“Clothes, clothes, clothes, music, music, music, boys, boys, boys – that’s all you ever think about,” Viv Albertine’s mother would admonish her, yet through these topics, Albertine probes profound questions about life and identity in this immensely thought-provoking memoir. Woven with wit and wisdom, it’s a tale of defying the odds to transform seemingly impossible dreams into reality.
Despite being told by her father that she was “not chic enough” to be a pop star, Albertine became the guitarist in female punk band the Slits. After all, You Can’t Do That by the Beatles was an early favourite, and she spends her life rebelling against people telling her she “can’t”. Accompanied by Mick Jones of the Clash, who wrote the song Train in Vain about her, she bought her first guitar: “For the first time in my life, I feel like myself.”
Told in a present-tense that endows a raw immediacy, Albertine’s story is bruised by breakages, from broken homes to broken bands, but she spins pain into creativity: “A burning ball of anger and rebelliousness started to grow within me. It’s fuelled a lot of my work.” Sitting on her childhood bed in her mother’s council flat she dreamed of escape and there wrote the Slits song Typical Girls.
The idiosyncratic Slits wore clothes inside-out, seams and labels showing, inspired by Vivienne Westwood. “It’s OK not to be perfect, to show the workings of your life and your mind in your songs and your clothes,” writes Albertine. It’s a philosophy reflected in this magnificent memoir, which wears its heart on its sleeve. With gut-wrenching honesty, Albertine documents experiences that “left an indelible emotional imprint”. She explores not only the sartorial but the skin beneath, telling how as children she and her sister would draw biro lines round the bruises left by their father’s belt.
After the Slits split, the seams of Albertine’s life began to tear and fray; the split is so painful that she couldn’t even bear to listen to music. The memoir, threaded with passion and compassion, is split into Side One and Side Two, the second part movingly chronicling her film career as well as IVF, miscarriage, illness, divorce, depression and “unbearable loneliness” – and how such experiences ultimately strengthened her.
Regret is channelled into reinvention and resilience, reweaving music and creativity back into the fabric of her life, relearning guitar and releasing a solo album, insightfully discussing the challenge of balancing motherhood and music. This brave and beautiful book is successful, indeed triumphant, in exploring failure and the courage it takes to begin again.
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys is published by Faber, £8.99. Click here to buy it for £5.99
