As I've mentioned before on this blog, I am a sucker for a compilation. This goes all the way back to when I first became seriously interested in Rock and Metal although back then I was obviously buying cassettes and vinyl.
I'd happily pick up something with Paramoid on it for the tenth time just on the off-chance that one of the tracks I hadn't heard might be a hidden gem. Great way to find new music and if all else fails, I had something I could stick in my Walkman.
I quickly found that there were two types of compilation. Type 1 was the Label Sampler, where somebody like Neat Records put a collection of bands out in hopes that the established bands would lure in new fans for the up and comers. Type 2 was best described as "What can we licence cheaply?" I always found this second type more interesting. Alongside the old, old tracks by Motorhead and Black Sabbath - and for some reason Hawkwind appeared on a lot of Metal compilations - you'd get more obscure stuff. Sometimes old bands from the 70s, sometimes bands that were only popular in their home countries and sometimes stuff that had no real relation to anything else. Those are why I was buying the rtape in the first place.
Moving on to the present day...
Even after all these years I still have a small pile of cassettes on my shelf that I can't bear to get rid of, including quite a few compilations. Here they are strewn across my bed.
I've had some of these for nearly 30 years. Christ, now I feel old.
There's one in particular we're going to talk about today.
I appreciate you can't read the cover very well so here's the CD version.
Dear Gods, that's ugly. A twelve year old with MS Paint could do a better job.
The track listing leans heavily towards stuff from the 1970s that could be obtained without too much drama.
This CD was released in 1995 and much of this material would have been ancient even then. The UFO track is from their first album (1970) and the Dokken & Tygers tracks might still be more recent but still date back to 1979 and 1981 repectively.
You wonder who this compilation was aimed at - either somebody just getting into rock and exploring the history or an older fan revisiting old favourites. Or, more likely, somebody who'd sorta heard of these bands and wanted something new for the car.
I recently dug this cassette out and give it a spin and that's when I rediscovered a track I'd forgotten about.
The who, now?
As you can guess this is a cover of the AC/DC classic done by a band who have a female singer and may even be an all-female outfit. And I have never heard anything by this band anywhere else.
A bit of googling turned up a wee bit of information. "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" was released as a single in 1985 and turns up on two other "Cheapo" compilations but there's no record of any other releases and there sure as hell isn't any information on who the Beasty Girls were. To make it even weirder, they recorded before The Beastie Boys recorded their breakthrough album in 1986.
The label was a German one so you'd expect Beasty Girls to be German, or at least Brits who had connections in Germany and I get the feeling this was a one-off outfit put together for the single. (I actually wonder if members of Girlschool did a bit of moonlighting here. Maybe I should ask them.)
That's it. That's all I have. I can't even play you the song because it isn't on Youtube and how often does that happen?
So for now, I have a mystery on my hands and no real way of solving it. I feel a headache coming on.
That's all folks.
