Loud and Quiet presents Midnight Chats.
Hey folks, welcome to Midnight Chats and thank you for downloading episode sixty seven of the podcast. My guest tonight is a truly incredible one and someone that I was very excited to meet and record this episode with. Viv Albertine doesn't like to call herself an artist, but when you look at everything that she's done in her life, no other term seems to be able to sum it up. She's been a pioneer of punk, a film director, an actor, and in more recent years, an acclaimed writer and author.
Since nineteen seventy six, she's been a feminist icon, and even when she was an aerobics instructor in the mid eighties, she did it from the point of view of a woman challenging what was expected of her from the patriarchal society. Her band, The Slits, remain underrated and are still pretty much overlooked when people talk about punk music in the mid to late seventies in the UK, everyone still likes to talk about the sex Pistols and the Clash and
the Buzzcocks. But the thing about the Slits is they were a group of women in a punk band at time when women weren't in punk bands. They were the first to do it. They had no one to follow, there was no roadmap, and that's quite an incredible thing to have done, and it just doesn't seem to be mentioned. People are still obsessed with the cartoon character of Johnny
Rotten and Sid Vicious. But more than that, I guess when you go back and listen to those Slits records, what stands out now is they were clearly the more interesting and experimental records to come out of punk music. The Slits were also putting on reggae and dub and lots of other things as well as rock and roll within their music. I mean, I could go on here now and talk about all of the things that Viv
Albertin has done. I won't do that, but what I would suggest you do is read Viv's first book, her memoir called Close Clothes Clothes Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys Boys. It's an incredible memoir and it will tell you in much more detail and in a much funnier and more heartfelt way than I can about the life of Viv Albertine. It really is quite incredible of the things that she's done and We're very excited and happy to have her on this episode of the podcast. Please do subscribe if
you like it. Check back our older episodes. There are sixty six before this one. Maybe avoid the first ten, but the most recent ones. I think we've kind of nailed it a little bit now. So thank you for listening. This is Midnight Chats from Loud and Quiet and this is Viva Albertine. Your first book, Closed Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys Boys. I read when it first came out a few years ago, and because I knew we were meeting, I listened to it this weekend. It's so good, is it.
It's got this young North London actress to read it because I wanted a young voice reading it.
So does she read your second book? She does as well. She did a really good job for the first one. Yeah, but I did have to keep reminding myself that this isn't you because she was very yeah, just really a motive. You could tell she was a pro because I've listened to some audio books where the person's read it, who's written it, but they're not very just not very good at it.
Yeah.
I won't know names.
Because I was worried I've sound a bit Joyce Grenfell, I tend to I might overstress it, and I didn't know. I just felt that. And also then lots of sort of older men have written to me saying, why didn't you read your book, you know? And I thought, no, they want another piece of me, as if I haven't given enough, you know, and there's some very raw stuff in the book, and some sexual stuff whatever, and I thought, no, they'd love to hear me actually say it. I'm glad
I didn't. It just gives me that little level distance.
Would you have found it hard to read? Do you think? Because as you say, some of it is very raw stuff and the stuff you went through and your cancer all of that stuff. I imagine it was really hard to write it, but then to have to then read it out in a sound booth somewhere and read it.
Yeah, exactly. I mean it's intense. It's not easy to do. So I thought someone who's used to using their voice like that would be better A bit for lazy get anyway, So that's another reason. But no, I just really glad. But you know what, you don't realize when you write a book. Some authors do realize it because I've read it since is be careful what you write about because you're going to be talking about it for the next
couple of years. And it keeps it very present. And I find I dream a lot about things in the book, and you know, when I'm when I'm doing a sort of a talking tour or whatever, it keeps it very present. And you know, I always think as that, you know, the Hillsborough football disaster, and apparently the people who went to therapy remained much more damaged in the end because they kept.
It so present, because they just keep to it, keep.
Talking about it, kept it very present. I'm not saying that therapy doesn't work, but I do find writing You know that if I'd just written the book, that might have exorcised some of the demons I write about. But to have written the book and then go talking about it for two years, you know on tour.
Did you when you wrote your second book, which came out last year, did you take that into account? Then no, you forgot.
