Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

It’s scary standing in front of audiences singing and playing, struggling to keep a band together, hustling for gigs and money. If happy domesticity came my way, I’d probably grab hold of it and never let it go. I think of what my mum said to me when I was lamenting my loneliness to her last week: ‘Do you really want to be owned again?�

Bloody hell. No guy has talked to me like that for a very long time. I’m high as a kite. For the first time in years I’ve been spoken to like I’m a woman, and most exciting of all, like I’m an artist. Not just a mother, not just a wife. OK, maybe this is the oldest trick in the book to get a girl’s attention, but it doesn’t matter, because the life force that was in Viv Albertine � that has been released.

Now we’re in the car, Hubby is driving. I’m horrified. What the hell is he doing driving like this? He is going to kill my child. Everything is heightened and distorted. Being a new mother is more psychedelic than taking acid. The whole world is different. Dangers are exaggerated, smells are intensified, speed and distance are stretched.

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.

We listen to ‘Space Is the Place� by Sun Ra whenever we travel through Europe on tour. It works especially well in Switzerland; we put it on at the beginning of the Gotthard Tunnel. The track lasts exactly the length of the journey through the tunnel, twenty minutes. It builds and sways, it’s shamanic and uplifting. If we time it right, the track ends as we burst out into the light on the other side. Orgasmic.

The Slits go through managers very quickly. No one can control us. 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.

I can’t sleep. I think about the terrifying power that women and mothers have. We don’t need to fight in wars. We have nothing to prove. We have the power to kill and lots of us have used it. How many of you boys have ever killed anyone? I have. I’ve killed a baby. It doesn’t get much worse than that. Maybe your mother has secretly used her power to kill in the past and not told you.

I talked to Chrissie Hynde about it. (I got to know Chrissie when I met Mick at art school. He was trying to get a band together with her, she’s still not in a band but she really wants to be in one.) I said, ‘It’s gimmicky and tokenistic being in an all-girl band, isn’t it?� She told me to shut up and get on with it.

We do have a name though: the Flowers of Romance. I think it’s the best band name in the world, reminds me of The Grapes of Wrath. Rotten thought of it, just came out with it, he’s so good with words. I love that the name goes against all the other band names that are fashionable at the moment, all the hard, shocking, aggressive names.

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.