Review: ‘The Go-Go’s’ Celebrates All-Female Eighties Band

The Go-Go’s famously wore beauty masks and towels on the cover of their first album, Beauty and the Beat. Those towels were purchased from Macy’s in New York City, and directly after the photo shoot they were returned to Macy’s in New York City. “I couldn’t invest in all these brand-new, fluffy, white expensive towels,” explains the band’s then-manager Ginger Canzoneri. “We couldn’t afford those!” How can you not love this band?

As we learn in the ebullient, amazing, often hilarious Showtime documentary The Go-Go’s, the defining girl group of the Eighties can match any bro band in tales of wild excess and savage infighting, although I’m not aware of any guy group whose members once took pictures of themselves simulating giving birth to one another. Born in the late-Seventies punk scene in L.A., the Go-Go’s operated under the prime directive of punk, which was, “You may sound horrible and still call yourselves musicians.” At their first appearances at the punk club the Masque, we learn, the band played only three songs, and two of them were the same. When guitarist Charlotte Caffey first met singer Belinda Carlisle, the latter was wearing torn fishnets and a garbage bag.

The Go-Go’s famously wore beauty masks and towels on the cover of their first album, Beauty and the Beat. Those towels were purchased from Macy’s in New York City, and directly after the photo shoot they were returned to Macy’s in New York City. “I couldn’t invest in all these brand-new, fluffy, white expensive towels,” explains the band’s then-manager Ginger Canzoneri. “We couldn’t afford those!” How can you not love this band?

As we learn in the ebullient, amazing, often hilarious Showtime documentary The Go-Go’s, the defining girl group of the Eighties can match any bro band in tales of wild excess and savage infighting, although I’m not aware of any guy group whose members once took pictures of themselves simulating giving birth to one another. Born in the late-Seventies punk scene in L.A., the Go-Go’s operated under the prime directive of punk, which was, “You may sound horrible and still call yourselves musicians.” At their first appearances at the punk club the Masque, we learn, the band played only three songs, and two of them were the same. When guitarist Charlotte Caffey first met singer Belinda Carlisle, the latter was wearing torn fishnets and a garbage bag.