It's just that the trouble is you start to write and the book starts to take on a momentum of its own right, and as Stephen King says, you know, the book is the boss. It actually sort of starts to dictate to you what should be in, what should be out, what direction it goes in. It's not some magical process, but if you're sort of in tune and very honest about the process and not being sort of you know, not editing yourself too much, et cetera, et cetera, if you go where the book has to go, it
has to go there flipping annoying. You know. I set out to write a sort of a novel about a middle aged woman who is so full of rage that she ends up committing murder, only to find about three months in I've put the sort of proverbial pen down and thought, hang on a minute, I am that woman. This is me myself exactly, and I have to face whatever you know, that rage. I have to go into
what that rage is and explore it. You know. Three years later emerged with this book, which is nothing like what I intended when I started.
Out, That is to throw away unopen, which I'm going to ask you about with your first book though, did you because the first book is kind of it is autobiography from life to about twenty thirteen, is that something like that? How did you find writing it? Did you find it hard because you did put everything's in there like Watson, or it's all there.
Well, it wasn't. That wasn't intentional either, because I hadn't written a book before, didn't know if I could write, so it was quite scared, and I've probably written quite quite a lot before. I sort of stumbled upon that
thing they say, where you find your voice. I started accidentally writing in the present tense, and suddenly the voice came, the book came alive, scratched everything I'd written before, and I started writing again in the present tense, as if I was there in the moment, which I really liked because you know when you watch horror films and you know the person in the horror film doesn't know that
the Baddi's looking around the corner. I wanted to have that feeling that I was making all these stupid decisions and the reader would think, no, you idiot. You know, don't hide in the underground car park, or don't take those drugs with Johnny Thunders. But in the moment, those were the decisions I made, however bad they were. And I didn't want a clever voice, you know, my narrator's voice sing, you know, little did I know in two years time I would meet so and so, or I
would be on stage with guitar. You know, that's sort of smart ass voice, yeah, top.
And that voice kind of is a spoiler all the time as well, isn't it. Whereas if you don't know your story, and I didn't know post the Slits stuff, and actually found that half of the book really really interesting because I was like, oh, I don't know. I'm now in completely uncharted territory.
You know.
At the beginning of the book, I knew you would meet the rest of the band and things like that, and then the band ends, and I was like, oh, well, where's this going? And you know these Whereas if you'd been as you say, kept saying, oh did I know that person would pop up in my.
Life or I'd pick up a guitar again when I was fifteen. You know, it was sort of so knowing. And the whole point about one's own life, let alone a life in the seventies is how we crashed through it all without any role models, you know, no Internet, no sort of awareness of anything. Really, you know, so much time on our hands. That's about all we had. And there was a sort of compared today a certain innocence. Strangely, Yeah, so that's when i'd sort of discovered my voice.
Sure, sort of.
But second book just to say that I wrote in a past tense because it had to have a more thoughtful approach. And there's something about writing in present tense that is quite not childlike, but it's sort of it's less mature, which suited the first book. But yeah, I didn't think it's right for second book. But it's very hard to make something feel so immediate using the past tense. That was a challenge.
My two overall thoughts on it, my impressions on it, I guess, well, one was how fearless you've been?
I'm the most terrified person, and I sort of wanted to get that across that. You know, there's some self help book that's called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, and that sort of sums me up in many ways, and I sort of wanted to sort of find out where that came from. In the second book. It's a bit of a detective story the second book. You know, why was I this person who picked up a guitar in the seventies, what was from a working class broken home,
terrible education, bad comprehensive school, no particular talents. What made me when no other girls were doing it, pick up an electric guitar on top of that couldn't sing and couldn't play, had no music lessons, you know, and nobility in that area. And I thought that was an interesting thread to explore, one of the threads I explored, and I sort of traced it back and back and back
to more or less to my mother. She made me that person who took those risks against my nature actually, and whether that's a good or bad thing, I don't really know. But there's this Gloria Steinem quote. This is
the American feminist. I lived my mother's unlived life, and I think that sort of sums up me and a lot of women of my generation who whose mothers were so stifled, you know, after the Second World War and with the patriarchy so strong back in those days, that they sort of pumped up their daughters to have the opportunities they didn't have. Now, if we'd been a middle class and if I'd been clever, she would have, you know,
pushed me off to university. She had not much to work with, so I think she thought and it's probably subconsciously, I'm just going to make her so angry, so full of rage, that that motivates her. It probably was an unconscious thing. So from very young, my mother made me aware of all the injustices of girls and women and the class I was born into and everything, until by the time I was sixteen, I was just a fury,
a sort of whirling dervisher fury. So when I started to meet other people who were angry and what became known as punk, you know, we jeweled I think, that sort of group of people in London, and then gradually we met with people from Manchester and whatever, because we had the same sort of outlook on life. Most of
us were misfits in one way or another. Quite a lot of us were working class and angry with nowhere to go, not particularly talented, and you know, it's Charles Brukowski who said, you know, be anything else you can be. You know, it was an absolute last resort in a way, to be in a punk band, even though it's quite revered nowadays. You know, if I was born now, I'd hope I could be something like a human rights lawyer or an architect. But I didn't have the equipment. It
wasn't the time. I didn't know a girl could even be those things back then. So I took the one area when I saw it start to emerge that I took in a sort of leap.
