Surviving 30 years on heavy metal’s pot-holed, temptation-laden highway to hell is no mean feat for any band. For Girlschool, who celebrate the big 30, along with the launch of an as-yet untitled new album at London’s 100 Club in September, many of the greatest obstacles were to be found in the final furlong.

“It’s been a traumatic, difficult year,” reflects Enid Williams, Girlschool’s bassist, vocalist, and co-founding member along with guitarist and vocalist Kim McAuliffe. Chief among the traumas of the last 12 months has been the loss of original member Kelly Johnson to spinal cancer.

Although she had not played with the band since 2000, departing shortly before being diagnosed with the disease, Johnson was no distant ex-member, remaining a prominent part of the Girlschool sorority, having shared a flat with her successor on guitar, Jackie Chambers, up until her death.

Johnson’s passing, coupled with further family tragedies for some members of the band and some disheartening failed deals with overseas management, put a dark cloud over the group in the months during which they worked on the forthcoming album.

“We’ve got a few fast thrashy songs, and that’s just part of who we are and what we do,” says Williams, “there’s a couple that pay homage to the band’s middle period, that was much more about partying and sex and good times and rock’n’roll, ‘cos that’s a part of who we are as well. But with this album there’s also a handful of songs about losing people, about death. As you get older you get more aware of your own impending death. [This record] is much more reflective, the lyrics are a lot deeper and a lot more meaningful because they’re about things that have happened to us and things that we’ve felt. I think they’re much stronger than anything we’ve done before.”

Such reflection and melancholy is unlikely for a band often somewhat patronizingly referred to as Motorhead’s little sisters. Actually, reckons Williams, when a teenage Girlschool first hit stages, most macho metal audiences would have been far too pre-occupied with the sheer novelty of just seeing girls wield guitars, to make judgments about the style and substance of what was being played.

“Kim and I started a band in 1975,” recalls Williams, “and Kelly and Denise (Dufort, Girlschool’s long standing drummer) were both playing in bands then as well. We were like aliens when we started playing! We had a lot of press because we were women but we also had a lot of prejudice. In this country we’re very much seen in the shadow of Motorhead”.

The spectre of Lemmy and co stands over the band because Girlschool’s biggest hit (and for that matter Motorhead’s) came in 1981 when the two bands collaborated under the name Headgirl, on single ‘Please Don’t Touch’, which charted at number five in the UK.

The whole ‘women in rock’ question often feels a very tired one to put to female artists, implying they still operate in an age where the gender imbalance in rock ‘n’ roll is still so pronounced as to make women’s endeavors notable merely for being just that, and as such fit to judge as a sort of novelty paralympics, running alongside the male-led main event. Williams, however, is apparently still not weary of the topic, and is the one who raises it to argue that it is still as relevant as it’s ever been.

“For all of us there was a sense that we were working class girls from London who didn’t want to live the life that our parents - or rather our mothers - were living. Growing up in the 60s and 70s women were chained to the sink, or they were secretaries and nurses and that was as much as you aspired to. The sort of narrow life that I saw my mother lead and her unhappiness was one of the things that drove me on. We all wanted to hit the road and have the same sort of fun that men had. We’ve won quite a lot as women and there’s many more women in public life now, but certain things are being eroded under our noses and I despair when I hear young women say ‘oh, we don’t need feminism.’”

If a more optimistic footnote can be offered to this statement it is that, on the evidence presented by their forthcoming album, Girslchool at least have fully earned the respect of their male peers. A heavy metal who’s who of guest musicians from Girlschool’s past and present, including members of Twisted Sister, Lemmy, Phil Campbell and former guitarist ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke, plus Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi and Ronnie James Dio, forges a convincing bridge between more thoughtful new material and the band’s three decade history of hard and fast touring.

“We’ve played with Sabbath on and off over the years,” Williams recounts, “the very first time that Dio sang with Sabbath for four nights at Hammersmith Odeon in 1980 we were supporting, and every decade the band has done gigs with Sabbath”.

Inviting long-time partners in crime Motorhead to join the party was an equally obvious move.

“The album was recorded in Wales, and of course Phil Campbell is just down the road. He came to the studio and listened through the tracks and he played on a few things. After listening through once he just picked up his guitar and played something brilliant, first time round.”

The launch of this star-studded album at the 100 Club anniversary celebrations will, as Williams explains with obvious pride, gain Girlschool a place in the history books as rock’s longest running all-female group. There are a number of reasons she posits as to why, in terms of longevity, they truly are in a league of their own as females.

“With women I suppose personal relationships take over,” she says, and by contrast to the cliché of the aging male rocker she suggests “you won’t find many women that are going to go on the road, and leave the man at home with the kids while she screws around. Certainly when you get towards 50, and when women get over that age, they become invisible. And I am never, ever going to become invisible!”.