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

by Viv Albertine

  When I visited Poly in the hospice we held hands the whole time, she had soft, young, girlish skin, and we had such a laugh, laughed our heads off about boys and sex and all that bollocks. Before I had cancer I was a bit uncomfortable about illness, but not now. I think Poly felt very relaxed with me. She still had hope that she was going to get better.

  I texted Poly a couple of days later that I was thinking of her, and got a message back saying she had just passed away. At her funeral I thought, It’s true the good die young, I’m going to try and be good like Poly, that’s what I’m going to take away from knowing her.

  31 THE VERMILION BORDER

  2010–2012

  You design your music to accommodate the level of skill that you have available to you.

  Brian Eno

  Making my record, The Vermilion Border, is like being a kid and getting all my mates over to help build a tree house out of bits of wood that are lying around. We bang it together bit by bit, only stopping if I run out of money or need to write another song. It takes a couple of years. I set up a crowd-funding account with Pledgemusic to help pay for the recording, the money dribbles in and I make sculptures and drawings to send to the pledgers.

  Working at the kitchen table, 2012

  I bump into Jah Wobble at a party, I haven’t seen him for twenty-five years; he’s just written his autobiography, Memoirs of a Geezer, and we talk about playing together. I hustle and hassle him and make it happen; we record two songs at his publisher’s studio in Soho (‘Traum Palace’ and ‘Bury the Bones’). A couple of weeks later at a gig, I meet Jim Barr, the bass player with Get the Blessing and Portishead. I act confident and say I’d like to work with him. He’s a very open-minded person and says yes. I send him the track ‘Couples Are Creepy’ and he records a bass line for it.

  Now I have Wobble and Jim on my record, the thought pops into my head, This could be a theme: I’ve already got two great bass players, why not keep going in that direction and have an interesting bass player on each track? Another bass player I would love to work with is Jack Bruce, how ridiculous is that. I only had about four LPs when I was fifteen and one of them was Disraeli Gears by Cream. Someone at Pledgemusic knows Jack so I send him an email, and lo and behold he replies and says yes too.

  I choose a drummer who I think will suit Jack, Charles Hayward (formerly of This Heat – one of the best bands in the world), and on the recording day Jack arrives right on time. We all have a laugh together and when he’s nice and relaxed I say, ‘Let’s go into the studio and play through the song.’

  ‘Have you got a demo for me to listen to?’ says Jack.

  I try to sound positive. ‘No, we’ve only just learnt it.’

  He looks surprised. ‘Wow. That’s old-school.’ There’s a pause, the air suddenly seems very thin and I take a deep breath. Then he smiles: ‘OK!’

  Phew. Got past that awkward little moment.

  ‘What key is it in?’

  I don’t know! I don’t know anything about keys. I’m way out of my depth here. ‘I’ve no idea,’ I say, keeping my voice steady.

  ‘Don’t you care what key I play in?’ says Jack.

  He thinks I’m an idiot.

  ‘Cool!’ He beams.

  Jack asks what sort of thing I would like him to play, I talk about opium dens, Morocco … but he laughs and says that to him the song sounds like those music-hall performers from the 1930s and ’40s, Wilson, Keppel and Betty, who did funny Egyptian dancing in a sand tray. He plugs in his Gibson bass guitar shaped like a violin, we dim the lights and watch him through the glass window of the control room. As I lean against the mixing desk, listening to Jack play, I feel spiritually elevated, his playing pulls me down into sadness, soars up into joy and rattles me through every emotion in between, that’s what he does with his bass playing, he paints an emotional picture.

  And that’s it, the end of the session. Jack says that if I ever need him again he’ll be there like a shot, he hasn’t enjoyed a session so much in years.

  The bass players on my album are: Tina Weymouth (Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club), Jah Wobble (PiL), Jim Barr (Portishead), Jack Bruce (Cream, Blind Faith), Jenny Lee Lindberg (Warpaint), Danny Thompson (John Martyn, Nick Drake, Pentangle), Norman Watt-Roy (Ian Dury, the Blockheads), Winston Blissett (Massive Attack), Glen Matlock (the Sex Pistols), Wayne Nunes (Tricky), Gina Birch (the Raincoats).

