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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, the 2014 memoir by Viv Albertine, former lead guitarist of the punk band The Slits. I considered skipping this based on its purchase price ($14.99). Another tale of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll in the days when they were great? But the reviews sold me and I am glad they did. This book is electric. I felt myself being plugged into an amp and projected across space. Albertine's romance with Mick Jones, songwriter and lead guitarist of the Clash and stories of punk rock's founders were exciting, but it was Albertine's writing that put a spell on me.



-- I can't imagine what a happy home life is like: parents cuddling and laughing, music playing, books on the shelves, discussions round the table? We don't have any of that, but if Mum's happy, I'm happy. The trouble is, she isn't happy very often because my dad is odd and difficult and not as quick-minded as her--and also we're poor. Every night I lie in bed listening through the wall to Mum tidying up in the kitchen. She opens and closes cupboard doors, bangs pots and pans, and I try to interpret the sounds, to gauge by the strength of the door slams, the ferociousness of plates clattering together, the way the knives and forks are tossed into a drawer, if she's in a good mood or not. Usually not. Occasionally I think, That door was closed gently, that saucepan was put away softly, she's feeling OK, and I go off to sleep, happy.

-- To keep my mind occupied, I fantasised about musicians. There was nothing else to think about. We had no TV, and there was nothing on it anyway, I wasn't missing much. (We eventually got a second-hand black-and-white set but the living room was so cold that we had to sit under a pile of old army coats, blankets and sleeping bags to watch it. It just wasn't worth the effort.) A children's feature film came out in the cinema once a year at Christmas, not many people had telephones (landlines), there was nowhere to go: youth clubs were a joke and I wasn't interested in lessons, except art and English. Music and guys in bands were a way to let your imagination loose. I'd fantasise that Donovan or John Lennon was my brother, or that I'd bump into Scott Walker and he'd fall in love with me; cooking up an interesting world in my head.

I studied record covers for the names of girlfriends and wives. That's how I connected girls to the world I wanted to be in. I scanned the thank yous and the lyrics, looking for girls' names. Especially if I fancied the musician. What are these girls like who go out with poets and singers? What have they got that I haven't?

I read the book Groupie by Jenny Fabian and I'm ashamed to say I thought it sounded OK, being a groupie. But I knew I wasn't witty, worldly or beautiful enough to even be that. The only way left for a girl to get into rock and roll was to be a backing singer and I couldn't sing.

Every cell in my body was steeped in music, but it never occurred to me that I could be in a band, not in a million years--why would it? Who'd done it before me? There was no one I could identify with. No girls played electric guitar. Especially not ordinary girls like me.

-- Nina Canal is in my year (she later formed the experimental New York band Ut). She's tall and willowy with olive skin, short black hair, and moves like a gazelle; she's languid and self-assured, the most elegant girl I've ever seen. Nina hangs out with an equally stunning girl called Perry--such a cool name--who has long messy blonde hair, is outspoken and interesting; she lights up any room she's in. Nina and Perry don't wear makeup, their hands and clothes are covered in splodges of paint, their fingers rough and gnarled, ringed with plasters covering cuts from scalpels and Stanley knives. Working hands, creative hands, the hands of girls who do stuff, who have ideas. Sexy hands. They smoke roll-ups. These two girls eclipse Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Suzi Quatro and June Child (not Yoko though) as role models for me--they're real girls, my age, that I can copy. Although they come from a more privileged background than me, which gives them confidence I don't have, I think if I watch them and listen to them for a couple of months, I can get there. This is the kind of girl I want to be: natural, passionate about work, articulate, intelligent, equal.


Walking down Davis Road with Keith Levene and Mick Jones, 1975

-- Expressing myself through the guitar is a very difficult concept to grasp. I don't want to copy any male guitarists, I wouldn't be true to myself if I did that. I can't copy Lita Ford from the Runaways or the guitarist from Fanny: they don't sound like women, they sound like men. I keep thinking, "What would I sound like if I was a guitar sound?" It's so abstract. As I experiment, I find that I like the sound of a string open, ringing away whilst I play a melody on the string next to it. It sounds like bagpipe music or Indian or Chinese, oriental and elemental. I try to play like John Cale in the Velvets, I don't realise for ages that he's playing violin and viola, not guitar. I want my guitar to sound like that. I like hypnotic repetition, I like the same riff played over and over again for ages. I like nursery rhymes. I love the top three trebly strings, the higher up the neck the better, and I turn the treble knob on the guitar and on the amp up full.

-- I can't wear my beautiful Terry de Havilland boots because they're brown. You can't wear brown. It's the most reviled colour. Not just because it's considered lame, being a mixture of other colours--even a colour has to state its position--but because it's bourgeois, worn by people who live in the countryside. It's too comfortable. Acceptable colours are black, white, red, shocking pink, fluorescent yellow or green (almost impossible to find anything in London in these colours), tartan, anything bold. Pastels are weak, unless you wear them ironically or in a contrasting fabric like rubber; grey is for old people and suits. As for beige, you may as well be dead.