And would you back then, would your mum would she like encourage you in a simple way of saying, why don't you go and learn the guitar? It wasn't that, it was just this idea of her kind of she made you so angry that you just worked.
She had no idea about the arts or anything. You know, it was outside her ken completely. But you know, because you know, Goden, when I get interviewed, especially by guys, they'll say, oh, tell me about Sidvisius, tell us about Keith Levine. Did he teach your guitar mac Jones or whatever? And I started thinking, well, I knew those guys eighteen months or something. You know, can't say that they are responsible for who I was, What made me that person
who was quite different for a girl, you know. And as I said, I traced it back to my mother, but you know, from very young and i'd come home, you know, she let me hitch hikof to Amsterdam, not knowing what country it was in when I was seventeen or sixteen, and you know, stay out all night. She was very hands off. She wanted more than anything for me to have experienced travel. She never said that, but if I said, oh, Mom, I'm hitching hiking to Ansidam,
what country is in? She'd say, oh, oh, good, good, you know, here's two pounds.
Good for it.
And if I came home and said, oh, Mom, I I think I've been spiked, you know, with some dragon. Had to go home for three go to bed for three days, you know, hallucinating, she'd bring me cups of teas. But she was supportive and almost sort of metaphorically clapping me as I told all these stories that would be terrifying any other mother, including me. Now I'm a mom, Do you see what I mean? She was my audience, and she.
Was letting you figure it out.
Yeah, she's letting me figure out, which is a hard thing to do, and clapping every ridiculous failure or attempt along the way. And the funny thing is just to say that years later, when my daughter was born, who she was quite shy and passive when she was young, and my mother used to give her a pound every time she tried something, and didn't matter if she failed, and she never got a pound. If she won something or did well at something, she got a pound every
time she tried something. So every time she went background to grandmother's house, she would say, oh, I put my hand up and volunteered for this, or I asked someone if I could do that, and she's got a pound.
The other thing that I couldn't ignore in the book is how rude men have been to you. I don't
just mean that in the sense of physical abuse. I just mean there are the recurring theme of people kind of being so blunt with you and kind of so bizarrely straight in a way that no one I know has ever spoken to in those ways, even to the extent where towards the end of the book where you talk about writing that book and your manager at the time got upset that you wanted to write it yourself and kind of said, well do that if you want it to be shit, then yeah, that was my manager,
and that's your manager. But that's kind of throughout the book. There are people that and it's always guys that kind of say that thing to you. I was quite shocked by it because it just seems what is it that people think they could talk to you that way?
Well, partly, you know, and he wasn't back in those times. But it started from my father who spoke to me like that. You know. It started that I was a working class girl who had ideas above her station, and my father put me down for that. And every man I came across, most boyfriends, you know, the boys boys boys in the title are the hurdles to be celebrated. Yeah, you know, they every step of the way tried to hobble me emotionally, you know, right all the way up
to my husband. I'm afraid to say, you know, you're rubbish, ash shit, you're too old, you can't do that. And I just think to be a woman sort of on your own battling, you know. To me, the thread of the first book is here's a young woman who just wanted to be a creative person, and my god, did they do everything they could could to stop me. And this wasn't, you know, just the uncool guys. This was
the cool guys as well. There was that little cohort in punk time who didn't do that, and that was very much the emanating from Vivian Westwood and malcol McLaren, who were very open minded people, and it would have been very uncall to put down a woman, you know, especially as Vivian was kind of at the pinnacle of it all and very strong and sort of it was very unusual. She's very unsmiling, very strong, first creative woman
I ever met in my life. Really, that was the first time I came across men who didn't put me down or try and stop me being creative. But as soon as that was over, it all started again. Yeah, and even within that, I mean, although my mates in other bands and a few people who hung out together in London at the time were supportive, not saying anything particularly,
but just not putting me down. And you know, the rest of the lips everyone else we came across was spitting at us, trying to stab us, attack us, rapists, stop us getting gigs. We weren't allowed to be played on the radio. I mean, in every you know, not didn't want to sign us. We got stopped in every way we could buy men the whole time, I mean.
