I like the Go-Go’s, really I do. Their peppy power pop fit nicely with the New Wave movement of the early ’80s and MTV made sure you noticed how easy they were on the eyes. I saw them play at the UD Fieldhouse — the old one north of Main Street that had acoustics like a quonset hut — and they gave a fun show, though my most enduring memory is that they were really tiny (Belinda Carlisle is supposedly 5’7″, but she didn’t look any taller than Jane Wiedlin, who’s 5’1″).
But are they worthy of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? The poobahs said yes — standards are noticeably lower for any act featuring women, or Blondie wouldn’t have sailed in its first year of eligibility — so they’ll be inducted this year. Their main claim to the honor: They remain the only all-female group to reach the top of the album charts writing their own songs and playing their own instruments. Their debut album, “Beauty and the Beat,” spent six weeks at No. 1 in 1982, eventually selling more than 2 million copies.
This tune, which opened the album and became its first single, wasn’t their most popular — it stalled at No. 20 — but the video was in constant rotation on MTV and sealed their image as effervescent good-time girls, a far cry from the punk rockers they were when Belinda Carlisle and Jane Wiedlin started the band in 1978. (Fun fact: Two years earlier, Carlisle briefly joined the Germs, under the name Dottie Danger).
Wiedlin, the band’s principal songwriter, co-wrote this one with Terry Hall, the British singer who fronted the Specials and later Fun Boy Three, about the clandestine affair they conducted when the groups toured together (Hall sent Wiedlin the lyrics, she wrote the music). It was a big hit in several countries, but not in the U.K., where the darker version recorded in 1983 by Fun Boy Three was more popular.
