‘Ordinary Girl’ was a firm favourite from our live set and also one of our foremost ‘misheard lyrics’ songs, so it had to be included on ‘Punk Rockers – The Best Of Vice Squad’, but not before being freshly mixed and remastered.
Beki: ‘The idea for ‘Ordinary Girl’ came about on tour after several days and nights of no sleep and/or no food.
It occurred to me that a day job and my own bed every night were possibly preferable to band life and certainly better paid.
So I imagined a life of pinstripe suits and commutes and concluded that it had its drawbacks, mainly ‘no late nights, no rock and roll’, and that it wasn’t for me.
I can’t remember what year we wrote it exactly, but I’m pretty sure we first recorded it in 2008.
BUY HERE
In October 2008 we had a weekend of gigs (Friday, Saturday and Sunday), which included a couple in Scotland, and we were on our way up the M1 in the drummer’s dodgy transit van. We were just south of Leicester when the van’s gearbox blew (the wood shavings must have failed…).
The RAC was called, and eventually a recovery truck came out for us.
The drummer lived down in Sussex, and we live in London, so the best the driver of the recovery vehicle could do for us was drop us at a 24-hour Tesco superstore on the North Circular.
There was no way that the gearbox could be replaced in time for us to do the gigs.
We got a cab back to south London, clinging on to the drummer’s promise that he would source a van the next morning and we would salvage the other 2 shows.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t get a van; none of the other 3 of us could drive, so we couldn’t hire one either, so that was the end of that.
We were very despondent and disappointed, to say the least, but decided to salvage the weekend and make the most of the fact our bassist Wayne was with us and record some songs.’
These songs became part of the ‘London Underground’ album, which we released the following year.