And all I can say is, first of all, I suppose I was going against what men were used to do, and what the power, you know, I was somehow threatening the power that they I mean, they felt so threatened, especially in the seventies. And I guess men, now that manager who said to me, now, you shouldn't write the book yourself. You should get some young journalists to write
it for you. And I said, I really want to give it a go, and he said, oh, well, if you know, Gorde known, if you want it to be shit. I mean, I realized later that he felt he wouldn't have a hand in it.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's what's underneath it all all the time. I'm losing my power if I if I you know, instead of saying, oh, Viv, but if you write it yourself, I feel like I won't have any hand in it, and I won't What role will I have? He said that to me at one point, What role will I have? And that's when I put two and two together. If people will only honest about it, you could say, well, you know, I'll bounce the ideas off you. You know, be great if you could be beside me whilst I
write it. Let's you know, let's embark on it, you know, help me tell me where I'm being twat in the book. And where I don't you know, doesn't read honestly or whatever. But no, you know, just tell you it will be shit, put you down, and honestly, don't think for one minute I didn't think I would be shit if I wrote it myself. It's not like people say that, you think, no, I won't. I'm going to do it anyway. Everyone who writes or plays or paints or whatever thinks they'll be shit.
So to have someone say that to you, you know, it probably took me months and months to get the courage to start writing after he said that.
Yeah, I found I've every time someone said that to you in the book, I always found it really quite shocking, just because I suppose I've never no one said has said that to me. But I've also any of my female friends and my wife, I've never heard of them being spoken to.
Are the artists, because that is a whole You see women who work within organizations, women who organize you know, women. There's something about a woman being an artist which is utterly threatening because to be an artist and it's a word, you know, I haven't been comfortable using about myself, not least because my husband said, you're not an artist, you're a wenka. When I was trying to make music. It's
a pretentious word. But the thing is to be an artist, you know, you have to absolutely immerse yourself in the world. You have to be a selfish bastard. I mean, you have to put the work above the people around you in terms of what goes into it, how honest you are about it. And that's any discipline, you know, any genre or whatever. And society still now isn't set up
for women to behave like that. I know young women in bands who tour and everything, they're so lonely, they're so isolated because a guy doesn't want to go on tour with a woman. A guy can't very easily stand and watch a woman be on stage and you know, sit do all the signing afterwards, you know, or her beat writing songs, what she's really thinking inside. I mean in a relationship, you keep that quiet, you don't say all that stuff. So the world doesn't set up for
women to be artists. It's a hard thing to be. Nearly every female artist I know who really goes there is solitary, isolated in some way. You know, from any age, you know, from twenty five to sixty five seventy all the women I know who really go for it and more or less on their own and is to do with we still live in a patriarchy. And even though people say, you know, men are always saying to me like you, oh, I wouldn't do that to my wife, or I'd love a girlfriend like that, they don't have
girlfriends like that. They don't have difficult you know. And whereas that you're allowed as a man in society from as far back as I can, you know, think to be a bit wild, a bit difficult, you know, the tortured artist, the tortured genius, and you'll always find he'll always find a nice young woman to travel with him and you know, cook for him and support him and protect him from the outside world or too many people trying to get to him and let him make his work.
You know, women are still trained to be okay with that role, and men are still seen as sort of enigmatic and mysterious in that role, whereas a woman in
that role, no, there's no place for you. And I know that, you know, I know that from my life, and I know that from now younger women in I know trying to do it and so I kind of wanted to make it clear in both books that choosing and I don't mean a creative life in terms of being an entertainer, but creative life in terms of going into all the dark spaces and making a piece out of them. Choosing that life is not glamorous and it's not comfortable and it's lonely. So I wanted to be
honest about that as well in the book. There are consequences to being this rebel or being this outsider. You know, that sort of language is used on T shirts in Prime Mark and this and that. You know, choose difference, be this, be that live the dream, No, to really do that, and to go against the norms of society, you know, whether it's within relationships, how you have relationships or don't have them, what you do with your work, how honest you are, you will be you will be
left out. And it's not an easy thing for a human and so and it's.
