British celebrities Noddy Holder and Jim Lea as producers persuaded the guitarist to carry on with Girlschool. Holder and Lea, who had returned in those years to great success and popularity in Great Britain with the 70s rock band Slade, were hired to produce only a single, with the following album already scheduled to be recorded in Los Angeles with Quiet Riot producer Spencer Proffer. However, the good chemistry found with the two Slade members led the band to decide to record not a single, but their whole fourth studio album in North London with Lea and Holder, giving up the trip to the USA. This time the group changed sensibly both their appearance and their musical style in order to appeal to a large American audience, which Bronze considered more oriented toward AOR and glam rock than to the 'biker metal' Girlschool had produced before. Play Dirty, released in October 1983, is an album with a very polished sound, filled with keyboards, choruses and melodies, but it lacks much of the aggression and power of the preceding works. The album contains covers of the Slade songs "High & Dry" and "Burning in the Heat" and of T.Rex’s "20th Century Boy", which was also released as a single. Play Dirty failed to enter the top 50 chart in the UK and had a lukewarm reception by fans and critics at home. A struggle between Bronze and PolyGram for the worldwide contract of the band resulted also in poor promotion for the album in the USA. Moreover, a disastrous performance at Wembley Arena supporting ZZ Top did not help Girlschool's already degraded image in Great Britain. Girlschool embarked in a long US tour to promote the album, sometimes as support to Quiet Riot and Blue Öyster Cult, but more often as headliner in small venues after uncomfortable travels. Johnson, unable to tolerate the unhealthy life on the road, quit the band before completing the US tour, hurting the promotion of the album in America. She went to live in Los Angeles with Vicki Blue, former bassist of The Runaways. With the departure of Kelly Johnson, who was often considered the visual and musical focal point of the band, the almost bankrupt Bronze Records failed to extend the band's recording contract for a follow-up album. At the beginning of 1984, Girlschool were in need of a new lead guitar player and singer,