It seems fairly unlikely that any autobiography this year is going to feature a more striking opening than Viv Albertine's Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. First, the former Slits guitarist announces that she thinks anyone who writes an autobiography is "either a twat or broke" ("I'm a bit of both"), then she launches into a passage about how she's never masturbated – "can't be bothered" – but did once fantasise about being raped by a pack of wild dogs. "Well, I can't stand these autobiographies that start with, you know: 'I was born in Acton and I went to such and such a school,' they just bore me," she shrugs. "And I thought, well, I'm just going on my punk principles here, a bit like a three-minute, short, sharp song, the first track on an album: you should just put it out there, show them how far it's going to go, grab hold of people and say: 'Right, you're in for a hell of a ride now.'"
There's another reason, she says. Her daughter is 15, so she has been exposed to a lot of teen fiction: you have to seize young readers with the opening paragraph or they lose interest, and it's teenage girls that she really wants to read it, rather than middle-aged rock fans looking for tales from the London punk scene that spawned the Slits. "I want them to see how often you have to fail to be anything in life. I think young men and boys are taught to fail. It's nothing to them; they do sport, they fall over, they shout: 'I'm all right,' and carry on. But with girls they're so appallingly embarrassed to fail, it's like it's considered unfeminine."
She smiles, rather sweetly. In person, Albertine, now 59, seems a very unlikely candidate indeed for authorship of a book that opens by clobbering the reader over the head with a load of stuff about wanking. She's softly spoken and appears to be aghast at how frank her book turned out to be: "I've exposed myself terribly and I don't know what the consequences are going to be," she says. "Will I ever meet another guy now that I've written it? How's it going to affect my daughter? Have I gone too far? I always go too far."
Neither is it easy to square the woman sitting opposite me in an east London cupcake shop with membership of an all-girl band once considered such a threat to the fabric of society that even the hotels who allowed other punk groups to stay refused to let them in.
"The A&R men, the bouncers, the sound mixers, no one took us seriously. On top of the fact that we were all women, we had a 15-year-old singer who was absolutely nuts, running around. So, no, we got no respect anywhere we went. People just didn't want us around."
Nevertheless, Albertine was a prime candidate for punk. She grew up on a north London council estate. Her father was a bully who vanished when she was 11. Her mother emerges from the book rather better, if possessed of an attitude to parenting that you might charitably describe as a little laissez-faire. At one point, she cheerfully waves her daughter, then 15, off on holiday to Amsterdam with a friend, despite the fact that Albertine has only five pounds in her pocket and doesn't know where Amsterdam is in:; she stays in a squat with a heroin addict from whom she contracts crabs.
She was obsessed with music but had no idea how to get involved until she saw the Sex Pistols. "It really was like the [dolly zoom] bit in the Hitchcock film where the lens comes in and they track backwards at the same time. It wasn't the band, it was John [Lydon], who was so not out there to entertain you, showing his credentials. If you came from a north London council flat, you hid it onstage, but he was what he was."
After an abortive attempt to form a band called Flowers of Romance with Sid Vicious, she joined the Slits, a perfect flowering of punk's DIY ethos. By the time of their astonishing 1978 Peel session, they had developed a bizarre, angular, idiosyncratic style that used the fact that they had no idea how you were supposed to write songs or play instruments as fuel for music unlike anything else; the writer Greil Marcus later suggested they had "rewritten the history of rock and roll". "Well, we knew what we didn't want, so that's a good place to start from. We couldn't jam, so when we sort of composed, if you can call it that, we'd honestly think: 'Does this next note go with the note before? Does it excite you? Does it unsettle you?' It was unpicking all your habits, lyrically and in our music. So, although we didn't know what we were doing, if any band had done what we were doing, they wouldn't have known what they were doing."