Not fair, but sure, And I've heard you say before that it's exhausting. Well, it's tiring, Like you've got to this stage and aarking You're like, they're just exhausted by this.
Yeah, I am. I'm exhausted by the fight, you know, and as are the other slits, and as are other females. I know, you know, we find ways to sort of protect ourselves. But there hasn't there isn't really a model yet,
a model of behavior. You know. I often talk to women after, you know, after they've done a talk and they come to get their books signed or whatever, and you know, they've maybe left their husbands, or they're trying something new at fifty, or they're young girls who're not quite sure, you know, left art school or school, and they don't know quite which way to go. And there aren't still that many models of behavior for us to follow, whereas there are so many for men to follow. You know,
the Slits we had no role models. We made up as we went along. We made up the music, we made out how we stood, what we wore. We'd never seen anyone and everyone who came to see us play in the seventies, which is hard to get your head around now, everyone in the audience would look at us and had never seen a girl on stage before with an electric guitar playing drums. Audiences of hundreds of people
had never seen it before. They'd just stand there with their mouths open, you know, and in Nemy that the journalists would write things like girls look shit with guitars because they hadn't even seen our proportions with a guitar, you know. And we'd spend ages in our rehearsal rooms, you know, thinking can I wear a mini skirt or
can I wear a two two with a guitar? You know, And how shocking I felt the first time I went on stage in a mini skirt holding a guitar, because you'd never seen little skinny girl's legs hanging out of a guitar like that, or you'd never seen a too too. It's all okay now, but it had never been seen before. That's before they even heard what we did.
Yeah, which they didn't like either.
Some of them, well, I don't know. I think they got the spirit of it. And you know, we were very exciting live, but it was very different times. I mean, there would be gangs of skinheads who would come, who would try and pull us off stage and you know, beat us up and beat up other people in the audience.
And you know, quite often a gig would descend into violence, and we would always be showered in gob and spit every gig, and it's hard to realize what filthy, violent, kind of desperate times the seventies were.
Yeah, it's look back on in kind of with a rose tinted view from anyone that wasn't there My age, for example, you know, the golden age of punk, and I wish I was there.
Most people wouldn't have cut it, wouldn't have chosen. It would have been too scared. It was not an easy choice. You know. Our people put up their hands when I do talks at art schools and things and say it's, oh, it's not fair. You know, you lot have done everything. There's nothing like yet left for us young people to
do or rebel against. And I'd just say, with that attitude, you wouldn't have done it anyway, because you had to be You had to put take your life in your hands every time we walk down the street, to dress like a punk in the seventies, to go against everything that you know, your parents or teachers, you know, not earn any money, and live in Scots till I was thirty. You know, it's not romantic living in a scot squat. Most people say I was lucky you didn't have to
you lived in squats. Hardly anyone lived in a squat. It was a terrifying thing to do. Break into a house, you know, go against the law, risk being arrested, you know, no heating that people like you said, they completely romanticize it. Most people wouldn't have had the guts to do what we did, and most people didn't even back then, because.
I think a lot of people think also that everyone was a punk, like they think that in seventy seven, every single person the whole of London, yeah, was a punk and go into these punk shows. But it was you know, obviously a very small minority of people who were in that world.
We stood out a mile. We looked like literally looked like aliens on the street. You know, it was starting to be talked about in parliament. Who are these strange people walking around? They've got to be stopped, spat at, stabbed as you walk past someone because how you looked. I mean, and you know, and men would their attitude
would be to us girls, you know, the slits. You know, if you're not going to dress like a woman and act like a woman, because we were noisy, and we wore these weird clothes, all mixed up you know, taking the mickey out of what women should wear, you know, so I'd have a two to two an S and M gear and men's DMS on which you know, girls didn't wear about then, and they'd think, right, all the
bets are off. We can attack you, we can beat you up, we can you know, try and rape you, because you're not like proper women.
In the moment of being in the Slits, which you joined in seventy six and the band strew up in eighty two, in that time, did you know that you were changing things? Did you have a sense of that this was going to affect everything going forward like all music.
