There’s a moment towards the end of this book when Viv Albertine confronts an audience she feels has not been giving her enough attention or respect. To put this outburst in context: it is 2008, and she has had to relearn the guitar from scratch after decades of not playing. (For readers unfamiliar with Albertine: she was the guitarist and songwriter for a punk band called the Slits, about whom more in a minute.) Almost utterly without confidence in her own abilities and, in her 50s, constantly mistaken for a folk singer when she gets on stage, she is sustained later by kind words from people who say her songs have touched them, or even, once, reminded them of the Slits, and finally manages to get her mojo back. “I don’t take shit any more when I play. One night in front of a crowd of braying ponytailed old rockers I shout, ‘Anyone here ever taken heroin? Made a record?’ There’s a stunned silence. ‘Well I have, so shut the fuck up or go home and polish your guitar.’”
At this point, I had been rooting for the author for 353 pages, so this moment – so cathartic, so ballsy and, from a narrative point of view, so exquisitely timed – reduced me to tears. It packed the emotional punch that certain films try to achieve, a sentimental pride in someone else’s achievement; and just because it’s sentimental doesn’t mean it’s not sincere.
Sincerity is the keynote of Clothes, Clothes, Clothes …, just as it was of the musical movement Albertine had such a big hand in. “‘Punk’ was the only time I fitted in. Just one tiny sliver of time where it was acceptable to say what you thought.” Amen, I say, and can still remember the impact of the Slits’ first album, Cut. On its cover the bare-breasted band members, all women, defied the ogle (or, as it is called in academic circles, “the male gaze”), and, on record, made strange new noises that were by turns hilarious, mordant, unarguable and wise. That album, I suspect, inoculated many young men against sexism. Although I might not have consciously formulated it, there was always a thought at the back of my mind, even as a 16-year-old: “Would my behaviour piss the Slits off?” I can’t have been the only one.
However, although it is Albertine’s musical past that has smoothed the way to publication, this is not just a musical memoir. True, early on, Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious stroll through the pages: but when they do, one marvels at the way they are presented without clouds of glory being trailed about them. They are just her mates, whose band she sees and is impressed by. Sid comes across as considerably more interesting than the bonehead I had assumed him to be (you will goggle when you see a reproduction of a letter he sent her, the handwriting neat and rounded, with little circles for dots on the “i”s).
But what strikes you is the tone and technique of her writing. It’s simple, so it works: she uses the present continuous throughout (with, occasionally, an italicised reflection or commentary from today in brackets), which places you squarely in each moment. When she first meets Rotten, she doesn’t know yet that he’s going to change the course of popular music, and so she doesn’t describe him as if he has. It’s eye-opening, and serves her well later, as she recounts, with absolute clarity, her post-Slits life of doomed relationships, motherhood, cancer and the death of friends. Her character runs through the book like letters through a stick of rock, and this is more a lesson in how to look back from middle age than it is a conventional rock memoir – no self-aggrandisement, but occasionally a quiet, defiant pride in her achievements. The list of which, I am delighted to note from her latest music, continues to grow.
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