Factory girls

It is only relatively recently that the heroic nature of the prefab popstar has begun to be appreciated. Traditionally – meaning since the dawn of rock’n’roll – the celebrated figure has been the rock star, drawn as a loner, an outsider: “Outside of society,” as Patti Smith sang.

A rebel, a hellraiser, wild and crazy, preferably dying at 28 with a shotgun blast to the head, leaving an iconic image: “Your eyes sing the sad, sad song/Of how you lived so fast and died so young.”

Second best: Live to a ripe old age, but still kick out the jams, motherfucker; stay alive, stay weird, stay cool. Stay marketable.

Even the middle path – dying fat and ugly in middle age – is marketable. Watch as the magic pen of industry erases Jim Morrison’s morbidly obese corpse, leaving only the skinny, sexy Lizard King.

It’s a lucky coincidence that this image of rebellion is exactly what’s needed to fuel the industries of culture: Who wants to read a book or watch a movie about a guy who turned up at the office every day until he retired (and then tended his garden until he died)?

But of course this means the real heroes of popular culture have long been denied their due. A real pop star turns up to rehearsals; sings other people’s words; learns to dance and sing at the same time; and completes all their press duties in a friendly and professional manner.

And for what? A career that lasts five years, if you’re really good.

For these acts, life is like the famous sequence in Modern Times where Charlie Chaplin gets sucked into the machine, run around the cogs and spat out again – only for longer, and with more cogs.

Girlfriend were just such an act. Teenagers plucked from a Sydney showbiz school, they were thrust into the limelight, taught to sing a little and dance a little and propelled directly to number one.

Making the brand

We now know a little more about the process of putting together an act. Reality TV has been a good teacher. Not a realistic teacher, but a good teacher. We now know that the songs are written for the act, not by the act; we know that artists get little say in how they are packaged, marketed and sold; we know that the hours are long and the work is hard.

Thanks to the intense media attention shows like Popstars and Australian Idol generated in their first seasons, we even know that the financial rewards for the act are not great.

But there was a time, not so long ago, when the industrial production process behind popular music was not part of the product; when it was shocking to discover that members of Girlfriend had made nearly nothing, and were working in a shoestore.

1992 was the year that grunge broke. But it was also the year that Girlfriend broke. It was the year they had a number one single (‘Take It From Me’) and a number one album (Make It Come True).

The group were put together by a management team consisting of Noel McDonald, Ross Wood and Nikki Goldstein.

Each member of the management team looked after a different area. McDonald, a singer/songwriter who had won Starstruck, handled the music. Wood looked after visuals and video clips. Goldstein, who’s now a self-help book author, was the stylist.

The first four girls - Melanie Alexander, Jacqui Cowell, Siobhann Heidenreich (sister of Dougie the pizza guy) and Lorinda Noble – were scooped up from Janice Breen’s dancing school in Sydney.

The four had the fresh, innocent next-door look management were after. But there was just one problem: They lacked vocal talent.

So they brought in a ringer. Robyn Loau was already working as a performer, doing stage shows and session vocals for radio jingles

“At first it was just disbelief,” she says. “Where I came into the picture was, they had already formed. One of the managers came to me when I was in a stage show and said, ‘We need a lead singer.’

“In those early days, the pace of progress was slow. “For a long time it looked like it was not going to go anywhere,” she says. “It was a complete shock when it [‘Take It From Me’] went number one.”

Eventually, though, the act was to be picked up by BMG. “Just before we got signed, we did a performance for the record company,” Loau says. “The performance was just shocking. The girls didn’t know the choreography, one of them dropped the mic.”

But they did have the look. And they filled the roles assigned them by management. “Talent was really not a priority,” Loau says.

Value added

Karl Marx knew that, in order for the owner of a business to make money, they have to pay their workers less money than they bring in. If a worker needs six hours to cover their wages, but works 12, they have made the business money. Marx called this difference “surplus value”.

Girlfriend were put to work. It’s fair to say plenty of surplus value was generated. As well as putting out records, the group toured and endorsed products – like a range of girls’ clothing, produced exclusively for sale in Myer stores in 1993.

“There were so many side deals going on,” Loau says. “We were getting peanuts, even [on] the touring.”