It didn't, though, did it. It felt like it was a big void afterwards. At the time, we knew we were doing something incredibly important. We knew we were different, We knew we were first felt very responsible about everything we wrote and how we sang it, and what voice we sang in, and how we stood every little thing. You know. I'd done sociology comprehensive school, I'd been to
art school. I had an awareness, you know, which I think I very much brought to the band to look at everything we did, and they were very all, very extraordinary women in the band. I don't know how we came together, but we were an odd bunch. But you know, then the eighties came and Thatcher came and wham, and it just disappeared. Yeah. No, it didn't feel like at all until almost now ish that we're being rediscovered talked about again. It didn't feel like it did have an effect.
Once the band split up in eighty two, the world as you knew it was over. Your band was kind of everything to you. Punk was dead, Punk was dead. One was interested and you sold your guitars. Was there any part of you that thought, oh, well I need to get a new band now I need to.
No, no, I did. I did for about a your or so. I went to Goldsmith's to try and learn a bit more about music because I couldn't even jam. I was so self taught. I didn't know how to jam or play with other musicians. But you know, as the world that during that year, the world was changing, it was getting more fach right, you know, more consumers, more capitalist. You know, no radio station would play that
kind of music. That the whole sort of the window closed, and I think, you know, Britain, Small Island, Small Island, mentality just two radio stations. We didn't have loads of TV channels like now, loads of radio stations. Two radio stations, you know, one program once a week that played music on TV. It was like, no, there's no room few
on the island anymore. Fuck off, we're getting you know, the new thing new Romantics or the new thing wham and you know eighties pop or and whereas in America things can sort of keep festering and but you can be something and stay in your genre for the rest of your life and find fans. It's a big country, loads of TV, loads of radio, but back then just wasn't room on the island, which I think is why we're so good at sort of subcultures and pop culture
because actually turn around so quickly in Britain. Not anymore now we've got the internetwork more global. But that's why we were good at it and why we're not anymore,
because we're not small anymore. But yes, so we were very aware that what we were doing was extraordinary, and we were very responsible and felt very passionate about it, I mean, but at the same time shocked that as the eighties came, no one took up the cudgels and you know and sort of you know, an even right girl when I you know, I went to hear some bands and everything, and it was great, there were female bands.
But what and I don't think has ever been bettered that slitsted that's never been betted, is how experimental we were with our music, you know, in our rhythms, in our words.
That's something that people don't give you enough credit for it. And I think I think it's almost as if because you were women, the music is kind of like, oh and it was women doing it, yeah, but they don't actually think about the music.
The music is extraord ordinary that we made because we would determine not to play old cliches, you know, twelve bar, twelve bar, blue card structures, first chorus verse. You know, we thought, well, consciously, if we're breaking everything down, let's break everything down. That means, you know that the actual form of what we make has to be revolutionary as well.
But you know, all the other bands, much as I love them, Clash the Pistols or whatever, they were just rock and roll bands with different haircuts, you know, and no one still seems to get that. And still now you know, the bands that are making money out of punk? Are those old rock and roll bands you know who are being played on adverts, who you know, get used on BBC or Channel four programs, you know, they never
use the Slits never. We don't make a penny still now we've never made a penny from our album even But did you.
Have a moment where you realized that in the underground world that people still talk about the Slits and love this references Slits and younger.
Bands, Well, it never happened. It didn't start to happen till the Internet, and I think young people started to, you know, look at a band they liked and then hear a reference, and bit by bit they traced back to the Slits and thought, oh, this is where it started more or less, you know whatever, for those bands. Few bands kind enough to mention us and admit we were an influence. So I think young people rediscovered us around honestly around two thousand and six, seven eight.
In that late as that sure, so in that interim between eighty two and then because in twenty five years, in twenty five years that in that period you started directing films instead and music videos and did keep fit. It got very good at keep Fit.
Well, it wasn't cool Keeper.
It wasn't cool keep.
