Singles Are the Best #1: Au Pairs, Blueboy, Blue Orchids

Talking about our favorite bands, seven inches at a time

Yes, I need to vacuum the living room rug.

“Singles just might be what life is all about.” Pete Townshend wrote that. In his own review of The Who’s singles comp Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy in Rolling Stone, which honestly says a lot about Pete Townshend. But on this point, he’s absolutely right. Singles are the best.

People talk about how rock music is fundamentally about the album, and that might even be true if we’re only talking about rock. But if it is, it was really only true from approximately 1966 to whenever the iTunes Store debuted. When it comes to pop music — the broader church of which rock is only one of many congregations — the single has always been where it’s at. One perfect two-to-five-minute blast of pure sound that at just the right moment can sound like the greatest thing you’ve ever heard and makes you want to hear it again immediately. Plus, if you’re lucky, a cool b-side.

That’s the rush I’ve been chasing since I was literally an infant. My older sisters would play their 45s at me to watch me dance when I still had to grab hold of the bars of my crib to hold myself upright. The first single I ever picked out for myself was an Apple reissue of The Beatles’ “And I Love Her”/“If I Fell,” from the record department of our dad’s store when I was five. The second was The Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.” I have never been apologetic about loving things that are uncool if they speak to me, and the wonderfully farty analogue synths on that song are awesome.

Monday afternoon, I went to my favorite local record store, Big Dig Records in Cambridge, and bought a stack of the 45s from a bin of new arrivals they’d posted on Instagram that morning. Someone had already snagged the Postcard Records release they’d flipped past too fast. (From what was near it, I suspect it was the Go-Betweens’ “I Need Two Heads.”) There was still a lot of good stuff. Here’s three of them, plus something that just came in the mail. There will be more of these.

Au Pairs: “You” b/w “Domestic Departure” and “Kerb Crawler” (021 Records, 1979)

The Au Pairs are not only my favorite discovery from the Urgh! A Music War concert doc that was on Showtime constantly when I was 13, they are quite often my very most favorite post-punk band of them all. Bassist Jane Munro and drummer Peter Hammond were heavily influenced by dub reggae, which grated pleasantly against the glass-exploding-into-a-thousand-shards aggression of guitarists Paul Foad and Lesley Woods. Woods, a political science major at Birmingham University when the band formed in 1978, wrote unapologetically left-wing, anti-racist, feminist lyrics, but without even a hint of sloganeering. She tackled topics like how rigid gender roles end up being a trap for everyone, the mistreatment of women in Irish prisons, and faking orgasms, but with lacerating wit and lived-in specificity. And she sang them like she was daring you to disagree.

This self-released single gained John Peel’s attention, leading to one tightly-wound masterpiece of a debut album, 1981’s Playing With A Different Sex, and a 1982 follow-up, Sense and Sensuality, that showed a fascinating new leaning toward funk and R&B. They broke up not long after that, with Woods going on to a career as a civil rights lawyer, which absolutely tracks with the vibe of the Au Pairs’ too-short career. Woods has recently formed a new lineup of the band, seemingly partly in response to some bad blood with the other original members over copyrights and royalties. That part’s a shame, but I admit I’m curious. For one thing, Estella Adeyeri from the heavily Au Pairs-influenced Big Joanie is the new bassist.

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Blueboy: “Stardust” / “Five Minutes (Cocktail Version)” (Precious Recordings of London, 2026)

At some point in 1994, I was flipping through the 99-cent sale bin of seven-inches at University Records in Lubbock, Texas, when my eye fell on a three-track EP called Some Gorgeous Accident by some band called Blueboy. (The William Gainsborough painting? The gay-coded nudie magazine? Both? I never have decided where the name came from.) I liked the cover art, what looked like random snapshots of some picturesque English village, and added it to the pile without thinking too much about it.

When I got around to playing the record a couple days later at my college apartment in Portales, New Mexico, the first two songs were pretty good. And then I was just floored by the last one, an incredibly lovely acoustic ballad called “Stephanie.” The next time I was at University Records a couple weeks later, I bought every other single in the bin from Blueboy’s label, Sarah Records. That turned out to be a good idea, one that’s influenced quite a bit of my personal and professional life ever since.

Sarah then and now had a reputation for politely shambolic guitar bands, but Blueboy were closer in sound and spirit to acts like Prefab Sprout and The Blue Nile. The melodies spiraled off in unexpected directions, the arrangements went heavy on acoustic guitars and cello, and singer Keith Girdler’s hushed voice and melancholy lyrics were always at the center. That said, singles like “Popkiss” and “Meet Johnny Rave” jangled and buzzed with the best of them.

Blueboy split in 1998, and Keith Girdler died of cancer in 2007. But a couple of years ago at the launch party for Jane Duffus’ enormous and fascinating Sarah Records history These Things Happen, guitarist/songwriter Paul Stewart and cellist/keyboardist Gemma Malley got together for a live set. It went over so well that they reformed the band. Gemma has a beautifully unlovely voice that’s utterly perfect for both the a-side’s shimmery shoegazey waves of sound and the more traditionally Blueboy-like delicate acoustic miniature on the flip. This is the third and so far best single by the new Blueboy and I can’t wait for the album.

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Blue Orchids: “The Flood” / “Disney Boys” (Rough Trade, 1980) and “Work” / “The House That Faded Out” (Rough Trade, 1981)

Martin Bramah and Una Baines formed the Blue Orchids after they were kicked out of The Fall, along with three other musicians who were kicked out of The Fall. Which is why both of their first two singles sound a lot like the Live at the Witch Trials-era Fall, all nervous energy and a somewhat shaky grasp of concepts like tempo and pitch. But they were also kinda sorta a pop band, albeit a decidedly idiosyncratic one. There are actual hooks buried in these murky, shouty, choppy songs. Most of them coming from Baines’ weedy-sounding but oddly memorable organ lines. I’ve often wondered if Martin Phillipps knew of the Blue Orchids when he formed The Chills, because there’s a definite similarity of approach between the two bands.

Like most post-punk bands, the Blue Orchids didn’t last long, recording just two albums and an EP following these singles. Part of that was that they got sidetracked by a long stint acting as Nico’s backing band, after the former icon moved to Manchester from Berlin because the heroin was cheaper and cleaner there. Another part was, well, the heroin. Bramah forms new lineups of the Blue Orchids every so often, and the resulting albums are always fascinatingly disorienting.

(I secretly have always liked the Blue Orchids more than I like The Fall.)

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