Lips Unsealed by Belinda Carlisle Page B

toured with Madness, we waited for them to finish their preshow dinner and then dug through the trash for the scraps they threw out.
    I still managed to gain thirty pounds over the next two months thanks to the Nutella I smeared on white bread every morning. And the beer and booze I drank every day when the entire city seemed to hit the pub. The good times often carried over to the house, which seemed to turn into party central. Big surprise, right? It was a house full of girls.
    There was one particular party that was memorable because it got out of hand when all of London—from skinheads to celebrities—seemed to come. I don’t know how it happened, but well over a hundred people showed up and the crowd spilled out onto the street. I saw Ozzy Osbourne and tennis star Ilie Nastase, and since we didn’t know either of them, I wouldn’t have believed it was actually them if I hadn’t read about it later in one of the London papers.
    In addition to the celebrities, we invited all types and were unaware that you didn’t mix punks, skinheads, and rockabilly boys. But they all converged at our house and after enough beer they beat the crap out of one another. We woke up the next day and found the house trashed. It looked like a battlefield.
    Little did we know it was like a warm-up for our tour. We played rough clubs across Northern England, including Leeds, Newcastle, Coventry, and Liverpool. The conditions were difficult and trying. The weather was dreary and we were broke, lonely, exhausted, and uncomfortable. Worse, we had to deal with the hard-core skinheads at the clubs where we played. They got drunk, fought, and taunted us as we performed.
    Apparently that’s what they did. They were young, angry neo-Nazi extremists who hated everyone, including us—and that was before we played the first song. Once they saw we were five little girls from Los Angeles, they yelled vile things and called us terrible names. They spit on us too. They called it “gobbing.” I later read that the practice beganat a Damned concert when someone threw a beer at Rat Scabies, and he grabbed the guy and spit in his face. I also heard it may have originated with the Sex Pistols.
    Regardless, gobbing caught on—and it caught us by surprise. Keep in mind that the clubs we were playing were more like large rooms in a bar, or next to the bar. The stages were slightly elevated platforms, and the audience was a few feet away. They may as well have been part of the show, and with their gobbing, they were.
    They ran up to the stage, coughed up a wad of spit, and hocked it at us. It was unnerving, and getting hit with spit was downright gross. I never saw the gobs coming, but I felt my stomach turn after they hit. There were stories about performers getting sick after being hit in the eye or accidently swallowing someone else’s spit. We came offstage covered in snot, and I cried afterward, as did the other girls.
    On the bright side, though, Stiff Records—the prestigious label that launched Elvis Costello, the Damned, the Pogues, and Nick Lowe—released “We Got the Beat” as a single in the UK. They did it as a favor to Madness, but we didn’t care how it got done. On May 9, the label issued a press release that touted us as “5 girls from Hollywood aged 19 through 21, who play as good as they look.”
    “We Got the Beat” took off in the clubs and became an underground dance hit. Suddenly the Go-Go’s were making a splash. The Specials asked us to record background vocals for them, and we were nominated for Most Improved Band at the Club 88 Awards. We finished up our stay in London with a June show at the Embassy club that inspired a writer for
Sounds
magazine to observe we “broke down the barriers of music biz supercooldom to the extent that people more accustomed to posing were actually moved to shake bits of their bodies in time with the music.”
    He praised “We Got the Beat,” “Automatic,” and “Tonight.” “Doing their