It was a new thing, aerobics that come out from America. Now people always laugh at that. But the thing is, again, it's so hard. I have to keep explaining what it was like back then. But women didn't use their bodies. Girls didn't use their bodies. You never saw a girl jog in the street. You never saw a girl in a tracksuit. Girls weren't in gyms. They were just for bodybuilders. Girls were passive. So to when I started to train, and I also did, you know, kung fu and things
like that. But when I started to train my body, it was not what girls did. And then this movement started that came from California via Jane Fonder. Yeah, and I remember reading her book on it and her saying, you know that instead of letting the guys always, you know, do the climb up the mountain or take the kids on the lake or whatever. You know, she had built her body so she could now do that. But until then, people don't realize the seventies, it was like the forties,
you know, the mentality at the time. Women didn't do the physical stuff. They didn't go up the mountain. You know what, they didn't even know a woman could run a marathon in the seventies. They weren't allowed to, didn't think the body could do it. You know, so young people, because we more or less dressed the same and listen to the same music. Now, you know, I'm in my sixties and I might wear the same clothes as my kid who's in her twenties, but we had a very
very different life. And because just because I can talk, or I was in a band and the band has kind of been rediscovered and I wear the same clothes, doesn't mean I had a practically Victorian environment that I grew up in. So for me to start using my body and train it and not to do dance just to get muscles and get fit, I mean, and then really it's quite rare. Even now people are beginning to say, you know, fit is better than thin, et cetera, et cetera.
It's still not really got there. But for a woman to be doing that instead of and not just to dance and twirl about, but just to have muscles and be able to run and you know, hike and do all those things row whatever was unusual.
During that time. Then had you backed away music.
Yeah, I am someone who I can't do something unless I am absolutely passionate about it. And I was became passionate about film. I thought, No, I always look at life and think, now, what's the most radical, exciting thing going on at the moment, And I'm going to try and put myself in the middle of that. I kind of don't care about the means.
That's a really rare thing to do.
I'm not going to fetishize guitars, you know, that's what guys do. A fetishize guitars, and it has to be guitar and churn out and another album and another album. No, I'd turn my attention to something else which is buzzy and interesting. And I looked around and I think, you know, I think films. Film in the seventies were so exciting what it was beginning to do, you know, the realism,
et cetera, et cetera. You know, on the back of the sixties film, but American especially and French film, and so, you know, took a couple of years to get a portfolio together and made some short films, went to film school. You know, it's not easy to shift disciplines. But and I've always thought myself as a complete jack of all trades until I wrote the book and put the whole thing and all the shifts in between two cardboard covers. And suddenly, because I've done that, it's made it valid,
and it's also made it valid to myself. So whereas I thought I'm a complete failure, I just shift from one thing to the other. I wrote it in the book and didn't get a bad reaction from the book, and it's made it sort of okay, and people saying, oh, that's really good the way you shift, Whereas it's always been thought of as a complete failure within my lifetime, especially in Britain America, they don't mind you shifting disciplines. Britain they find it hard to accept your serious if you shift.
It's really rare, isn't it. Because people who are in a band and you have some success and you make a record and that band splits up, the most natural thing that people do is go, well, I need to start a new band now because I need to hold on to It's my identity, it's everything about me, it's this band. Do you consider yourself a filmmaker over a musician.
No, the filmmaker was the hardest of all because the money it takes to make a film or you know, and the amount of collaboration and producers, et cetera, et cetera. It's the hardest medium to be back then. So we didn't have little film camera you know, cameras on our phones. You couldn't shoot even a little DVD digital camera, I mean, great big, whopping things when I was at film school, So I couldn't do anything really personal in that medium. I could now, but I didn't then, So I don't
really even count that bit particularly. But what it really did do for me, though, is I did quite a lot of script writing. It made me even more visually aware. I mean, I'd already been to art school, but you know, in my ducking and diving, i'd managed to get myself to another one. And it all went towards when I came to write a book and I thought, I can't write. I haven't got even you know, English a level, and let alone all these other writers got degrees in creative
writing and everything. And I sat down, I think this is a really good exercise for anyone. I think, what can I bring? What have I got I really understand rhythm, and what's talking and writing if words if it's not about rhythm, And what's the structure of a book if it's not a rhythm. And I kind of wrote it like an album, with each chapter almost just a track, you know. And I brought to bear all the rules I had, which were, you know, no long winded guitar solo,
so there'll be no great, big windy passages. You know, when you finish saying what you're saying, like with the end of a song, you finish the song. You don't go waffling off with a big sort of fade out at the end, et cetera, et cetera. So I brought what I did know, you know, and I brought the life I had lived to the book. I brought my
visual awareness. So when I had to write something that had happened, like you know, when me and Mick Jones fled in love on Forte Bella Road or whatever, I thought, how do I didn't even know where to start? And I thought, well, I'll just see it like I see a film when I'm storyboarding, and I'll just write what I see. So it made it. Both books are quite visual.
