Playing With a Different Sex

The Au Pairs had been warned. And it would have been so easy not to do it. It would have been so easy to stay silent, passive, and do as they were told. But let’s be real. A political punk band isn’t going to stop being political for the sake of some airtime on the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test. That would be so very boring. That would be so very stupid. Because, if you have a platform, saying fuck you to Margaret Thatcher and saying fuck you to Northern Ireland for torturing female political prisoners on live television was exactly what you should do.

Thus: the Au Pairs got up there and performed their song “Armagh,” even though they were told they really shouldn’t. There was the heaving snarl of Jane Munro’s bass, the strident slant of Pete Hammond’s drums, and the dueling guitars and vocals of Paul Foad and Lesley Woods. “We don’t torture,” Woods sang, “We’re a civilized nation!” Anything can happen on live television. The Au Pairs knew that. They were never asked back.

They weren’t interested in making things easy. They didn’t often write lyrics that you could get your head around quickly, nor did they construct songs focused on delivering a dopamine hit on first blush, even if that was, perhaps, the ultimate intent. And in their politics, they weren’t interested in any sort of armchair socialism, theoretically dense, pseudo-Marxist whatever bullshit. “We’re not an army on a mission, we do commercial songs,” Pete once said, tongue-in-cheek, to NME in 1980. Chiming in, Woods said: “We’d like to be number one.”

Here is what they did instead: write music that, while not exactly militant, was explicitly political. There is no way to listen to “Armagh” and not taste how much the band detested Margaret Thatcher and her curdled, inherently cynical realpolitik. There is no alternative, Thatcher famously said about capitalism being the only system that works. Wait, seriously? the Au Pairs seemed to say in response. They were cynical about the idea that following the ’60s, everyone was supposed to be so liberated—how could that possibly explain Thatcher? It was not as if we had finally figured out everything about sex. The Au Pairs were blunt about all of this in a way that made people uncomfortable. “All I do in writing lyrics,” said Woods, “is try and provide a new understanding of situations that people take for granted or accept as natural or normal.” This is what made their debut album, Playing With a Different Sex, a revelation.

At the end of the ’70s, Rock Against Racism—a disparate network of anti-fascist, anti-racist bands that formed in opposition to an increase in support for the National Front, a far-right, fascist political movement and an uptick in violence against people of color throughout the country—was at its height. Thatcher and Reagan were about to bring their bootstrap politics to higher offices. The situation was unsustainable. In 1978, in Birmingham, the Au Pairs formed out of their local RAR chapter. Woods had just dropped out of Birmingham University, and like many other young people in an economically ravaged, post-industrial Britain, was living off of the dole. Through RAR she met Paul, who introduced her to his childhood friend, Pete. They started playing together, inspired by the blade-sharp, discordant sound of bands like Gang of Four, the Slits, and the Pop Group. At first, they were a band called End of Chat, which was more leftfield jazz and funk than rock’n’roll. After spending time playing together, with Woods writing the lyrics and the band co-writing everything else, they decided to become a four-piece, symmetrical. Two women, two men. Munro joined, and at some point, End of Chat became the Au Pairs. And the Au Pairs became a post-punk band that sounded like absolutely no one, with Woods’ perfectly pitched alto, a certain sonic symmetry, and lyrics that were abstract but entirely potent.

They became very big on the indie club circuit, very fast. Their first performances took place just four weeks after Munro joined. They went from “merely edgy and oppressive,” as one reporter wrote, to having “a cohesion, an unforced flow of power and sense of resolution and purpose.” They toured with Gang of Four and the Buzzcocks, playing high-profile gigs that landed them a deal with the indie label Human.

Along the way, Woods became a palpable stage presence. She wore high heels, a full face of makeup, and sang with shocking explicitness about sex. It wasn’t exactly well-received. “I don’t know how they call themselves feminists when they dress like tarts,” one showgoer told a reporter for Rock On. “You’re a girl and you sing about boys and girls and that’s okay because it fits into music,” Woods quipped to Melody Maker, paraphrasing one particularly misogynistic review of the band. “You couldn’t sing about Marxist ideology because you’re not intelligent enough.” In the eyes of the band’s critics, what Woods was doing couldn’t be called “feminist” at all. Isn’t it bad for women, one might incorrectly think, to stand up there like a piece of meat? Why couldn’t the Au Pairs be more like the Gang of Four—cut all the salacious stuff and just focus on theoretical Marxism?

When it comes to the sexual revolution, there are rules: Enjoy sex, but enjoy it the right way. Be a feminist, but don’t be femme. Be a lesbian, but don’t secretly covet the gaze of men. Woods was queer, sexually fluid. She wrote about the freedom of loving who you want, and she wasn’t always sex-positive about it. This provocation was the essence of the Au Pairs as a political project: Their deliberate handling of sex forced a conversation many would have preferred to dismiss as anti-intellectual or disgusting. The sexual revolution may have promised to destigmatize the actual enjoyment of sex, but does liberation happen just because men know they’re supposed to make women cum? Does sex actually have to be about cumming? That’s the essence of “Come Again,” a breakneck beatdown that almost scans as surf rock, with its swinging lines of guitars and shuffling drums. “Is your finger aching?!” Woods shouts in one moment as the guitars crash into each other, white-capped and supercharged, “I can feel you hesitating!”

