Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.

by Viv Albertine

  I stand alone in the darkened studio. Everyone else is up on high in the control room. Dennis’s disembodied voice comes booming through my headphones, with Ari excitedly shouting instructions in the background. I try with all my might to concentrate and get the part right. I get a few bars into the song but the tape stops abruptly. ‘You went out of time on the beginning of the intro, I’ll drop you in,’ says Dennis. I count the bars until I have to come in and start playing just before, so I’m up to speed when I’m dropped into the track. I’m completely focused on the task, absolutely determined to get it right this time. Phew, did it. The tape stops. ‘You were a fraction early. Try again.’ I can’t believe it, seemed all right to me. I try again. On and on it goes. We spend half an hour on the first few bars of the song. I want to cry but hold it in. I honestly don’t know what to do differently. I’ve lost all my self-confidence, all sense of judgement. I keep playing and replaying the part, not knowing what on earth to do to make it better. They play the tape for about the twentieth time, I flip. I thrash at my guitar furiously, not caring about timing, chords or tuning, I just smash my hand over the open strings, the tape keeps playing, I run out of steam and stop. I wait for them to tell me off for losing my cool. ‘That was brilliant! Don’t stop! Do it again!’ And that’s how the guitar part for ‘Newtown’ comes about.

  Ari and Dennis bounce off each other well. I think Dennis recognises Ari as someone who loves and lives for music, like him. All of us are very willing to learn and there’s no ego, no arguments regarding the songs, normally we argue a lot, but at Ridge Farm we are as one. We just want the record to be great, the song comes first.

  ‘Instant Hit’ is a new song; I can’t believe it’s turned out so well and is now the opening song on the record. I had a few lyrics about Keith Levene – the title refers to his smack habit – and we put them to music in the studio as a round or canon, which we remembered doing at school. Dennis thought it was a great idea. I love that he never dismisses an idea as childish. Keith’s actual voice is on the end of the track, we taped a phone call where me and him have a bit of an argument: he says ‘Thanks a lot’ in a sarcastic voice. Dennis added the South American flute, it brought the whole song together, made it really light and ethereal. (In 2013 this track was sampled and used on the single ‘Consumerism’ by Ms Lauryn Hill.)

  ‘So Tough’ is the first song Ari and I worked on together in the Daventry Street squat. The words came out of that late-night telephone conversation I had with John Rotten about Sid. I used to phone John sometimes when he was staying at his mum’s flat in Finsbury Park. He never answered the phone himself, a friend or brother screened his calls. John had just come back from Amsterdam, so when the bloke who answered the phone asked, ‘Who’s calling?’ I made up the name ‘Tulip’. He said, ‘Hang on,’ and went off to tell John that Tulip was on the phone. A minute later John answered, so I don’t know what the point of the screening was. Anyway we chatted for about half an hour about Sid, wondering why he was spiralling down, out of control, what he wanted from life; when I put the phone down I wrote ‘So Tough’, using a lot of the words and expressions from the call. I already had the guitar riff so I tried to make it fit the words. When I played the riff to Sid, he said, ‘Why don’t you repeat the first part of the riff, do it twice?’ It was a great idea and I liked that he contributed to the song about himself.

  I wrote ‘Spend Spend Spend’, inspired by the pools winner Viv Nicholson. It’s what she said when she won. It was the headline in all the papers the next day. She was the first winner to say she was just going to blow the lot, not ‘I’m going to buy a house for myself and one for my mum and dad,’ and all that safe stuff. I thought she was great and of course it resonated that she had the same name as me and I thought she was pretty. As the song evolved it turned into more of a comment on needing to own things to make yourself feel happy or complete, which I have a tendency towards, and the line about ‘walking down the street looking in the windows’ is something I’ve done since I was a child.

  Palmolive wrote the words to ‘Shoplifting’, I just added the ‘Do a runner’ chorus. It’s fun to record; we speed it up and Ari gets so excited when she does her part that she pisses herself when she screams. She laughs her head off and you can hear her on the track saying, ‘I pissed in my knickers!’

