Girlschool look back on 45 years of St Valentine’s Day Massacre with Motörhead: “It still sounds bloody good”

Posted On February 15, 2026February 15, 2026

It’s now 45 years since Headgirl dropped their St Valentine’s Day Massacre EP, an impromptu fusion of the all-female Girlschool’s hard rock snark and the speeding juggernaut of Motörhead, leaving its burnt rubber skidmarks across the heights of the new wave of British heavy metal.

Way back in 1975, rock was a strictly male domain. Despite some of the gender barriers broken during the previous decade’s counterculture in the States, over in the UK’s rock landscape, the only woman up on stage giving the blokes a run for their money was the bass-attacking Suzi Quatro amid glam’s heyday…and she was from Detroit. Despite such a seemingly barren climate for aspiring female rockers, South London schoolmates and neighbours from the Wandsworth area, Kim McAuliffe and Dinah Enid Williams decided to pick up the respective guitar and bass and start jamming anyway.

“We didn’t even think about it really,” McAuliffe tells Far Out, still in Girlschool as rhythm guitarist, singer and de facto captain. “I mean, the reason we became an all-girl band in the first place is because we couldn’t find any blokes that wanted to play with us.”

After pestering her next-door neighbour cousin to start a band, repeated rejections at least resulted in a prized hand-me-down guitar and the means to pursue rock without the lads, “We just found other girls that was like minded. So, that’s how that all started. We just sort of said ‘sod ‘em’ really. We’ll just do our own thing.”

At this point, there was no awareness of Los Angeles’ oft-compared The Runaways, and prior trailblazers Fanny and Birtha didn’t enter McAuliffe and the gang’s record collections til sometime into their tenure as Painted Lady, the predecessor covers band playing anything from the Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ to UFO’s ‘Shoot Shoot’, hopping around the punk and metal circuit and winning residencies in Tooting and Clapham while still in their teens. They were underage, of course, much of the pubs and clubs turned a blind eye as the venues packed out until a local paper splashed a picture of 16-year-old Williams downing a pint of Guinness.

Before long, Kelly Johnson joined the outfit for lead guitar and primary vocal duties, and Denise Dufort sat on the drum stool in April 1978, adopting the Girlschool moniker from the wholly unmetal double A-side to Wings’ ‘Mull of Kintyre’. The classic line-up was cemented. Independently cutting and producing the debut ‘Take It All Away’ shortly after, a chance encounter with BBC Radio 1 tastemaker John Peel outside the dingy Soho studio yielded a surprise spin of their single on his acclaimed Friday show.

“I don’t normally play stuff like this,” he reportedly quipped while broadcasting Girlschool among his otherwise alternative curations.

It turns out Lemmy was listening and seriously impressed. Needing a support band for the upcoming Overkill Tour, the Motörhead bassist and frontman sought out Girlschool to accompany his trio on the 18 dates across the UK. Bizarrely, McAuliffe and Johnson had not long become exposed to Motörhead’s speed heavy rock, McAuliffe’s mother frequently in receipt of free records courtesy of a friend in the music business and on one fortunate day handed the girls a 10” of the band’s ‘Motörhead’ second single.

“We’d never heard of ‘em,” McAuliffe confesses. “Didn’t even know a thing about them, and put it on the turntable and thought, ‘Bloody hell, what the hell’s this?’ It did sound very much like what we were doing at the time, you know, a bit sort of like noisy and trashy and thrashy and whatever and punky, so we just thought, ‘Oh my God, look at the state of them…they look a bit scary!”

Two months later, they received a call from the man himself asking to meet. “Lemmy came down to rehearsal, and that was it,” McAuliffe looks back with a laugh. “We just got on like a house on fire. Next thing we know, we were out of the punk clubs and the rock clubs, and we were on big stages with [Motörhead] on their Overkill Tour.”

Girlschool were already a well-oiled live machine, having played countless shows before even cutting their first album, but such a concert hall upgrade still hit Girlschool with dizzying surreality. Touring under the aegis of a bigger band and Motörhead label Bronze Records’ dosh afforded the gang a new level of drunken debauchery. McAuliffe and the gang were more than happy to partake. Lemmy personally ensured a steady flow of Carlsberg Special Brew, and on one occasion, snuck half a pig’s head in McAuliffe’s guitar case to a shriek that rang around the entire backstage.