  32 FRIENDLY FIRE

  2011

  Behind every successful woman is a man who tried to stop her.

  Graffition the wall of the women’s lavatory,

  the George Tavern, East London

  I’m on my mobile in Waterstones in Camden Town, arguing with my ‘manager’, Pete Panini, about my book. He’s telling me he’s found a twenty-three-year-old music journalist who he thinks should ghostwrite it for me. She’s never written a book before, just articles.

  I start off quite calmly, ‘Pete, I’ve asked an editor I know to oversee my writing. Give me a chance, just three chapters and if it doesn’t work out, we’ll do it your way.’

  ‘Well, if you want the book to be shit,’ he replies.

  I try again. Mustn’t get ruffled, god forbid a woman should appear to be difficult in business. ‘I know I can do it, I’ve already started writing and I’ve found my voice, I’m really excited.’

  ‘What’s my role? I have no role if you do it that way,’ he says.

  Aah, now we’re getting to the nub of the problem.

  ‘Anyway, your new agent won’t want to represent you any more,’ he continues. ‘Faber probably won’t want you either.’

  I swear at him. He hangs up.

  ‘Excuse me, madam, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave the premises.’ I stomp out of Waterstones, security guard at my heels, and onto Camden High Street. Dodging through the traffic, I stop in front of Marks and Spencer and lean against the window shaking with fury. My so-called ‘manager’, who in all the six months he’s been ‘managing’ me has never once come to one of my gigs, is now telling me that I’m a shit writer and can’t write a book about my own life.

  I knew I’d have a fight on my hands when I came back to music but I never imagined I was going to be taken down by one of my own team. That’s the end of that relationship.

  I’m scared he might be right. I can’t write. The book will be shit. But I ignore my fears. I feel a fool, I’m sure the answer will be ‘no’ – but I call my new agent and the editor at Faber and ask if they would still be interested if I wrote the book myself. They are. I can’t overemphasise how difficult and embarrassing it was for me to make those calls, but I’m so glad I did.

  33 FALSE START

  2012

  We’ve been filled with great treasure for one purpose: to be spilled.

  Yoko Ono

  Why do I bother pounding around Regent’s Park three times a week, going to the gym, keeping fit? It’s not like I’ve got a boyfriend to roll around with. It’s not like anyone cares what I look like. It’s exhausting trying to keep it together at this age. Constantly tweezing, waxing and moisturising, running, stretching and all the rest of it. Aaargghh! I trip over a tree root and smack down onto the hard dry earth. I fall so heavily that I’m winded, my tracksuit bottoms are ripped and my knees have gaping wounds jam-packed with little stones. But I’m not giving up and going home after all the effort it took to drag my arse over here, I’m going to run my usual course just to show god, myself, my non-existent boyfriend and anyone else who may be looking down on me from above that I cannot and will not be beaten.

  My friend Joanna Hogg, the filmmaker, calls whilst I’m lying in bed the morning after the fall. For twenty-five years, since we first met, our friendship has kept bubbling along. We support each other by meeting up every now and then to appraise our lives. We’ve both been through slumps, but we buoy ourselves up and give one another creative goals to achieve. It’s an unusual and productive friendship.

  Over the past few weeks we’ve been discussing th
e new feature film Joanna’s about to start shooting, bouncing ideas around for casting. It’s getting perilously close to the first day of filming and she still hasn’t found the right people to play her two main characters. Joanna has her pick of actors, but she likes working with non-actors.

  ‘Viv, I’m going to ask you something, please say no if it’s something you really wouldn’t want to consider.’

  A little glow ignites in my sternum, not quite pleasure, not quite anxiety.

  ‘How would you feel about playing the main character in the film?’