When reporters asked what the Au Pairs’ songs were about, Woods usually said something along the lines of “personal relationships.” Here’s an example: “We’ve never been into party politics,” Woods once said to the Birmingham Evening Mail. “I write about personal relationships and the attitudes people have to each other.” Personal relationships is, perhaps, a mannered way to describe Playing With a Different Sex’s opening track, “We’re So Cool.” Girl meets girl meets boy meets boy’s girlfriend meets boy. Or however you’d like to interpret it. The lyrics are opaque enough that you can draw your own conclusions. “I don’t mind if you want to sleep on your own,” sings Woods, playing it so cool, so chill. Beside her, Munro’s bassline is a jackhammer, plummeting, smashing itself into concrete. The guitars feel like sticking your finger into an electrical outlet. But then, just when you think that fucking whomever you like is some kind of nonstop all-night free-love Dionysian utopia, Woods reminds you that actually, sex is a power exchange. “You must admit,” she sings, “When you think about it, that you’re mine.”

The record came out in May 1981 with a striking cover. Shot by the Magnum photojournalist Eve Arnold, the photograph features two young women in Inner Mongolia training for the militia, running through a field in pink dresses and white scarves. It cemented the record’s ethos: that of chaos and collectivity. Somehow, this translated into a bona fide indie hit. Playing With a Different Sex peaked at No. 33 on the UK album charts and No. 1 on the Brit Independent Charts. “Here, unless I am much mistaken, is the band that will provide the biggest sales for a small independent record label since Joy Division,” wrote a writer for the Guardian after seeing the band play at the 100 Club. Woods’ dreams of being “number one” were realized, sort of. They were critical darlings. Lester Bangs namechecked them, alongside the Slits and the Raincoats, as “the absolute best rock ‘n’ roll anywhere today.” He continued: “The other night I saw God in the form of the Au Pairs.” Greil Marcus called them “the UK’s most interesting and challenging band.” Kurt Cobain loved them too.

Challenging, as Marcus puts it, is a good word for it. For all of the Au Pairs’ commercial ambition, Playing With a Different Sex is an oblique piece of music. It is one of those records that requires you to rewire your brain a little bit. They play with dissonance and repetition, taking one phrase and beating it into the ground until it becomes less of an earworm and more of an absurdist echolalia. The playful “Dear John,” warps images of kingfisher-blue cars and a sex maniac named John, repeating his name through the epistolary song. Robert Christgau, in a rare lukewarm review of the record, referred to the band as a “bored Gang of Four.” I get it. “Headache for Michelle,” for instance, is nearly seven minutes of downtempo dubby post-punk. It seems like it’s going nowhere, with its meandering bassline and occasional flickers of guitar. But spend more time with it, and it becomes almost like a meditation. The little guitar flickers start to feel like needle pricks on your skin.

And then there is “It’s Obvious,” where repetition and dissonance rejiggers itself as something completely ecstatic. It is the Au Pairs’ anthem, an absolutely perfect post-punk song. First it is the drums, a playful sort of military march. Then it is the braggadocio of the guitar and the way the bass feels like a snake wrapping itself around your throat and maybe you like that. Then Woods’ voice comes in. She sing-speaks in maxims: “It’s nice. It’s paradise. You’re equal, but different.” It is an emerald in a dumpster of a punk song, the record’s climax, its final sigh. It is unmistakably sexy, taking the band’s sexual politics and almost allowing them to be purely pleasure-oriented, if only for a moment. Woods isn’t breaking off from being directly political here, but in “It’s Obvious,” more so than any other song on the record, the operative is to actually feel good. To lose yourself. A guitar break in the second act is like a Wile E. Coyote motorcycle smokeout skronk, where the Road Runner wins and there’s a sense of gratitude about having an Acme dumbbell fall on your head. To put it in simpler terms, it makes you want to just say goddamn.

The Au Pairs, like many great punk bands of the era, flamed out as quickly as they took off. They toured too much. Their original project of communication and closeness between four people, as Foad once put it, began to sour. Their follow-up album, Sense and Sensuality, wasn’t quite as good as its predecessor, written in a rush as tensions started to boil. They broke up soon after, and it became clear that, like many cult bands, the Au Pairs would be remembered by their first record, a nanometer in the cosmic cuticle that is the history of the universe. It would always be about Playing With a Different Sex. It was always about saying what you feel about your relationships with other people. It was all about being radically honest. This is the kind of ethos that would later start riot grrrl. This is the kind of ethos that would make Kathleen Hanna scream “girls to the front.”

It was ironic how things ended: a massive communication breakdown, Woods deciding not to share any of the rights or royalties to the songs. When asked about it in an interview with the Guardian in 2021, Woods said: “Women need to control their own music.” And while this is true in principle and in reality, there is perhaps a notable distinction to be made between, say, Scooter Braun controlling your masters and refusing to share songwriting credits with the people you were in a punk band with when you were young. But then again, Woods never claimed to be some kind of saint. She wanted to be number one. And for a perfect, exhilarating moment, she was.

Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.