Anarchic life of a punk priestess
FROM 1977 to 1981 Viv Albertine played guitar and wrote songs for The Slits, a band who, even by the rackety standards of punk, were amateurishly rubbish. They were significant, though: a free-spirited, female-dominated group right at the heart of a supposedly anarchic movement that remained deeply reactionary with regard to sex and gender.
Since 1981, Albertine has by turns been an aerobics instructor, filmmaker, ceramicist, stay-at-home mother, cancer sufferer, solo artist, divorcée and the unlikely star of Joanna Hogg’s opaque art-house movie, Exhibition.
Given she thinks anyone who writes an autobiography is “either a twat or broke”, should we read hers? Yes, actually. A fresh, insider’s take on “punk” — a term she always puts in inverted commas, as if handling it with rubber gloves — is enlivened by Albertine’s bluntness about the small victories and many disappointments of a life which, like most, happened by accident.
Albertine grew up poor in Muswell Hill with an English mother and a violent French father who promptly left. As a girl she is obsessed with John Lennon and The Kinks. David Bowie stands on her head after a crowd-surfing failure at Kensington Town Hall in 1972. She becomes part of an art student/squatter set, starts going out with Mick Jones as he is putting together The Clash, hangs out at Vivienne Westwood’s shop Sex on King’s Road and buys a Les Paul guitar. She’s not going to let sexism or lack of ability stop her forming a band, initially with Sid Vicious.
In the grey wastes of the late Seventies punk was a scary, thrilling, self-starting phenomenon, but it was also tribal and judgmental, peopled by “psychopathic, nihilistic extremists and careerists”, and dressed in some utterly phony ideas about the value of shock.
What comes across most strongly is how awful the era was for women: constantly at risk of rape, offhand assault or stabbing, taken for granted even by friends. ( Johnny Rotten tells Albertine she’s “trying too hard” as she attempts an unpractised blowjob.) She tries heroin with Johnny Thunders, who can’t get an erection. When she joins The Slits it’s a sort of sisterhood: supportive, competitive, bitchy, difficult, short-lived.
The second, post-punk chunk of the book — called, inevitably, Side Two — is messy but engaging. Sudden baby-hunger tips her into a long and bloody period of miscarriage and IVF which brings her both a daughter and a diagnosis of cervical cancer.
Although a feminist, she still defines herself by her relationships, and for a while she is married alive in Hastings, saving up for school fees (how un-punk is that?). She doesn’t name her younger husband but describes their 17-year marriage — including her bizarre transatlantic flirtation with nutball actor Vincent Gallo — in discomfiting detail.
Although she’s performing and writing again now, the book ends bleakly: a relationship with a psycho, a difficult film shoot for her friend Hogg, a roll-call of deaths: Malcolm McLaren, Ari Up, Poly Styrene. “‘Punk’ was the only time I fitted in,” Albertine laments, but in the last chapter she counts her blessings and concludes with: “I still believe in love.” That’s something, I suppose.
