With a title that is an incantation and a picture of the gorgeous author on its cover, Viv Albertine's autobiography is quite something. It promises a punk snog'n'tell, but is a real tease: strident, uncertain, compelling, with a structure that jerks all over the place via snapshots of Albertine's life. It's a scrappy book, as in a scrapbook of memories – and scrappy, too, in the sense she is always up for a fight. Albertine's words are naive and in-your-face. Above all they talk about what it is not to be a Typical Girl. This is maddening and magnificent all at the same time – rather like her band, the Slits.
Albertine was the band's linchpin and was always good with the verbals. First of all the name, as Simon Reynolds has memorably noted, was "the concave mirror to the convex phallic innuendo of the Sex Pistols" – a brilliant name that slashed through the cultural void of the late 1970s. Albertine conjures the dreariness of that time, the poverty – actual and artistic – that many of us grew up in. We were supposed to aspire to an engagement ring and a job in Boots.
Punk came as a slap that allowed a tiny number of women to escape and a lot of us to play around, dressing in fishnets and plastic, confronting men with their fantasies by distorting them. As Albertine says, many guys at the time didn't know whether they wanted to kill us or fuck us. Plus ça change.
But there was, before the punk uniform became commodified, a year of so of putting socks and toothbrushes in our hair, a way of dressing that used clothes as commentary on what it was to be a woman. We made it up. Of course I didn't know anyone who could actually buy anything from Vivienne Westwood's shop, Sex, because it was too expensive. We would not even have known what a designer label really meant.
But Albertine was at the heart of this clique – punk royalty – as girlfriend of the Clash's Mick Jones. Having gone the art school route she wanted to be in a band and bought herself a guitar. And so it would be that one night in 1977 I lay in bed listening to John Peel and heard the stupendous Slits session that is amazing still.
It would be great to say that I became a total fan but in truth they were difficult. Writers whose job it is to judge music often have unwavering certainty and appear to have listened to Sun Ra in their cots. The reality is different. I wavered. The Slits made us waver. Here was this gang of girls who looked fantastic, had rebuffed Malcolm McLaren, and were playing snakey dub. They were one of the first bands where one didn't have to choose between white music and music you could dance to. My heroines at the time were Nina Hagen and Patti Smith. (Hagen was the first person I ever heard talk about FGM, in about 1978.) Smith, as Albertine says, unlocked a lot of our minds with Horses. You didn't have to get to rock'n'roll via any man. You could be it. Gender was cast off as casually as Smith removed her oversize jacket to claim the crown.
Even in this environment, it was still remarkable that Albertine (pictured)did what she did. Many of her experiences are familiar to me. It was a time when you had to be blasé about things rather than reveal yourself as uncool. If people started shooting up heroin over the sink of your bedsit, you would merely hope they left no mess. She is very funny and self-lacerating about her sexual prowess. When Johnny Rotten demands a blow job, she makes a valiant effort until he tells her to give up. Sid Vicious emerges as a tender soul with lovely handwriting. Jones comes across as a mensch.
Albertine dances the whole time between insecurity and self-belief. She says she was the first person to wear pretty dresses with Dr Martens? Really? Certainly without her style, Madonna would not have dressed the way she did, nor Courtney Love. She remains loyal to her fellow Slits despite the obvious tensions that one could see on stage. Ari Up, who I always thought of as a necessary monster, was a privileged girl who was barely socialised: I realise now she was actually a child star (14 when the band started) who needed more protection than was proffered. I stopped liking the Slits because of the Cut album cover. Their naked, mud-smeared bodies I saw as a sell-out, their intended subversion was lost on me.
These days I would not be so moralistic, but punk culture was essentially moral. Things were absolutely right or wrong. Many found life on this frontline unbearable. Parts of the book about Albertine's post-Slits struggle show this: she had cancer, IVF and ended up with a much-wanted baby as a Hastings housewife. The urge to play again coincides with the realisation that her marriage is dead. Marriage is not a place where she can be an artist. A phone call from Vincent Gallo awakens her. The to-and-fro between wanting to be valued by men and then walking away from them makes her story intriguing. She boasts, almost, of having a low libido and starts with a declaration about how she does not masturbate.
She is knowing and unknowing about her sexuality, but as she studied film at the London College of Printing I wonder what theories she absorbed. This book and the Slits themselves seem to embody much theorising about what female desire would be if it were better expressed culturally: the interplay between lack and excess, where the female body tries to write itself into language. Awkwardly, beautifully, strangely. Hélène Cixous's idea of L'écriture féminine comes to mind – in which the female body, no longer alienated from itself, cuts through all the normal codes and regulations. Albertine, whether consciously or unconsciously, achieves this. She is brutally honest about her own body. We read of crabs, period-stained jeans, what happens to her labia when she is underweight.
And now she comes back to herself, and she is certainly playing brilliantly at the moment. She has survived where many were not waving but drowning. What she was searching for was there all along. Long before fourth-wave feminism started critiquing the cosmetic-industrial complex, the Slits – all underarm hair and knickers showing – were chaos magicians. The song that said "Typical girls / Don't create / Don't rebel / Have intuition / Can't decide"? Well, Albertine decided. Creation is the rebellion. She still has it all to play for.
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