  I say yes. Not only because I’ve got used to saying yes to challenges since the Year of Saying Yes, I also know that if Joanna thinks I’m right for the film, I’m right for the film. I trust her judgement completely. This is an amazing thing to happen to me, like when you find love. It’s wonderful and terrible at the same time: wonderful because something you thought could never happen has happened and terrible because all you can think is, Am I up to it? Will I fuck it up?

  I’ve just sold the family house (I got it as part of the marriage settlement, unlike my mother – after her divorce we had to move into a council flat by the gasworks in Turnpike Lane, women were not allowed to take out mortgages on their own then, they needed a man’s permission), and during the next two weeks I pack everything my daughter and I own into cardboard boxes, call the removal company, bring the move forward two weeks and we move out the day before filming begins. I thought I wouldn’t want to leave this big house I was so proud of, but as I shut the front door for the last time, I feel nothing. We can’t move into our new home yet, so I install my daughter at my mother’s. Tomorrow I’m going to start living with the man playing my husband at a house in Kensington – this house is also the main location for the film – for the next six weeks. I’m meeting him for the first time tonight.

  I stop packing for half an hour and meet Joanna and the man in a pub up the road. This is what an arranged marriage must be like; the first meeting laden with hope, expectation and dread. The main thing is, I must feel safe with him, I don’t want to spend six weeks alone in a house with a creepy guy. I walk into the Lord Stanley and he’s leaning against the bar with Joanna. His name is Liam Gillick, he’s an English artist who lives in New York. He talks a lot but I can’t understand most of what he says. It’s convoluted. He speaks like an academic giving a lecture, so I ask him to speak more simply. He drinks a lot of wine and his nose goes red but I don’t feel threatened by him, so I know we’ll be OK. When he goes to the bog I whisper to Joanna, ‘Please will you ask him to clean his teeth before we kiss?’ She assures me she will. I haven’t kissed a guy for a year.

  I arrive at the location at 8 p.m. with all my bags, an assistant helps me unload the taxi and then leaves me and Liam alone. Tomorrow we start filming. I’m going to stay the night in someone else’s empty house, with a man I just met. How weird. He suggests we go to the pub. We sit outside under an electric heater and discuss life, art, having children. As we talk, I realise that an old friend of mine went to Goldsmiths art school with him. I text her to ask what he was like. She texts back: VERY ambitious. Meanwhile Liam is telling me what a lovely big cuddly socialist he is. I don’t care that he’s ambitious, lives in a fancy penthouse and has round-the-clock nannies for his child, I just think it’s funny. I start to tease him about it but he explodes. He’s not at all amused. I think I’m being quite flirty calling him a Thatcher’s child and a careerist. (I have been off the dating scene for seventeen years.) I thought we’d got to a place during the evening where we could say stuff like that to each other, wind each other up with a smile, but I’ve hit a raw nerve. He goes mental, jumps up off the bench, practically turns over the table, grabs his (designer) coat – face bulldog angry and red, chest puffed out – and says he’s not doing the film, it’s not going to work, he’s going to pack his bags and fuck off back to New York.

  As I watch Liam scurry off up the street in a huff, my mouth in an O shape, I dimly recall Joanna saying something like ‘Be gentle with him’ the last time I saw her. She knows me only too well. I’d better sort this out or the film isn’t going to happen. I run after Liam and try to placate him; I explain that I was only teasing and I really like him. I put my hand on his arm, he shakes it off like I’m a leper and hisses, ‘Don’t touch me.’ He looks disgusted by me. Wow. I go back to the house and watch him pack. He’s still snarling and hissing, ‘You’re not smart enough to play my wife,’ and, ‘You’re lazy and unprofessional.’ (Because I haven’t Googled him yet.) ‘I don’t want to be in this bourgeois film anyway.’ It seems to matter very much to him how he is perceived in the ‘art world’. On and on he rants. I give up trying to pacify him and say, ‘I understand if you think the film’s not right for you and I’m not the right person to play your wife, you have to do what’s best for you and your image.’ His expression softens, he stops packing, says he’s not going to leave the film after all, he’s going back to the pub and he’ll see me later.

