New interview with Jane and Billboard.com
The Go-Go’s are still a going concern, and guitarist Jane Wiedlin, for one, hopes that a summer tour to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their debut album, “Beauty and the Beat,” will lead to some new music from the all-female 80s favorite.
“We’ve talked about it for years. It’s one of those ongoing conversations,” Wiedlin tells Billboard.com. “I was thinking about how few records we actually have made in our 33 years and how we could be doing a lot better. Because the Go-Go’s isn’t a full-time band anymore and the fact we’ve scattered over the whole world, it makes it really hard to commit to things like making records. But having said that, now that the interwebs are so big and people release one song at a time… the structure of making music has become less rigid. So I’d like to think that, yes, we will have new music coming.”
Wiedlin adds that bandmates Charlotte Caffey and Kathy Valentine have, in fact, written a new song “that is good, and if we get our act together to learn it, we might perform it in concert.”
The Go-Go’s recorded three albums during the 80s and came back in 2001 with “God Bless the Go-Go’s.” It has not released any new music since then. The group will, however, release a remastered 30th anniversary edition of the double-platinum “Beauty and the Beat” on May 17, featuring the entire original album and a second disc recorded live at The Metro in Boston during 1981, featuring non-LP tracks such as “London Boys” and “Surfing and Spying” as well as an early version of the title track for the group’s second album, “Vacation.”
The Go-Go’s hit the road for their Ladies Gone Wild tour on May 29 in Hershey, Pa., and Wiedlin says that, unlike last year’s farewell trek — which was postponed after she injured her knees in a hiking fall — there are no plans to say goodbye for good when this tour wraps in August.
“Over the course of a year everyone just started re-thinking that idea and ultimately we decided we shouldn’t say it’s a farewell tour this year,” explains Wiedlin, who also writes a comic book called Lady Robotica and recently wrote and directed a short film called “The Pyrex Glitch.” “I was not happy about it, anyway; I want to be a 90-year-old Go-Go someday. I love being a Go-Go. It definitely has its ups and downs, and we have a very intense energy with each other. Sometimes it’s amazing fun, and it’s always magical when we play live together. And sometimes we are just such a pain in the ass to each other, like, we all get on each other’s nerves because we’ve all known each other for so long. Basically it’s a five-way marriage that’s gone on for 33 years — and will keep going if I have anything to say about it.”