-- I bump into Chrissie Hynde at the Speakeasy and tell her I've changed my mind, I've decided to join the Slits if they ask me again. She says, "If you didn't go for it, I would have!" If they ask me I'd better say yes before Chrissie moves in on them. But they wouldn't ask Chrissie. No one wants to be in a band with her, she's too good.


The Slits -- me, Ari, Tessa, Palmolive

-- Ari is wonderful and terrible in equal measure. She's great when we're writing, rehearsing or playing, but the rest of the time I find her difficult to be around. She'd loud, boisterous, rude, unstable and desperate for attention every second of the day. She's not an ordinary fifteen-year-old, they discovered that about her at her last two schools; in the end they asked her to leave, they couldn't control her. She makes enemies wherever we go, pissing off soundmen, promoters, potential managers and other bands with her attitude. I know she's young and just beginning to discover the adult world but she's so extreme: at one point she was convinced she was god's mistress reincarnated. It's worrying.

Because Ari's the singer of the band she's our mouthpiece. The trouble is, she doesn't know enough about life yet to be a mouthpiece, and she doesn't know that she doesn't know--that's the worst thing. I'm not very patient with her, I hardly ever let her naïve comments pass without a withering look or a sharp retort. I wouldn't care what she says or does if I wasn't in a band with her, but I am and it's important to me.

-- The Slits go through managers very quickly. No one can control us. I don't think a manager should control a band, ideally they should guide and facilitate, but control is what they seem to want to do. Also, when girls have an opinion, and the manager is a man, sexual politics rears its ugly head. They don't hear, We don't want to play those kinds of venues, we're trying to create a whole new experience, so even the venues we play have to be thought about carefully. They hear, I don't want to fuck you. They try and treat us like malleable objects to mould or fuck or make money out of.

-- A friend of Dick's turns up, he's just been in Africa. An older hippy guy, we don't mind him hanging about, he's very relaxed. He's watching the shoot and we're smearing mud from the rose garden on each other's arms and legs, mucking about and using our eye makeup and crayons to look a bit tribal. He gets what we're trying to do, and says we remind him of a tribe he saw in Africa; we ask him what marks we should do, he suggests, he shows us how to tie a loin cloth ... Yeah! Let's cover ourselves in mud and wear loin cloths! This is pretty late in the shoot, and we've been at Ridge Farm a couple of weeks so we're all a bit stir-crazy. We strip off in the garden. We wouldn't have done it if it had been a male photographer, but we feel safe with Pennie.



-- Our first show in LA is at the Whisky a Go Go; we walk onto the stage acting like Stepford Wives because we've just watched the film back at the hotel and we think it perfectly describes LA--a tranquil surface with sinister undercurrents. I'm surprised how much I like it. Whilst we're here, we try to meet up with a friend of ours called Ivi, a sweet, gentle Jamaican guy Don Letts introduced us to in London, but when we call his apartment we're told he's been shot dead in a drug feud. We dedicate Return of the Giant Slits to him.

-- Even though we love our new record, it was exhausting to make without any support and things are disintegrating within the group; the musical climate has changed in England, it's more careerist, bands go to record-company meetings dressed in suits with briefcases and do business deals. It's not an environment the Slits fit into at all. Honesty and outspokedness are yesterday's papers. In the back of the van on the way to one of our last gigs Ari tells us she's pregnant; as she talks, she tugs absent-mindedly at her eyebrows, pulling them out one by one. By the time we arrive in Bristol, she has no eyebrows left.

-- The pain I feel from the Slits ending is worse than splitting up with a boyfriend, my parents divorcing or being chucked out of the Flowers of Romance: this feels like the death of a huge part of myself, two whole thirds gone. Now the Slits are over and Tessa has recovered, I've got nowhere to go, nothing to do; I'm cast back into the world like a sycamore seed spinning into the wind. I'm burnt out and my heart is broken. I can't bear to listen to music. Every time I hear a song I feel physical pain, just to hear instruments is unbearable, it reminds me of what I've lost.


The Slits memorial photo, 1982. L-R: Tessa, me, Ari, Bruce Smith, Neneh Cherry

This takes us to the end of "Side One," or 59% of a whirlwind memoir. Teaching aerobics, graduating film school, marriage, cancer, motherhood, Vincent Gallo, divorce and more music are to come. Albertine does a sublime thing with Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys. In addition to the clarity and wit she brings to her writing--as if the Brontës started a punk band--Albertine pens each episode as if a journal entry from that time. She rarely comments on events from any wiser, healthier perch but from what head space she was in then. I found this remarkably alive and also so honest in autobiography that delves into the creative process. I loved it.

Viviane Albertine was born in Sydney, Australia in 1954 and grew up in a North London council flat.



In the event you missed them: Previous reviews in the Year of Women:

Come Closer, Sara Gran
Veronica, Mary Gaitskill