  ‘FM’ is another Palmolive lyric. She’s fantastic with words, and it’s even more extraordinary when you think she hadn’t been speaking English that long when she wrote it. Palmolive wrote the lyrics to ‘Newtown’ too. The song was originally called ‘Drugtown’, but I changed it to ‘Newtown’, thinking about all the new towns that are springing up around the edges of London, like Milton Keynes and Crawley. The young people growing up there are so bored, they take loads of drugs and drive around really fast or beat each other up at football matches, then they get up and commute to their dull jobs on Monday morning. Palmolive made up these great words like ‘televisina’ and ‘footballina’ as drug names, I think only a foreigner could do that. I’m too self-conscious about the language. I added the rap in the middle. We completely change the arrangement in the studio. After Tessa’s deep, solid bass, my painful guitar part and Ari’s extraordinary vocal performance the song is transformed – haunting, menacing, druggy and violent. We don’t want to crowd the track with a load more instruments but something is missing. We sit at the mixing desk throwing ideas around but nothing excites us. In the end Dennis says, ‘Let me try something.’ ‘What? What?’ we want to know. But he won’t say. Not sure he knows himself.

  He goes down into the pit, turns the lights down low – it’s quite theatrical – we all peer through the glass watching him search the studio for props. He lays a couple of things he’s found on a table – a glass, a spoon, a box of matches – then says, ‘Roll the tape.’

  Dennis moves his body with the rhythm of the song, focusing on the table, completely in the zone: first he picks up the box of matches and, using it as a percussion instrument, gives it a shake, just one shake – he could have used maracas or any other proper percussion instrument, there are plenty lying around the studio but he chooses the box of matches – then he taps the glass with the spoon, drops the spoon into the glass, shakes the matchbox, taps the glass, drops the spoon, lights the match … bit by bit he builds a percussion track. He’s so inventive he doesn’t need any instruments at all to make music. We stand in a row in the control booth watching Dennis make magic. Nobody moves, nobody speaks, we don’t want to break the spell. One take and that is it: ‘Newtown’ is finished.

  Ari and I go through the lyrics of ‘Ping Pong Affair’ together, and I explain the emotions behind the words. We discuss that when she sings ‘life’s better without you’, she doesn’t mean it; she has to convey the underlying meaning of regret, not the actual meaning of defiance. The song is about me and Mick Jones. I rushed out of his flat in Ladbroke Grove one night in a fury, forgetting I didn’t have enough money to get a taxi, and got a bit scared trying to get home. A couple of days later, looking at the pile of comics and records he’d left at my place, I started to miss him. Later when I was in the newsagent’s in Shepherd’s Bush looking at the magazines, I heard that beautiful soft voice behind me and knew I was still in love with him.

  ‘Love und Romance’ is a pastiche of a love song and all the expectations and traps of being in a relationship. Mick hates this one. During the recording of this track, our new manager Dick O’Dell visits Ridge Farm, bringing with him Bruce Smith, the drummer of the Pop Group (who he also manages). We all click with Bruce immediately. He has a friendly open demeanour and when we hear him play, we’re knocked out. We know Budgie isn’t into being in the Slits full-time, and Bruce says he’d love to play with us. We get Bruce to mumble on this track as if he were the boyfriend. I snog him before he goes home. Don’t know what’s the matter with me, I can’t resist a kiss.

