When people talk about the Go-Go’s, nostalgia usually shows up first, jangling a tambourine and insisting we all remember the hits exactly the same way. Kathy Valentine doesn’t dismiss that impulse, but she’s more interested in what came after the first wave — specifically 1994, when Return to the Valley of the Go-Go’s quietly became one of the most honest self-portraits the band ever released.
“I thought it felt very grateful,” Valentine says of being a Go-Go in ’94. “We hadn’t played together in quite a while. We reunited after breaking up in 1990, then split again. So it was exciting to work on something new.” That’s the key word she keeps circling back to: new. The compilation wasn’t just a victory lap or a tidy archive. “The best thing of all was to write new material,” she says. “That’s what made it feel valid. Like, yeah — this is still relevant.”
The three new songs at the end of the collection — “Good Girl,” “Beautiful,” and “The Whole World Lost Its Head” — weren’t leftovers or label obligations. “The impetus wasn’t to make a record,” Valentine explains. “IRS wanted to do a retrospective that covered everything that hadn’t been covered. An oral chart of the journey of the band.” But the band pushed back. “For us, it wasn’t enough. If it was going to be a journey, it had to go up to the present. And the present didn’t have anything yet.”
That present-day jolt mattered even more given the timing. In 1994, punk had come roaring back into the mainstream through Nirvana, Green Day, and the Riot Grrrl movement — a cultural echo of the Go-Go’s own late-’70s origins. Valentine heard it immediately in “The Whole World Lost Its Head,” especially that line: “Mary had a little lamb ate her little lamb / Punk rock isn’t dead.” She didn’t write it as prophecy, but it landed like one.
“If a band sticks around long enough, there’s a lull and then it comes back around,” she says. “But with the Go-Go’s, it happened really fast. We were barely into our second decade and bands were already saying, ‘You were a huge influence on us.’” She remembers radio festival bills in the ’90s where the generational divide vanished onstage. “We thought we might feel like dinosaurs,” she admits. “Instead, we got so much acceptance.”
One night in particular stuck. “We played with Hole,” Valentine says, laughing. “We were scared to death what Courtney was going to say.” Instead, Courtney Love stepped to the mic and declared, “If it wasn’t for the Go-Go’s, I wouldn’t be here. That acknowledgement meant everything.”
That recognition didn’t always travel upward, though. Even now, Valentine sounds genuinely baffled that the Go-Go’s were overlooked for so long by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “It amazes me how overlooked we’ve been,” she says. “The influence was acknowledged in the ’90s. Maybe not so much now, as you get further away. It starts to look diluted.” She shrugs. “If I’d known we’d go on to be ignored, I would’ve been even happier about how it felt back then.”
Listening back to Return to the Valley of the Go-Go’s, that sense of continuity is unmistakable — from the early punk tracks (before Valentine even joined) to the hits and into the ’94 songs that feel permanently restless. Valentine traces that back to punk itself. “Punk leveled the playing field,” she says. “It wasn’t about virtuosity. It was about message, attitude, passion.” Before that, she assumed she needed to be “as good as Jeff Beck” before she could even think about being in a band. Then she saw the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. “And I thought, wait a minute — I can do this now.”
Her first spark came even earlier. “Suzi Quatro,” Valentine says without hesitation. “She was the first woman I saw being a rock star.” Only years later did she realize how many women-led bands had existed before, largely undocumented or dismissed. “I didn’t even know about Fanny until 1981,” she says. “That matters, especially to young girls.”
That lineage carries through Valentine’s own songs. “Vacation” predates her time in the Go-Go’s, originally written with the Textones. “When I showed it to Charlotte, she said it needed a stronger chorus,” Valentine recalls. “So we wrote that together.” Other details came together in the studio. “The intro? That wasn’t there originally. We came up with that together.”
If “Vacation” captures youthful escape, “The Whole World Lost Its Head” has become something else entirely — a song that refuses to stay in one era. “We’ve rewritten the lyrics two or three times over the years,” Valentine says. “To reflect the current times.” Sometimes they printed the new words and passed them out to the audience. “There’s never a lack of material,” she adds dryly. “We could rewrite it every week.”
That constant updating feels less cynical than necessary. “It’s oddly comforting,” she admits. “It’s always been crazy — but now it’s really crazy.” She laughs, then sighs. “Sometimes I just stop looking at the news. I can’t handle it.”
Still, there’s momentum. A long-awaited Go-Go’s documentary is finally on the way, and Valentine is cautiously hopeful. “We really trust the director,” she says. “This is one of her favorite projects she’s ever done.” She contrasts it with Behind the Music, which the band felt “formed a narrative” instead of telling the full story. “Hopefully this one circles back and shows the fun, influential parts too.”
Valentine herself is hardly slowing down. Her memoir is finished, and she’s written an entire soundtrack to accompany it. “It’s one of the most creative things I’ve ever done,” she says. “I’m 60 years old, and I’m doing something new and exciting after 45 years in bands.” She pauses, clearly pleased. “I really love that.”
Which brings us back to Return to the Valley of the Go-Go’s. Not a scrapbook. Not a reunion gimmick. Just a band insisting that their story didn’t stop when the hits faded — and a songwriter who keeps finding reasons to update the chorus.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the classics below.
