When I first started writing about music in the early ‘80s, all-girl bands were a rarity, with acts like the Slits and the Raincoats the proverbial jewels in the female punk crown. The way they played with beats and tempo, and the way they sang - off-kilter, unguarded, angry - was inspirational.

The Raincoats Live (Ingrid, Ana and Gina). Photo by Peter Cox, 1980, Eindhoven, NL.

In the first of three in this series, we have the 12“ mix of one of the Slits' most famous tracks, Typical Girls, a collision of dub reggae, speed pop and street feminism. There's also The Raincoats' song Shouting Out Loud, from their 1981 album Odyshape, which combines avant jazz with Vicky Aspinall's scabrous violin. Also from this era were German all-girl band Malaria, inscrutable, iconic, and obsessively rhythmic. They're featured here with the deadpan track Your Turn To Run, along with Pulsallama, an early ‘80s seven piece ensemble from New York, whose audacious drumming and tribal chanting can be heard on Ungawa Part 2.

All of the women on this compilation are driven by rhythm: whether using it like a pulse, or twisting the beats out of recognition. There's Bjork, who creates a howling electronic seascape with Storm, her voice weaving in and out of the mix like a sonic meditation. This track is from the score she did for artist Matthew Barney's latest Cremaster film, Drawing Restraint 9, which was shot aboard a Japanese whaling ship in Nagasaki Bay. Also included are prime movers Chicks On Speed with the explosive satirical song Plastic Surgery. And there's key female electro-rock pranksters, like transgendered San Francisco ‘emo-hop' MC Katastrophe with his deliciously bitchy Your Girlfriend: Anat Ben David mixing sublime choral chant with a metallic beat on Virtual Leisure, and French multimedia artist Sir Alice creating an extreme noise wonderworld with Super Hero.

The Slits, film still from the film "Typical Girls", 1981 by Christine Robertson.

There's room here, too, for the quirky and minimal. NO BRA's Up To 19, for instance, has a plunging bassline and ambiguous lyrical fragments like: “tissue in the road/knickers on your doorstep”. And once described as ‘Tyneside's one-woman electonic avalanche', Caroline Churchill inhabits a slightly bonkers world of sexual innuendo and spoken word in Tree Song. She creates mood music with an improvisatory feel, while feisty Swedish duo Cat5 go all Europop horny for their glittering track Sexy. Francoise Cactus (formerly of Berlin-based garage rockers The Lolitas, and now one half of the duo Stereo Total) exudes effortless Gallic cool on You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory, an eerie track that sounds like Marianne Faithfull meets the Velvet Underground.

Featured here too is giddy female rock n'roll. There's Juliette Lewis & The Licks defying critics with the song You're Speaking My Language, a choppy two-minute snarl that amply displays Lewis' Brenda Lee-style holler. Barcelona-based Las Perras del Infierno (Bitches From Hell) charge through a girlpower surfpunk anthem Somos Las Perras (We Are The Bitches), and former Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail conjures up hypnotic noise rock with the politically-charged Panic Of The Square. Boyskout, meanwhile, create their own garage punk tribute to lesbian switch-hitting in School of Etiquette.

Malaria flyer for a Peppermint Lounge gig, ca. 1981. The pic was taken at Studio 54, after a Malaria gig, backstage and later used for this flyer.

Girl Monsters are motivated by surprise, chaos and difference - they relish the musically unexpected and challenge stultified notions of sex and gender. Montreal band Lesbians On Ecstasy, for instance, love hijacking lesbian anthems and redistributing them, scattershot-style, in their electroclash romps. “Here come the lesbians”, they sing, tongue-in-cheek on Sedition, “creeping down the stairs.” We also have Berlin jazz-tinged art rockers Rhythm King & Her Friends with Not Like Other Girls, alongside the acid glam of Hotel Motel's Sucker Man. Fronted by charismatic songwriter Marika Gauci, their ‘retro-futurist' London sound combines grit and glamour. And there's Brighton trio Miss Pain with a fine line in peverse synthcore. Their anticonsumerist rant Sell It To The Kids is by turns fizzy punk and latter-day power pop. Above all, Girl Monsters convey an emotional truth about being female and unfettered. Not restraiined by mainstream models of pop marketing, their sound can emerge in all its anarchic glory. The perfect off-kilter soundtrack to the summer of 2006.

“This was the first, crude version of the handdrawn font I designed for the band, the final version is on the 12“. I have no idea who took the photo, maybe Tseng Kwong Chi, but the top three girls on the right were never even really in the band, also Diana, middle left, was never either. This is extremely early on. John Sex silkscreened the posters for us, he still had access to the supplies in his art school on 23rd street here in NY. April helped him design it. Definitely 79” Stacey Joy Elkin.