CLOTHES CLOTHES CLOTHES MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC BOYS BOYS BOYS
CLOTHES CLOTHES CLOTHES MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC BOYS BOYS BOYS
By Viv Albertine
Someone asked me the other day why I loved this book so much. Viv Albertine was a songwriter and guitarist in the all-female punk band The Slits. Consciously non-girlie, in the mid to late 70s they were total pioneers who forced themselves onto the male dominated music scene. I have to admit I was a bit scared of them back when I was at uni, although I loved their music.
But now I really get what made The Slits special – their ambition, their feistiness, their feminism, their determination to do things differently.
Albertine’s unflinching tone as she retells the tale of The Slits, hanging out with the Clash and Sid Vicious and how her life has unfolded since is refreshingly, brutally honest. She is dry and hilarious, sometimes shocking, absolutely never dull.
As she recounts the many challenges of midlife like IVF, cancer, depression and the breakdown of her marriage, she is just as blunt. There’s still plenty of dark humour and wry observation and when she becomes a film maker and later revives her music career doing solo gigs in pubs, you can’t help but root for her. The funerals section at the end – all the old punks like Poly Styrene and Malcolm McLaren – is sobering in the extreme. You only get one life and the thing I love best is how Viv Albertine just goes and does things.
Marina Gask