the nearby subway line the Girlschool guitarists are more concerned with considering English girls’ schools.

Kelly, it transpires, went to a mixed sex school in England in the far North London suburbs: “I thought it was really good to go to a mixed school. Mind you, the school playground had a dividing fence that the boys used to have to try and crawl over. But our classes were all mixed, with boys making up about three-quarters of them.