St. Valentine's Day Massacre (EP)

Recording

When Girlschool were recording in Rickmansworth with producer Vic Maile, he had the idea that Motörhead and Girlschool should record a single together. The result was this three-track EP, on which the bands duetted on a cover of Johnny Kidd & The Pirates' "Please Don't Touch." The bands also covered each other, with Motörhead performing Girlschool's "Emergency" and Girlschool playing Motörhead's "Bomber." The EP was recorded while Motörhead's drummer Phil "Philthy Animal" Taylor was recovering from a neck injury sustained playing "who can lift each other up the highest" with a large Irishman, so Girlschool drummer Denise Dufort played on all three songs. The artwork features the two bands dressed as prohibition era gangsters and their molls.

In his autobiography White Line Fever, vocalist/bassist Lemmy Kilmister took aim at critics who accuse him of being a sexist, citing his work with Girlschool and insisting, "When I find good women rockers, I'll lend them a hand. I'll never get any kind of credit for helping advance women in rock 'n' roll, but I have." In 2011, he admitted to John McNair of Mojo, "Truthfully, it's the women that I've lost I think about, not ex-members of Motorhead. Wendy O' Williams was a great woman. Fucking mental. And Kelly Johnson from Girlschool - she died young as well, which was a terrible, terrible shame. I had a small affair with Kelly. She was a good looking girl and a great guitarist. 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."

Release

The EP was released in 1981 in 7" and 10" vinyl formats, with the same cover and track listing. It reached #5 in the UK Singles Charts. A bootleg St. Valentine's Day Massacre exists, a double 12" vinyl album with white labels. It contains recordings of Motörhead and Girlschool's sets from a 1981 Rockstage TV Special from The Theatre Royal in Nottingham. On 19 February 1981 the band played "Please Don't Touch" under the name Headgirl on the BBC TV Top of the Pops show, to support the release of the EP. They also performed the song on episode 62 of the German TV show Musikladen, that was aired 4 April 1981.
The songs "Please Don't Touch" and "Emergency" were both on the 1984 compilation album No Remorse and then subsequently the 1996 Castle Records reissue of Ace of Spades. The tracks were left off the 2005 Sanctuary Records 2cd deluxe edition though, which is part of the remaster series they did of the first 6 studio albums released under Bronze and GWR.

Critical reception

Joel McIver points out in his 2011 book on the band Overkill: The Untold Story of Motorhead, "Although the EP reached number 5 on the U.K. singles chart and even the critics gave it a begrudging thumbs-up, more than a few purists regard it as a sidestep into less serious, almost novelty territory that marked the beginning of a worrying tendency on Motorhead's part to get involved in projects that were beneath them." AllMusic: "This glorious artifact documents one of the most peculiar detours in Motörhead's uniformly pedal-to-the-metal career."

Personnel