  When I was writing ‘Typical Girls’ I sat cross-legged on the single bed – the same pale blue wo
oden one I’d had since childhood – in my tiny little bedroom, bored out of my brains in my mum’s council flat in Highgate. After I moved out, my younger sister got the big bedroom, so when I moved back I was stuck in the box room. The flat was freezing, the only warm room was the tiny steamed-up kitchen. The living room was never heated, so none of us ever went in it. It was too cold to sit and watch TV so I never watched it. All the windowsills were rotting from damp and condensation. I wheeled the Calor gas heater into my bedroom; it took up most of the floor, I had to make a bit of space for it by kicking all my clothes into a pile. There was a big F scratched into the cream enamel paint on top of the heater where my boyfriend, Nic Boatman, started to write the word ‘Fuck’ before my mum caught him and went mad. I stared out of the window. Nothing was happening. Nothing for it, I’d have to write a song. I flicked through my lyric book and picked out snatches of words that suited my mood. I got distracted and started looking through a pile of books on the windowsill – they were sitting on top of a folded tea towel so they didn’t get too damp. One was a sociology book called Typical Girls. It sparked off a train of thought and I went back to sit on the bed and write a list of all the traits a typical girl was supposed to have: gets upset too quickly, emotional, can’t control herself, worries about spots and fat and natural smells …

  I took the song – in my head as I can’t write music – to rehearsal. I made sure I played the riff lots of times before I went to sleep so I wouldn’t forget it. I learnt to do this the hard way; so often I’ve been sure the music is lodged in my brain, but can’t remember it when I wake up the next morning.

  Ari got ‘Typical Girls’ immediately; that I was taking the piss out of all the expectations and clichés, and she didn’t change the timing of the guitar riff even though it’s a bit odd, not 4/4. (When Mick heard the song he tried to persuade me to put it into 4/4 time. I didn’t know what he was on about. I didn’t know about time signatures, that this was in a strange time signature; it was just how the guitar riff came out. He said we’d have a hit with it if we changed it but we ignored his advice. We didn’t have a hit.) Mick wrote ‘Train in Vain’ about me after we broke up the last time. When we were going out, he used to get the tube train from his gran’s flat in Royal Oak to my squat in Shepherd’s Bush. If we’d had an argument I wouldn’t let him in, I’d leave him pining on the doorstep. There’s a response to ‘Typical Girls’ in ‘Train in Vain’. I say, ‘Typical girls stand by their man’ (quoting the Tammy Wynette song), and Mick replies, ‘You didn’t stand by me.’

  ‘Adventures Close to Home’, what a great title. Palmolive wrote this song just before she left the band. She said we could only use it on the record if Tessa sang it, she didn’t want Ari to sing it. Tessa said she’d do it, which was very brave of her, she’d never sung before. Ari didn’t mind not singing it at all, she didn’t take it personally and leapt at the idea of playing the bass instead; she wrote a great bass line that weaves through the song like it’s having an adventure of its own.

  We want to use some holiday snaps for the front cover, taken on our trip across Europe with Nora last summer. We think we might even use the ones of us naked on the beach; I telephone Mum and ask her to look through them and post the ones we’ve selected to Ridge Farm. Mum calls me the next day and says something terrible has happened: whilst she was sorting through the pictures on the kitchen table, she knocked a cup of coffee over them and they’re ruined. Ari and Tessa go mad. They’re furious and I’m really embarrassed. It’s not like Mum to mess up something so important. I call her back and ask if any of the pictures can be salvaged at all and she says absolutely not, they’re ruined. So we decide to get a photographer to come to Ridge Farm to take a picture for the cover. We choose Pennie Smith to take the photographs, we’ve worked with her before and feel relaxed with her.

  The night before the photo shoot, we discuss the kind of thing we might do; wild animals, warriors, woodland creatures – and then go off to bed. Except I stay up and bleach the hairs on my legs with Jolen Crème, I don’t want to look like a real animal.

  In the morning we mess about on the lawn doing crouchy, crawly positions, playing off each other, putting makeup on like war paint. One of those shots ended up being the cover for the single, ‘Typical Girls’. Then we go to the woods that border the farm and run about, chasing each other and peeping through the trees (the back cover of Cut).

  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.

  Someone gets an old sheet and tears it up. We dip the strips of fabric into the mud. I don’t want too much mud on my face, I still want to look nice. Tessa and Ari are much better about that, they’re not always worrying about looking pretty. They’re more in the moment.

