GIRLS ALOUD | Racey Lacey

Available on:
x Girls Aloud - Chemistry (2005) CD

Credits:
Written by Miranda Cooper, Brian Higgins and Matt Gray.
Published by Xenomania/ Warner Chapell Music Ltd.
Produced by Brian Higgins and Xenomania.
Mixed by Tim Powell and Brian Higgins.
Keyboards and Programming: Brian Higgins and Tim Powell.
Keyboards: Tim "Rolf" Larcombe.
Programmed by Jon Shave.
Guitars: Nick Coler and Tim "Rolf" Larcombe.

REVIEWS:
x A logical extension of Xenomania/ Aloud's use of every trick in the book, the group's most recent album finishes with a final tour de force of smart, funny pop and then, after what seems like no time at all, pull the rug out from under it. Just like all great pop, it leaves you wanting more. Iain Forrester

x (...) their Officially Dubbed By The Blogosphere "Blur" track, "Racey Lacey." Character based roffles about a girl who's a "Phd with her legs apart". It's not all about the hangovers and the fame, it's all about fun. Which is all Girls Aloud can give you. Dom Passantino

x (...) the Girls now assume the role of the audience, surveying what the Girl has now been reduced to. "I know this girl/She's not too bright/But she's educated in bed all right.../A PhD with her legs apart." At first we reel in happy disbelief that a lyric which a generation ago would have been sung, unironically, by Whitesnake or Saxon, has now been reclaimed by women...and then we realise that this is nothing to celebrate, the "she's got undulating, punctulating, grinding hips" motif notwithstanding. "She clicks her fingers, guy comes to heel (or to heal?)/Chewed up, spat out, no big deal." The chorus itself is a music hall relic (musically) over which the Girls sing, "Boudoir beauty, it's all that she can do.../A bedhead through and through... /She's got this crazy mind." A sound effects interlude of unsexily boinging bedsprings and banging headboards follows (sounding nothing like seagulls or cricket bats), after which the Girls recite the story of "Watch Me Go" from the third-party perspective: "And so this girl, I've heard it said, can spend up to 24 hours in bed. She gets her suitors to wait in line and she's worn them out by half past nine." This is delivered in terms of rueful ridicule...and it is a suitably grotesque portrait of a shadow of a victim of the market who will never voluntarily break her ropes even if someone comes to untie them. Look, say the Cold Rationalists, this is what free enterprise leaves us as...sex as soap powder, love as a too-expensive/too-much-hard-work luxury, demographic husks of empty. Marcello Carlin