The Record The Changed the World: Who were the first female band to have a number one album?
There are two separate interlinking quotes that give you a good picture of the history of rock ‘n’ roll. The first comes from John Lennon: in 1972, the bespectacled Beatle said, “If you had to give rock ‘n’ roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry.” The next comes from the man himself: the duckwalking ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ singer said, “My whole career has been one long Sister Rosetta Tharpe impersonation”.
Before Patti Smith became the Godmother of Punk, there was first the godmother of rock ‘n’ roll. This godmother dabbled in the soul of gospel, danced into R&B, threw in the off-kilter rhythms of swing, tossed it all together with a slosh liquid bravura and a careless garnish of fucklessness, poured it over an ice-cool fortitude and just about served up the complete stylings of rock ‘n’ roll.
Her fast hammer-clawed guitar plucking may well be her most obvious gift to the inception of rock ‘n’ roll, but once more, it is the attitude with which she propagated her Promethean guitar playing that helped it conquer the world in a drip-feed of the soundtrack to progress. So, it comes as a cruel twist of fate that the irony of her legacy is that her contribution was overlooked, as women were precluded from being considered the pioneers of rock.
Even today, fewer than 30 songs by female artists that could be considered rock or alternative have risen to number one in the charts. Lzzy Hale, however, commented that the tables are finally turning on the matter, telling Consequence, “It’s completely flipped. It used to be that not only was I the only girl in a band onstage but I was the only girl on tour, and now that’s not the case.”
Hale added, “At any given festival, we’re all over the place. Women are taking over the rock festivals right now, and I’m not alone in being a girl musician, but also there are female lighting techs and tour managers and engineers and roadies. It’s wonderful to see.” There was one key record that helped to contribute to this upturn in progress.
Who were the first female band to have a number-one album?
A one-off hit can be ignored, but a whole album is a statement. The Go-Go’s delivered just that in March 1982 when they became the first all-female band to have a number one album. It stayed there for six weeks, too, ensuring that the arrival had a lasting impact and inspired a legion of young rock stars to come.
While the Supremes had previously scored a number one album back in 1966, ironically with an album titled A Go-Go, Belinda Carlisle’s band’s debut record, Beauty and the Beat, was the first time that an album had topped the charts with all the songs written by women and women playing all the instruments.
However, it wasn’t instantly accepted. The album was actually released in the summer of 1981, and it took eight months and a tour to launch it to the top. But when it did, the record went on to achieve double platinum success. It has now sold in excess of 2.1 million copies.
But perhaps more significant than the ales is how it came about. “We did it our way,” Carlisle told AOL Music in 2010. “We weren’t put together by a Svengali and told [to play] the same songs and dress a certain way. We did it ourselves. We started from nothing — we had no idea about how to play instruments and write songs, plug guitars into amplifiers — to being the number one band in America two-and-a-half years later is an unbelievable feat.”
Yet, Carlisle certainly didn’t see the wider industry change overnight thanks to this success. “When I first went solo,” she told the Telegraph, “I was told maybe I should show more tit. They wanted me to sing a song called ‘Stick it in Me’. I said, that’s not really me at all.”
So, it might have taken decades, but thankfully, the misogyny that Beauty and the Beat battled against seems to be slowly on its way out, just about a century after Tharpe pretty much started the industry to begin with.