But what was really driving the money into the hands of management and the record company? It was the shopping centre appearances, the live shows, the photoshoots, the video clips, the interviews with newspapers, TV, magazines… it was the daily grind of five girls, working hard in the pop factory.

Loau tried to get a better deal. “I remember a time when we were in Japan when I rang the touring company and said, ‘This is what I want.’ Management hit the roof. The roadies were getting more than we were.”

The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie

Loau knew that to get a better deal, she needed to climb the ladder of opportunity. She needed to become a capitalist, or at least a member of the petite bourgeoisie: The class that owns something, but works as well.

In the world of pop, the song is king. Without a catchy tune, all the packaging in the world will get you only so far; it might be possible to polish a turd, but they only get so glossy.

The songwriter is no salaryman. The songwriter owns the material they write, and powerful organisations collect royalties – payments for having used the songs – owed to them.

Loau, an islander girl from the western suburbs, saw the group as an opportunity. “I knew they wouldn’t come along too often,” she says. “I milked it for what it was worth.”

She learnt as much as possible about the business, and figured out what she had to do.

“I knew the only way I was going to make money or gain credibility was to write songs… it was not a unified front.”

She says she brought songs to the other girls, but they weren’t interested: “They just kept reading their Jackie Collins novels.”

The decline and fall of the Girlfriend empire

With her ambitions stifled, Loau quit. With her left most of the group’s clothing. Re-branded GF4, the remaining four pumped their breasts up, slashed rip lipstick across their faces and bared their bodies for the camera.

And out went the old management; in came Chris Gilbey, the man behind mid-90s dance-pop chart toppers Euphoria. “As soon as the line-up and staff changed, Chris Gilbey said, ‘Okay, the girls are just tits and arse, let’s just put them with the best producers’,” Loau recalls.

GF4 were sent to the US, doing two weeks in Los Angeles and two in New York.

They ran up a huge bill, then came back with nothing that could be presented to a record company.

“I really did feel for the girls,” Loau says. By that stage she was doing a world music project for EMI France that involved working with villagers in the South Pacific.

But the others soldiered on bravely until the very end. They released a gimmick CD single, ‘Sooner Or Later’ – the world’s first to contain a CD-ROM! – in 1994, sparking a burst of publicity.

It went to number one, and the girls were packed back off to South East Asia, looking for that lucrative export market.

Nonetheless, it wasn’t enough to revitalise their career. Follow-up ‘Need Love (To Make The Sex Right)’, released in 1995, failed to chart at all.

We could be heroes

A few years later, all the girls – except Loau and Melanie Alexander – had left showbiz. Loau has stuck at it, working as a hip-hop dance teacher and recording her own material (an EP is forthcoming), while Alexander did a stint on a kids’ show for Foxtel and Channel 10’s advertorial show Bright Ideas.

In the pre-Popstars era, it was considered shocking that members of the group had ended up working shitty retail jobs. After all, Girlfriend made BMG a fortune – why didn’t the girls see any of the cash?

It’s not that Girlfriend weren’t ripped off: They were. It’s not that it was right they were ripped off: It wasn’t. But nobody showed much interest in the financials during the good times, when the charts were topped and the images glossy.

That wasn’t the storyline, then. The storyline then was that Aussie girls were conquering Asia, and everyone went along with it (except Dolly magazine, who gave noticeably scant attention to the group).

Through it all, the girls of Girlfriend soldiered on, grins fixed like bayonets, doing what they were told; process workers on the assembly-line of pop.

They primped, they preened, they posed. They sang, they danced, they answered press questions. They flew here, they toured there, they met with this and that producer.

They, and the hundreds of young men and women like them, worked long hours for little reward, only to be tossed aside once the machine had finished with them.

And that’s what makes them heroes.

Girlfriend: A chartography

Girlfriend Albums
Make It Come True (1992) HP 6 - platinum
It's Up To You (1993) HP 29 - gold

Girlfriend Singles
‘Take It From Me’ (1992) HP 1 - gold
‘Girls Life’ (1992) HP 15
‘Without You’ (1992) HP 18
‘Bad Attitude’ (1992) HP 28
‘Love's On My Mind’ (1992) HP 64
‘Heartbeat’ (1993) HP 36
‘Wishing On The Same Star’ (1994) HP 44

GF4 Singles
‘Sooner Or Later’ (1994) HP 1

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