Day after day, there are girls at the office/ and men will always be men/ Don’t send him off with your hair still in curlers/ You may not see him again . . .”
While modern pop might sometimes shock with its upfront sexuality, even a generation raised on Smack My Bitch Up will gasp at the lyrics to Burt Bacharach’s Wives and Lovers. Golden oldies seemingly promise a more innocent world, a Norman Rockwell print of apple-pie romance and chaste embraces, but the women behind the high-energy stage show Girl Talk know better. Songs you mindlessly hum along to on the radio are suddenly revealed as seedy paeans to male wish-fulfilment: in the hands of Claire Martin, Barb Jungr and Mari Wilson, Dusty Springfield’s Wishin’ and Hopin’ is revealed to be overt incitement to sexual availability while Carol Douglas’s Doctor’s Orders and the Supremes’ You Keep Me Hangin’ On are startling testaments to female masochism.
Sitting outside the National Theatre in London amid the everyday clutter of sunglasses, cycle helmets and coffee cups, the Girl Talk trio are hugely entertaining company, prone to bouts of filthy laughter and obscene suggestions on how to secure upgrades at airports: with their onstage personas at full-beam, they’re invincible. They are also gifted song interpreters perfectly placed to uncover the sinister truths behind pop classics: Claire Martin is an award-winning jazz star; Mari Wilson, the star of Taboo and Dusty the Musical, secured her place in pop history with her early 1980s hits Just What I Always Wanted and Cry Me a River, while Barb Jungr is an international cabaret star known for interpretations of Jacques Brel, Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley. They have been performing together as the group Girl Talk since 1999 — although Jungr and Wilson first shared a stage when the latter was with the Wilsations — honing the show into their very own “brand”.
“We all keep trying to abandon ship,” explains the ebullient Jungr. “Claire goes, ‘I’m a serious jazz singer.’ I go, ‘My work, my work.’ Mari goes, ‘I’ve got to concentrate on my career.’ Then it grabs us and reels us back in. It’s not letting go of us.”
Proving the point, they appear at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London on Friday as part of Euro Pride, “the pinnacle of everything we’ve worked towards”, according to the deceptively quiet Martin.
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“People have said it just looks like three friends having a good time on stage,” says Wilson, before waiting a beat to display her immaculate timing. “It just shows what good actresses we are, really.” There’s gleeful laughter. “When you do what we do you’re often working at the weekend,” she continues, “so when we get together it’s like a school outing.”
“And you have to wear uniform,” adds Jungr, before discussing another of Girl Talk’s unique selling points — their flamboyant array of sparkly outfits and domestic goddess props.
“You need to get into costume and be Girl Talk, really,” explains Wilson. They promise all-new accessories — “We just haven’t bought them yet.”
Jungr: “But we’ve got the idea for them, and that’s the main thing.”
Wilson: “It’s whether Alexander McQueen has the time, really.”
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Jungr: “And a tape measure large enough.”
Amid the glitzy rubber gloves and feather dusters, however, Girl Talk have a serious point: horror at a culture that exalts youth and celebrity anorexia and in which Martha Stewart and Nigella Lawson can still push the idea of being a domestic goddess. “Very nice if you’re married to a multimillionaire to peddle ideas to people on a housing estate in Peckham who have no option,” says Jungr archly. Yet their love of lyricism and irony means they remain untempted by modern music, going no further than the 1970s with splendid covers of Elvis Costello’s Girls Talk and Joe Jackson’s Different for Girls. Are they never drawn to the explicit misogyny in today’s pop music — or do they think the gentle pastel-shaded oppression of the old hits is more sinister? “It is more pernicious,” nods Jungr. “You can listen to a Jack Jones song and think, ‘Ah, isn’t that lovely! Isn’t that nice!’ The Burt Bacharach and Hal David stuff is like that — we take it to be good music, ‘great songwriters, great work’ . . . whereas if somebody’s saying, ‘Whap your bitch,’ it’s very obvious.
“What’s sad, of course, is that we haven’t moved forward — we can be that much more explicit without anyone saying, ‘Isn’t this appalling?’ But it’s interesting what does pass you by. Both Claire’s dad and my dad used to come to the show and miss the point. ‘Ooh, lovely songs, lovely singing.’”
There are five new songs lined up for the Queen Elizabeth Hall show, although they have been designated — not altogether seriously — “absolutely top secret”.
“Really,” decides Wilson, “the best thing about the show is us in the dressing room.”
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“Do you think we ought to say that actually?” deadpans Martin. “Because that’s a bit nobody sees . . .”
Wilson says: “It’s like therapy backstage and our piano player Adrian York is fantastic because he just gets on with it. Well, he has his own dressing room — because there’s too much oestrogen flying around. At least with Claire there is — we don’t produce any oestrogen any more.”
Jungr: “I think I’ve given all mine to the developing world.”
“It’s exhausting, this gig,” says Wilson, happily. “It’s very hard to come down afterwards.” Martin nods. “What we’re trying to say is that after gigs we don’t sleep for two days. So anyone coming along better have the next day off to just calm down.”
Ladies in the audience, though, be warned: a day at home doesn’t mean letting yourself go. Curl your hair, do your make-up — after all, “men will always be men”. Thankfully, however, as this trio show, girls will always be girls.