They also attracted an astonishing level of violence. Every old punk likes to tell war stories about how dangerous it was to walk the streets dressed like that, but Albertine's are genuinely shocking: the Slits' 15-year-old singer, Ari Up, was stabbed on the street twice by strangers in the space of a year. "People didn't know whether to fuck us or kill us, because we looked like we'd come out of a porn magazine." Albertine was a devotee of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's fetish-influenced clothing – "But something wasn't quite right, with the bovver boots and the black makeup and the hair and the gobbing. We put them off kilter. We looked like aliens to them, so a guy seeing us in the street and being pissed off by us, they didn't think they would have to treat us like girls."
If it were merely a punk memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys would still be a great read, packed with incident and striking pen portraits of the scene's main figures: Johnny Rotten, complaining "like Kenneth Williams" that Albertine is "trying too hard" when she attempts to fellate him; Johnny Thunders: "A very tender, thoughtful guy who the next minute couldn't wait to jab me full of heroin"; Sid Vicious, who seems to have been spectacularly irritating and a kind of savant, and who manages to cultivate a ruinous hardman image while still wetting the bed. Albertine even manages to rustle up a degree of affection for Vicious's nightmare girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, a screeching pantomime villain in virtually every other punk history: "Well, before they went, both of them – in a way – found some sort of bond and companionship. It wasn't particularly healthy, but it was a bond that couldn't be broken, really."
It's the second half of the book, dealing with Albertine's life after punk, that elevates it beyond most music memoirs. It opens with the curious interlude when, poleaxed by the waning of punk and the demise of the Slits, Albertine gave up music and became, of all things, an aerobics instructor. Frankly, if this happened in a novel, it would seem like a spectacularly heavy-handed metaphor for the 70s turning into the 80s but, today, Albertine has a way of talking about aerobics that somehow makes it sound like an extension of the Slits' agenda: "It was so exciting, girls moving their bodies. Before the early 80s, the only times girls moved their bodies was doing hockey or whatever at school, which everyone tried to get out of. This was really liberating: a sweaty room, packed with women, throwing their bodies around, sweating, looking dirty, no makeup."
What follows, however, is a pretty harrowing read: the book details, with candour, the "seven years of absolute madness" that were her attempts to get pregnant via IVF, her diagnosis with cervical cancer six weeks after the birth of her daughter and her doomed attempt to sink into a world of domesticity as a housewife who never mentioned her past. With Albertine's guitars and memorabilia from the punk era sold to fund the treatment, her daughter initially grew up unaware that her mum had been in a band. "I hid myself from her in the early years," she says, "because what I was, it was considered not good for a child to know. I know it sounds odd, but I'd got myself caught up in a marriage and a scene that was incompatible to who I was."
Of course, she says, now her daughter knows everything. "I can be completely outrageous to my daughter now and we have a right laugh." It just seems sad that Albertine wasn't proud of what she had done for so long, I say. "Well, being in the Slits had no collateral in those circles. If they had known what I'd done, I don't think they'd have been happy about it. Now I meet people and they're interested – 'Oh, you were in the Slits?' – and I'm suspicious of it, because when I didn't mention it for 20 years, no one was interested in me. I had blank, glazed eyes. If I went to a dinner party with these middle-aged, middle-class people, the husbands, you could see them thinking: 'Oh God, I have to talk to another wife for an hour and a half, how boring, pass the wine.'"
Eventually, with her marriage collapsing, Albertine made a tentative return to music. She declined to join the reformed version of the Slits convened by Ari Up a few years before her death and instead started performing at open-mic events in local pubs: She groans at the memory. "I felt like a complete fucking idiot and a lunatic." Her solo work doesn't sound much like the Slits, although, as she points out, it is, in its own way, just as confrontational. "I was a middle-aged woman who was very uncool, who went and did her own thing, even though no one was doing it, there was no one to follow again." Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore offered to release her solo EP on his own label. Other musicians flocked to perform on her debut album; not just friends from the punk era but Jack Bruce from Cream and Jenny Lee Lindberg from Warpaint. "That's what comes, or I hope that's what comes, of following your own true path," she says. "I hope that comes across in the book." And then something of the spirit of punk comes over her and she rolls her eyes. "Hippy as that sounds," she adds.
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