“Our roadie Tim [Warhurst] at the time picked up the head in a towel, knocked on Motörhead’s dressing room door and said ‘I think this belongs to you.’”

Signing to Bronze and teaming up with Jimi Hendrix and The Who’s former live sound engineer, Vic Maile, 1980’s debut Demolition was cut at Jackson’s Studios in Rickmansworth, including a rerecord of their ‘Take It All Away’ number. Two months after Girlschool’s LP drop, Motörhead nabbed Maile to produce their fourth album Ace of Spades, standing as one of the essential records of the entire metal genre and yielding its immortal title track. Both Girlschool and Motörhead were at the peak of their powers. Back at Jackson’s to start work on Girlschool’s Hit and Run sophomore, Maile suggested the pair work on a joint EP effort.

With both bands entering the studio in December 1980 with Maile in the producer’s chair, Lemmy’s love of old rock ‘n’ roll inspired a choice take on London’s Johnny Kidd & the Pirates’ 1959 stomper ‘Please Don’t Touch’. To expand the venture to a full EP, Maile suggested the two mutually cover a song of each other’s, so Girlschool took on ‘Bomber’ and Motörhead grappled with ‘Emergency’ with guitarist ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke behind the mic. Largely absent from the sessions was Motörhead drummer Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor, who had only near broken his neck at the time, leading to Dufort on the sticks for all three tracks.

Then there was the matter of the cover. In the middle of winter, Girlschool and Motörhead raided a giant theatrical warehouse to look the part for a proposed Chicago mobster photo shoot, playing the part in the city’s old Docklands area with much glee between the two bands clobbered as gangsters and moles. Eager to duck into a nearby pub to escape the biting cold, the suited and dolled-up mafia troupes turned heads as they entered a local boozer in full Prohibition-era costume. “It was just like something out of An American Werewolf in London,” McAuliffe recalls. “…Where they go in the pub, and everybody stops and looks like this,” before making a mock look of stunned aghast to the camera.

Keeping with the theme for the EP’s title, St Valentine’s Day Massacre was released in February 1981, peaking at number five on the UK Singles Chart and winning a prestigious slot on the BBC’s Top of the Pops show, the two bands performing ‘Please Don’t Touch’ together on stage under the moniker Headgirl, the first time Girlschool had ever appeared on the flagship music programme. Such a high-profile slot beamed into countless TV households and set the stage for Girlschool’s second LP Hit and Run’s explosion, running as high as number five on the album charts when released two months later.

While Girlschool’s metal trajectory was well-assured, there’s no doubt Lemmy accelerated their rise across the early 1980s, and his championing provided a crucial big break. He was also one of their biggest fans. “She was a good-looking girl and a great guitarist,” Lemmy reflected to Mojo in 2011, looking back on his romance with Johnson and her impressive guitar technique. “People used to say, ‘She’s all right for a girl,’ and I’d be like, ‘She’s better than you, motherfucker!’ On a good night Kelly played like Jeff Beck.”

For such a mutual affection, Headgirl only ever played live twice years later, Lemmy joining Girlschool onstage in November 2005 for a special performance of ‘Please Don’t Touch’ in Brixton Academy and Hammersmith Odeon, but otherwise no dates or shows were ever organised back in 1981, despite the EP’s success.

Looking back after 45 years, McAuliffe brims with pride at St Valentine’s Day Massacre’s small but potent impact on the metal climate, sowing the seeds for today’s female metal groups from Crucified Barbara, Burning Witches, and Cobra Spell, whom McAuliffe enthusiastically namechecks as a likewise fan. “It still sounds bloody good,” she affirms. “Still got that energy and that rawness and the fun. I’m very proud of it, and I know Lemmy was too.”

“Lemmy always used to say, ‘Oh, that’s the highest single we’ve ever had,’” McAuliffe revealed. Considering Motörhead counted numbers like ‘Bomber’, ‘Overkill’ and ‘Ace of Spades’ under their belt, such a plaudit from the famously ungushy Lemmy over St Valentine’s Day Massacre and Girlschool’s place in the Motörhead story is nothing to be sniffed at.