  When I hear the front door close, I sit down on the top step of the spiral staircase and cry. Then I get angry. I’m not going to be bullied and told I’m not good enough by any more men. I’ve had enough of it. I’m not doing the film, it’s not worth having a nervous breakdown over. I pick up my guitar and my bags, call a cab and go home to mother.

  34 FEELING THE WEIRD

  2012

  Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth.

  Albert Camus

  ‘Never mind, dear. Didn’t they think you were very good?’ Mum isn’t being mean, it’s just that to be asked to play the lead in a feature film is so far out of her life experience, she can’t imagine how I could possibly do it. She assumes I’ve been sent home because I was crap.

  In the morning I talk to my daughter: she wants me to go back and do the film. She’s so proud and excited about it, and Joanna’s promised her she can be an extra in a scene with Tom Hiddleston. She doesn’t want to give that up.

  I go back to the house in Kensington and come across Liam in the kitchen. I give him a hug. We get on with the job. I make a pact with myself to commit to the challenge ahead and give it everything I’ve got, I’ll deal with the consequences later. It’s very very important I get this right, more important than my pride.

  The crew are friendly and easy to get along with. You’d think doing something as huge as being the lead in a film would be overwhelming. It isn’t. I’ve been a director and an editor, I understand the language, how to start and end scenes, how it might edit, how to repeat movements and dialogue. Even if none of this knowledge is relevant in this particular film, knowing it stops me feeling out of my depth. I’m not sure I could be in an ordinary film and learn lines, but I can improvise, I’m confident about that. What I’m not confident about is my body, or my face. Joanna doesn’t want me to wear any makeup, and here’s the camera inches from my face (and thighs), god knows what kind of lens Ed Rutherford, the director of photography, is using. I have absolutely no control over what I look like. I feel like Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, when Stanley Kowalski grabs her face and holds it under a bare light bulb to see how old she really is (Vivien Leigh said that was the most painful scene she had ever filmed). On the first day of shooting I’m acutely aware of my age and the rarity of a movie camera lingering over an older woman’s face in films. Usually it’s a young woman’s face the camera loves, it almost caresses her: isn’t she beautiful, isn’t she perfect.

  At first I think portraying the character ‘D’ in the film isn’t that big a leap for me: I know Joanna well, I know her films and her aesthetic, but the challenge reveals itself stealthily; D is a slightly out-of-sync reflection of myself, it’s disturbing and unsettling that I’m so close to her – but not her. The events I’m portraying in her life have just happened in mine: moving away from the family home, trying to create within a relationship, fear of change – although I’m much feistier than D. I start to lose track of where she ends and I
begin.

  One of the references Joanna mentions to me for my performance is the film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quaidu Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) by Chantal Akerman. I saw it at film school and loved the naturalism and thought how revolutionary it was to show such ordinary everyday chores as peeling a potato in real time in a feature film. Joanna also gives me Robert Bresson’s book Notes on the Cinematographer (1975) and it helps me trust my own judgement. ‘Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to what you have done and redone ten times in your head,’ Bresson writes.

  The role is physically very demanding. I’m in almost every scene, working every day, six days a week, running up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, around the local streets, on my feet all the time, thinking, remembering, calculating, improvising, and I’m pleased that I kept myself fit in those dark times when there seemed no point, especially as I’m naked in five scenes.

  Still from the film Exhibition

  I couldn’t do the sex scenes if I had a boyfriend, it would be a betrayal. Just before the first one, Joanna and I discuss what sort of knickers I should wear. Not sexy black ones, this is a long-term marriage; I try a pair of white ones but we agree they’re ‘too Bridget Jones’: we settle for a plain flesh-coloured pair from American Apparel. The crew are nearly ready, Liam’s on the bed, I’m wearing nothing but the knickers and a white towelling robe, when my body gives me the signal, a clutching feeling in my stomach, that diarrhoea is imminent. I rush down to the ground-floor loo, the most private one in the house, although even this one isn’t very private, it’s right next to the front door, which is open and a bunch of the crew are sitting outside drinking tea and eating biscuits.