she grinned
a big white space in the middle of her face
the hard sell
shiny as a fridge in a lipstick frame
she blew in
second only to no one
it's like nothing really changes
she's power dressed in that soft-toned nineties way

this is where it's at
this is where it's at
oh if this is where it's at I'm on my bicycle

she she she she she she grins
the kind of smiles you could eat your meals off
when she she she she steps in
grown men cry angels walk on eggshells

this is where it's at...

she talked about being sick until I could visualise it
how she licked the toilet bowl clean with her tongue
then she took a taxi to Company's House
with her sick bag by her side and saved the world

this is where it's at
this is where it's at
this is where it's at
she struck a blow for ladykind

words and music Eric Goulden / Wreckless Eric (MCPS / Copyright Control)

I was thinking of going legit so I somehow got persuaded to go to a meeting for people setting up their own business. It was the usual sort of thing - several pony-tailed charmers who were starting record companies, a fat girl in a very small anorak with a cat-sitting agency and a collection of blokes hoping to to find workaday independence and financial salvation in secondhand fridges and bad carpentry. It all happened at ten o'clock in the morning in the basement of some council offices just off Brighton seafront.
The meeting was chaired by a woman in her thirties who breezed in wearing a well-cut brown trouser suit. She was aggressively dynamic. It was like an episode of Fame for the would-be self-employed: 'self-employment costs, and right now is where you start paying, in sweat...'
Her warnings of the perils and pitfalls of self-employment culminated in the story of how she prepared the wages during a severe bout of gastroenteritis and hiked the paperwork along to the office in a taxi with a sick bag by her side - because somebody had to do it. She had teeth like dinner plates and it was difficult to imagine vomit gushing out of her perfectly lipsticked mouth.
It's a shame when women think that in order to compete on equal terms they have to act in the same aggressive and hard-nosed way as the most obnoxious business men. It's not the way to true equality.

The recording was a protracted affair. I did the acoustic guitar and vocal in Brighton with Will playing his electronic drum kit. I put a load of random telephone and TV news recordings on it with a lot of echoes, Ina put the orchestral samples in and then I forgot about it. Later on in Norfolk Tim Lane came round with a guitar that had a midi pick-up attached to a box of some sort and played a weird squawking guitar part on it. We were actually working on a version of Housewives - I only got Ladypower out for light relief, and that's the one he ended up playing on. Graham played some sort of synthesiser pad on it and we had a lot of fun with synthetic 'oohs' and 'aahs' from the Cubase catalogue of slightly naff sounds. I wanted to get Norman Watt Roy to play bass on it but the logistics were too complicated so I did it myself in the end. I also played electric guitar on it - I recorded three separate tracks of the same sort of thing using three different guitars - my old green Microfret, Gibson 330 and three pick-up Supro. I just used the best bits of the three tracks and didn't worry about matching the sound.