‘Richard Branson was shrieking: has anyone signed them yet?’ The invasion of all-female ska band the Bodysnatchers
‘I remember being 15, 16, 17 and being so tremendously bored,” says Nicky Summers, whose all-female London-based band the Bodysnatchers would soon become a cornerstone of the 2 Tone ska scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. “Top of the Pops had gone stale. A whole generation was waiting for something. There were no jobs. We had electricity blackouts, garbage strikes. Something had to happen.”
Inspired by the Slits, and the fusion of fashion and energy wrapped up in the Specials’ live shows, Nicky placed a series of adverts in the music press in May and July 1979. “All I got was three months of dirty phone calls,” she says. “I thought a lot of girls would want to do it, but it didn’t seem that way.” After what seemed an interminable period of waiting, Jane Summers, a drummer and part-time lifeguard, responded. “Jane assured me she had a drum kit, but I never saw it for six months,” laughs Nicky. Next, they met Stella Barker and Sarah-Jane Owen; trembling with nerves, Penny Leyton picked up the phone and organised an audition. “They had a piano in the rehearsal room, and I played Scott
Joplin!”
Now a five-piece, the teenagers extended their search for a brass player. Miranda Joyce suddenly appeared, pushed into the rehearsal room by a boy who practised in the adjacent room, who announced, “This is my sister.” Asked if she could play an instrument, Miranda replied, “No – not yet.”
Six down. One to go. But where to find a singer? After work, Nicky would often go and watch bands in London with her friend Shane MacGowan (later of the Pogues). One night, she saw him talking to a girl of mixed heritage. Intrigued
by her striking image, she asked for an introduction. “I went, ‘Yeah! I sing in the bath’,” says Rhoda Dakar. “I thought if Shane knows her, she must be alright.”
Sharing her vision to be a female version of the Specials, Nicky laid it on the line from the get-go: “We’re going to go places. Everybody’s got to focus. We’re not going to muck about. This isn’t a hobby.” Practising three nights a week on Royal College Street in a basement shared with Adam and the Ants and the Vibrators, Nicky says, “We weren’t very slick or professional musically, but that became our sound and reflected how we played.” Abundantly aware that 2 Tone was a British take on Jamaican music, Nicky says, “You couldn’t replicate black music or a Blue Beat record and do it justice. But you could do your contemporary take and put your input and life in it.”
Plugging a Dansette record player into a light socket, the girls studiously listened to ska and R&B records – Time is Tight, Monkey Spanner, 007 – to understand what made up the different elements of a song. Enjoying the naivety of it, Miranda says, “It held together on a thread. Had it been all guys I would never have gone for the audition. It’s terribly sexist I suppose, but I thought men would be better musicians or more judgmental. All the boys I grew up with who were getting into bands had been playing for years.”
Aged 20, Penny was the only group member with knowledge of music theory, but she told Smash Hits at the time: “A lot of girls seem to think that if they’re in a band they’ve got to prove themselves instrumentally, or have got to put across some heavy point about sexism or feminism, so that in the end there’s no fun in them at all and they end up downright boring”. Promoting a sense of fun, Sarah-Jane suggested calling the band Pussy Galore. Nicky was not amused. “It smacks of 70s sexism and dirty old men.” Rolling her eyes, Rhoda said, “Fuck off. If you want to call this band Pussy Galore, do it without me.” Rejecting Soft Cell and the Avengers, Stella suggested the Bodysnatchers, influenced by having recently seen the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. “It was the name that everyone hated the least,” scoffs Rhoda.
Marching across the sticky carpet at the Windsor Castle, in a support slot for the Nips, the Bodysnatchers plugged in their instruments. “My hands froze for the first song and we kind of fell apart towards the end,” recalls Nicky. “We were ramshackle and chaotic but people loved it.” Insistent that they had played all the songs they knew, the crowd demanded the Bodysnatchers