40 years on from The Specials’ era-defining anthem ‘Ghost Town’
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(Credit: Alamy)
How The Specials contributed to a classic Go-Go’s song
How it ever took until 2021 for eternal new wave heroes The Go-Go’s to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is beyond comprehension. Emerging from the original California punk rock scene of the late 1970s, The Go-Go’s eventually adapted to more progressive pop sounds as they assembled a killer list of self-written and self-recorded tracks.
The Go-Go’s were on an important mission: they were out to prove that they were more than just good for being girls. The band did everything to avoid the trappings that came with being an all-female rock band, and instead, just positioned themselves as a really good rock and roll band. Period. End of story.
That couldn’t have been done if they didn’t have killer songs, however. The Go-Go’s turned out to be innovators in the emerging scene of new wave, pairing punk ideas with pop hooks and synth-rock style. Their debut, 1981’s Beauty and the Beat, was a landmark that paired power-pop with punk rock in a new style that had never been seen or heard before. When you turned to the album credits, you didn’t see producers or professional songwriters’ names next to the songs. You saw the band members’ names – because they did it all themselves.
Well, most of it was written themselves. Two songs on the album have writing credits outside of the band. The album’s third track, ‘Tonite’, was written alongside Peter Case, a musician and singer who was a part of a band called The Plimsouls at the time. Case shares credit with guitarists Charlotte Caffey and Jane Wiedlin, the band’s two main songwriters at the time. But it was another track, the album’s leadoff song and second single, that had a slightly more famous connection.
That’s because Terry Hall, one of the lead singers for British two-tone ska leaders The Specials, is credited with co-writing the song ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’. Hall was still in The Specials at the time, although he and fellow singers Neville Staple and Lynval Golding would leave the group soon afterwards to form the new band Fun Boy Three. But more importantly, Hall had a brief affair with Wiedlin at the time, and their romance formed the basis of the song.
Hall was in a relationship at the time, and the need to keep their affair on the down-low was the initial starting point for ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’. Hall mailed Wiedlin some lyrics that related to the romance, and Wiedlin composed the song’s music and added some lines of her own. By the time it was finished, Wiedlin had ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’ as it became famous through The Go-Go’s finished.
The affair was brief, but Hall and Fun Boy Three did their own version of the song in 1983. That slower and slightly down version of the track has nothing on the poppy original, which is one of the many jewels in The Go-Go’s rock and roll crown. ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’ only peaked at number 20 in 1981, but for a debut single it made a strong showing. The Go-Go’s would peak as singles artists on their next release when ‘We Got the Beat’ rose all the way to number two in 1982. The song that kept it from number one: fellow original punk rocker Joan Jett and her cover of Arrow’s ‘I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll’.