Three sassy young British women in matching polka dot dresses belt out a pop song with unified voices accompanied by choreographed, seductive hand gestures. While it sounds like an evening television program from the early ‘60s, the scene describes a typical live performance by Brighton, UK-based girl group revivalists the Pipettes. The trio, while almost excessively retro, is not to be taken lightly as their debut album, We Are the Pipettes will most likely end up as this year’s finest straight-up pop record.
The group takes an almost puritanical approach to their music, clinging to Phil Spector-produced girl groups as their ideal, while shunning those with a Beatles-centric approach to rock and roll history. “We don’t love you (yeah, yeah, yeah),” they claim on their web site. Spector’s revolutionary “Wall of Sound” production technique, which involves large orchestras of musicians playing all their instruments at once is found throughout We Are the Pipettes. Spector invented the technique to create songs that would sound rich and full on AM radio; the Pipettes employ it to make their music beautifully anachronistic.
In the heyday of girl group mania, it seemed like record labels had secret factories churning out groups on conveyor belts. The labels would often recruit girls individually and assign each member their image. Even the most successful—and talented—girl groups of the era, such as the Supremes and the Shirelles, didn’t write their own songs; their biggest hits were written by people like Carole King or the Motown songwriting trio of Holland-Dozier-Holland. The Pipettes, in contrast, write most of their songs themselves, and their music comes off as more domineering and sexually aggressive than that of their comparatively passive predecessors.
So, why haven’t these girls taken off in the single-oriented mainstream? The Pipettes’s “Pull Shapes” is the perfect pop song for a generation too young for the Supremes’s “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Unlike the Supremes’ gem, however, “Pull Shapes” hasn’t exactly shot to number one on the charts, topping out at 26, and it’s very unlikely that the Pipettes will be able to match the Supremes’s 12 number one hits on the U.S. charts. Perhaps it’s because they released their record on the indie label Memphis Industries and can’t get the distribution or press required for such musical stardom. Or maybe the public just wants something new and sees the Pipettes as a novelty act. Either way, it’d really be a shame if the majority of the population fails to hear about one of this year’s most intriguing acts.
