‘Here To Be Heard: The Story Of The Slits’ Recounts Brief But Vital Life Of Revolutionary Female Punk Band

There were female musicians and rock bands before The Slits, but the British punk four-piece (and later post-punk six-piece) was a force of one. Never before had female musicians upended expectations, both social and musical, with such power and fury. If anything, their contributions were greater than those of their male counterparts, who were already playing the pre-ordained rebel roles expected of them. The Slits didn’t behave like the “typical girls” they sang about, they didn’t look they way society said women should and they didn’t sound like any other rock band before or since. The 2017 documentary, Here To Be Heard: The Story Of The Slits, chronicles the band’s brief but vital epoch and is currently available for streaming on Hulu.

Formed in 1977, The Slits’ credentials as punk rock scenesters were beyond reproach. Founding drummer Palmolive had squatted with and dated Clash singer Joe Strummer, while guitarist Viv Albertine dated the group’s lead guitarist Mick Jones, and both had played in Sid Vicious’ early undocumented band, The Flowers of Romance. Bassist Tessa Pollitt came from another unrecorded group, The Castrators, while 14-year-old lead singer Ari Up was the daughter of punk den mother Nora Forster, who later married Sex Pistols’ singer Johnny Rotten.

When we first see The Slits, it is archival footage of the group gleefully trashing a car on some grim English back street. This is contrasted with scenes of Pollitt at home in the present day, delicately looking through her Slits scrapbooks she made at the time. She tells how how the band members met at famed London punk club The Roxy, and their first gig opening for The Clash, which occurred two weeks after she joined the band and began playing the bass.

Despite being musical novices, The Slits quickly learned to play around their instrumental shortcomings. Palmolive beat out tribal rhythms on her tom toms, while Pollitt’s bass lines borrowed from dub reggae and Albertine was as able at spitting out power chords as any of her punk brethren. Above it all, lanky lead singer Ari Up sang, screamed and cooed, displaying the bratty charisma you’d expect from a teenager who quit school to go on tour with The Clash. The end result sounded like a kindergarten class erupting in chaos after eating one too many sugar cookies and picking up electric guitars. Things moved fast for the band, so fast that their earliest, and most traditionally punk sounding recordings would remain unreleased until the late ‘80s.

While punk rock paid lip service to revolution, its sexual politics were not inherently radical. Most of the bands were made up of men, some of whom were as sexist as any cock rocker, and its obsession with violence and anti-social behavior was more of the same male bravado that stretched back to Elvis’ infamous sneer. However, by merely drawing a line in the sand between themselves and the elder rock establishment, punk opened the door for many who never saw themselves as musicians. This included, for the first time in rock history, a significant number of women. Albertine says she was inspired to start playing after seeing The Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten perform, and Palmolive claims she first envisioned an all-girl band after having to put up with Vicious’ macho and racist behavior in The Flowers Of Romance.

In a world ruled by “men in bowler hats and three piece suits,” the idea of four women with a provocative band name behaving as badly as the boys courted outrage and in some cases actual violence. As Albertine says men, “couldn’t decide if they wanted to fuck us or kill us.” While on the The Clash’s ‘White Riot’ tour, they were thrown out of hotels for their appearance alone, and the tour’s bus driver had to be bribed to allow them on the bus. Ari Up’s coat was slashed by a hostile concert goer and the group encountered racist skinheads in England’s provincial small towns.

The Slits were late to record, not issuing their debut album, Cut, until 1979. By then the distorted guitars had been replaced by a pronounced reggae influence. “For us it fused our whole sound” says Albertine. By then, Palmolive was gone. While the band were as close as sisters, they bickered like siblings. They would later augment the group with drummer Bruce Smith, borrowed from The Pop Group, multi-instrumentalist Steve Beresford and singer Neneh Cherry, transforming themselves into a travelling tribal collective, black and white, male and female. Burnt out by record label expectations and increasingly indifferent audiences who were still trying to catch up with their artistic breakthroughs they broke up in 1982.

Over the ensuing years, as the original members of The Slits struggled with domesticity, religion and drugs, their legend quietly grew. The ‘90s Riot Grrrl movement basically based its entire sound on the group’s recordings for influential BBC DJ John Peel, replacing the group’s anarchic feminism with a more dogmatic strain. Ari Up and Tessa Pollitt reformed the group in 2005 for several well-regarded tours and new recordings but in 2010 the singer died from breast cancer at the age of 48. Albertine, meanwhile, has written two memoirs and Palmolive is a born-again Christian living in the United States.

As a documentary, Here To Be Heard: The Story Of The Slits is lovingly done and holds your attention the whole way through. If anything, it could have gone deeper into the band’s mix of ideology and anarchy, and shown more footage of the group during their peak years. In the end, though, it is a deserving tribute to a band who despite their brief time together and scant recordings had a seismic effect on rock n’ roll which is still reverberating to this very day.

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.

Watch Here To Be Heard: The Story of The Slits on Hulu