After Penetration split up in 1979, our beloved Pauline Murray was very active in the new born post punk scene. She played a lot with our hero Peter Perret and finally got together with the John Cooper Clarke band, The Invisible Girls. They were great musicians and a solid backing band for Pauline: Dave Rowbotham (guitar), Vinney Reilly (guitar), Robert Blamire (bass), Steve Hopkins (keyboards), John Maher (drums). Their sound was fantastic, an evolution of the best Penetration tunes to a new sort of pop punk. Sadly this co-operation didn't last long - little more than an year - but it was a great year! Their music was (is) a brilliant and disconcerting journey through a murky post-punk world. Listen to their eponympous album, one of best of those years, produced by Martin Hannett... someone said it was the greatest record Factory never released. Its format is standard - two sides of 3-minute pop songs – but that's about as close to convention as it dares to drift. Murray shows a surprising willingness (given her back catalogue to that point) to engage with melodic vocals – breathy and urgent on Time Slipping, wide-eyed and credulous on the first tremendous single Dream Sequence 1– but, while there are any number of odd-pop gems, they’re shrouded in post-industrial, nigh-on-apocalyptic arrangements. Pauline played also live with The invisible girls and they toured together germany & somewhere else in Europe. It was 1981... don't know how extensively they gigged but, in my opinion, this was the best of Pauline Murray and an unforgettable document of the emerging sound that would come to dominate the post punk era.
