Day After Day #274: Girls Talk

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Girls Talk (1979)

Many artists have had vanity labels over the years, usually to release their own material. When Led Zeppelin was at the height of its powers in 1974, its contract with Atlantic Records expired and the band decided to start its own label, Swan Song Records. The Rolling Stones and Beatles had done similar moves a few years earlier; the idea was to release future Zeppelin albums as well as music by other artists the band liked. 

The first Swan Song releases weren't Zep-related, but the debut album by Bad Company and a new record from the Pretty Things. The label was active for a decade, ending in 1983 after Zep broke up and manager Peter Grant fell into ill health (although Swan Song is still used for re-releases of its albums). One of the artists who signed to the label in the early days was Welsh guitarist Dave Edmunds, who had been playing in bands since he was a teenager in the late '50s.

Although Edmunds was primarily known as a rockabilly artist, he also was a producer and had a big hit in 1970 with a cover of "I Hear You Knocking." He produced early '70s British pub rock acts like Brinsley Schwarz (featuring a young Nick Lowe) and Flamin' Groovies as well as blues-rockers Foghat. Edmunds released a 1972 album called Rockpile and for the tour, called his band Dave Edmunds and Rockpile; after the tour, the band split up.

In 1976, Edmunds and Lowe formed a new version of Rockpile along with Billy Bremner and Terry Williams (who had played drums in the original Rockpile); by this point, Rockpile's sound had evolved into power pop, although it also got lumped in as new wave by the late '70s. But because Edmunds had his deal with Swan Song and Lowe had his with Stiff Records (where he was in-house producer), things got a little complicated. Essentially, the band would record albums and then release them as either Lowe or Edmunds solo albums. 

One of those albums was 1979's Repeat When Necessary, which was billed to Edmunds. The album featured mostly covers, although Bremner contributed three originals, including Graham Parker's "Crawling from the Wreckage" and Hank DeVito's "Queen of Hearts" (which later became a hit for Juice Newton). The most prominent song on the album was "Girls Talk," which Elvis Costello wrote and gave to Edmunds to cover. 

It's a typically lacerating but extremely tuneful Costello composition about the emotionally damaging world of gossip. 

"There are some things/You can't cover up with lipstick and powder/Thought I heard you mention my name/Can't you talk any louder?/Don't come any closer, don't come any nearer/My vision of you can't come any clearer/Oh, I just wanna hear girls talk."

Costello and the Attractions did their own version and released it in 1980 as the B-side to their cover of "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down."

"Got a loaded imagination being fired by girls talk/It's a more or less situation inspired by girls talk/But I can't say the words you wanna hear/I suppose you're gonna have to play it by ear, right here/And now girls talk/And they wanna know how, girls talk/And they say it's not allowed, girls talk/If they say that it's so/Don't they think that I know by now?"

The Edmunds version is more upbeat than Costello's, driven by Edmunds' acoustic guitar work and vocal delivery, while Costello's take is a little more sinister. Both versions are excellent, but they just hit differently.

"But the word up on everyone's lipstick that you're dedicated/You may not be an old-fashioned girl but you're gonna get dated/Was it really murder? Were you just pretending?/Lately, I have heard you're the living end."

Edmunds' version was released in June 1979 and hit #4 on the U.K. Singles Chart; it also got to #18 in Canada, which is where I was hearing it regularly on the radio. In the U.S., the song reached #65 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Linda Ronstadt also covered the song on her 1980 new wavy album Mad Love; she also covered two other Costello songs ("Party Girl" and "Talking in the Dark"). Aimee Mann has praised the song, saying she used to cover it live, and Tegan and Sara did a version for the soundtrack of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

After the success of "Girls Talk," Edmunds and Rockpile released the first and only album under the name Rockpile with 1980's Seconds of Pleasure; Edmunds' contract with Swan Song was up so he was freed to do so. The album had a minor hit with "Teacher, Teacher" and the band ended up playing the Heatwave festival in Toronto in August 1980 in front of over 100,000 fans. But tensions between Edmunds and Lowe, mainly over Edmunds' dislike of band manager Jake Riviera, led to Rockpile splitting up in 1981.

Edmunds released four more albums in the '80s with limited success and by the '90s was essentially retired, although he joined a couple of Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band tours in 1992 and 2000. He did a tour in 2007 and performed live a few times over the next couple of years. His last release was an instrumental album in 2015.