  We know we have to have a warrior stance, not try and be all seductive. We’re aware what we’re doing could be misconstrued, we want the photo to have the right attitude, not be prurient.

  After the shoot we jump in the swimming pool to rinse off. Dennis is already in there, he’s horrified, can’t get out quick enough. Says he can’t be photographed with three naked white girls.

  When we see the contact sheet we can’t find a shot where we all look right so I’m cut out of another shot and superimposed. The designer Neville Brody, who later becomes famous (for The Face), does the artwork.

  Twenty years later, Mum confessed that she deliberately ruined the holiday pictures because she was appalled that we wanted to use naked shots of ourselves on the record cover.

  55 SIMPLY WHAT’S HAPPENING

  1979

  I meet Gareth Sager, the guitarist from the Pop Group, at Glastonbury. He’s speckled with freckles, has healthy, ruddy cheeks and hair the colour and texture of pale English straw. His eyes are cornflower blue. I think of poppy fields and blue skies when I look at him. He’s the opposite to the pale-skinned, dark-haired, introspective guys I’ve met up until now. We run around in the mud, he laughs a lot and says surreal things. His mind darts all over the place, he’s bursting with enthusiasm and curiosity about music. I think he’s extraordinary. I want him. I think he might fancy Ari, they get along really well. I’m a bit older and more balanced than they are. Maybe he’s too clever or too wild for me.

  Gareth lives in Bristol, so when I get back to London I start going into Dick O’Dell’s office every day – he’s managing us and the Pop Group – hoping Gareth will phone whilst I’m there, then we can have a quick chat. Gareth is the one in the Pop Group who does what I do in the Slits, all the organising. It’s funny, but every time I’m in the office, he does call. Is it too much to hope that he wants to talk to me too? After he’s spoken to Dick, he always says, ‘Is anyone else there?’ And Dick says, ‘Viv’s here, do you want to talk to her?’ And he says, ‘Yes.’

  One day he tells me he’s coming to London and we arrange to meet up: I say he can stay at mine and Tessa’s place in Victoria if he wants. It doesn’t take long before Gareth and I are together. The first time he has to leave me and go back to Bristol he doesn’t seem too bothered. I’m upset at his lack of emotion, but after he’s gone, I go into the bathroom and he’s scrawled on the mirror with my lipstick, ‘Never can say goodbye.’ I think it’s beautiful.

  Gareth is into free jazz and introduces me to music by Ornette Coleman, Dollar Brand, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis and Don Cherry. Even though h
e’s a really exciting and proficient musician, Gareth thinks tuning and timing are arbitrary restrictions – passion and ideas are much more important. His approach makes me excited about music again.

  Recently there’s been no room for speeding up, slowing down, dropping a beat, turning the beat around, singing a bit out of tune; everyone’s desperately trying to be a good musician, quite the opposite of why we started a group in the first place. I find it difficult to keep time but what kind of human being can keep in metronomic time? It doesn’t seem natural to me.

  I don’t understand why time-keeping is considered such an attribute in western music. African drummers don’t play one speed all the way through a piece of music, they speed up and slow down according to the mood, same with Indian music. It’s like being told to keep the same speed and rhythm all through sex.

  The Slits are off to Europe – Brussels, Germany and Amsterdam – to play some gigs and a couple of TV shows. At a Bavarian rock-and-roll show in Munich, I meet an improviser called Steve Beresford who’s playing with the experimental band the Flying Lizards (they had a hit in 1979 with a cover of the Beatles song ‘Money’). What impresses me about Steve isn’t just his ability to play any instrument – piano, bass, trumpet, euphonium – or that he has a suitcase full of brightly coloured toy instruments which he also plays and takes great care of – but that like Gareth, he isn’t a music snob. Steve’s a classically trained musician and very accomplished. We hang out together in Germany and talk about TV shows, pop music and cartoon characters. Steve is my discovery.