The Go-Go’s in 1981; Credit: Paul NatkinThe Go-Go’s, the new documentary about the famous all-female rock group of the same name, gets its television premiere tonight on Showtime at 9 p.m. ET. In conjunction with the film’s TV debut, the first new Go-Go’s song in almost 20 years, “Club Zero,” gets released today as a digital single.
“[I]t’s a cool song,” bassist Kathy Valentine tells ABC Audio. “We wrote it together from remote places, and we recorded it remotely too…[T]he band got together and recorded the track, and then [singer] Belinda [Carlisle] did her vocals at another time.”
The documentary features new interviews with all five Go-Go’s members — Valentine, Carlisle, guitarist Jane Wiedlin, keyboardist/guitarist Charlotte Caffey and drummer Gina Schock — both individually and together.
Valentine notes that the group interview was done at one of the Los Angeles-based band’s main stomping grounds, The Whisky a Go Go.
[W]e all met up in Los Angeles and we went to the Whisky a Go Go and went inside,” Kathy notes, “and they filmed us working on the new song and did some interview stuff.”
The Go-Go’s emerged from the late-1970s L.A. punk scene to become the most successful all-female rock band ever, as their 1981 debut album, Beauty and the Beat, spent six weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200. By 1985, however, conflicts and the pressures of fame led the group to break up, although the band members have put aside their differences to reunite multiple times over the years.
“It’s a really good story,” Valentine says of the documentary, noting that she’s happy with the film because, in addition to the drama, “[i]t really tells a lot about our accomplishments and the good stuff that happened.”
By Matt Friedlander
Copyright © 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.