I think because of that. I know about editing because I've edited so much film work, you know, over the years, because I did work in TV and film for quite a long time. So and I just think anyone is daunted by a project should think what can I bring?
Never mind, you haven't got the you know. And that's the one great legacy of punk for me personally, and I hope it's resonated for other people, is you don't have to be a virtuo, so to have something to say and to have the right to say it, and actually, on top of that, probably make quite a big splash with it. In fact, I think if you can draw on what you do have and put that in, you know, into what bring that to bed in whatever you do, you'll make a better work than someone who's been trained.
You did go back to music briefly released a solo album and a couple of EPs. But are you done with that now? Do you feel you feel like?
I feel like I'm done with it? But of course when I did those, my god, I was so passionate about it, you know, to the point where I blew everything out of the water, my marriage and everything to
make that album. You know, that's That's why being a female artist doesn't go down too well in the normal run of things, you know, because you know, if you're in a relationship and they're threatened by you doing that, you know, what do you and give you an ultimatum saying either you make that music or it's you know, you either do that or you do the marriage. You don't do both. You know. I don't know how many people say, well, see you.
Then you wanted to. You were so committed to making that record that you and it's one of the kind of the loveliest sections of the book, the stories of you learning the guitar again and go into open mic nights and driving three hours with a squire crap little yeah thing, crap little guitar, new guitar because you'd sold all your guitars because that was packed away, that that
was all done. And you drive three hours to an open mic and you'd you'd be agonizing, you wouldn't want to necessarily do it, which comes back to this thing. If you kind of what fears you, what are you most scared off, then go and do it. And you'd sing in these pubs and then you drive three hours
home and but that whole section of the book. I just think is I guess kind of almost sums you up, like it feels like it sums up you know, that kind of dedication to feeling you have to do it almost have ack came from.
I almost didn't recognize myself. I was so driven, I have to write these songs. I have to get them out there. You know, nothing else, you know, apart from my daughter matters. You know, I'd put her to bed, and then if I'd go with this, guitar, couldn't sing, come play, hadn't touched the guitar for twenty five years. Even when I did play before, I was completely self taught, So it's not like I had anything to fall back on.
And yeah, I was absolutely driven to do it. And there was no I'm going to have a career in this, you know, I was fifty five. It's not like there was any reward in it financially or any quos.
Was it then that made you do it?
I don't do. You know what it was almost like in height situations where you know, we don't use that much of our brains as humans, you know, we probably couldn't even cope with what we could possibly see and hear if we And I really feel like I was in a situation where this higher self kicked in and completely took over and just ran me. And it was like, Viv, you have still got something in you and you know the marriage is over and you've got to make a
life for yourself and your daughter. But more than anything, maybe it's because you know, the brush with cancer, and it actually was more than a brush. It was pretty touch and go. You know, it had been like ten years since that had happed. Maybe suddenly that had kicked in, like, you know, grab life, Grab life, because people always say, you know, after cancer, you feel like every day is you know, to be lived, like you'll last. I didn't get that at all. I was terrified. For ten years.
I was scared. I was sort of traumatized. But this madness did kick in and I would go and do those open mics, put my daughter to bed, drive miles, you know, down windy c side roads, depths of hell and going to a pub of four blokes of Ponytails play really badly, seeing out of tune, shaking so much, even strum the guitar. You know, it's so embarrassing. It was so embarrassing.
After the show, After the show, would you have this sense of euphoria of having done it?
Cringe because I was so bad. I had one friend who came with me if she hadn't been there. She used to come all the way down from London to sit with me, and she would be bright red in the audience. And then I'd walk out past the men, you know, the sort of men with ponytails, only four or five people in the pub looking down at the carpet, and they would be looking down at the carpet so as not to catch my eye. The embarrassment. No, there was.
There was no euphoria, because it would have been euphoria if I'd been good and I'd killed it. But I was hopeless, hopeless. It is, you know, squawking middle aged woman.
But you'd go back the next week.
Yeah, i'ld go back because I was driven it completely and I don't know where that volcano and me came from it.
Yeah, you were saying that you kind of look at the arts and the world and think, what is the what is the most exciting thing happening right now? And can I get can I get in on that? Is it writing for you now? Because you have written two books.
For me personally, it would be writing. But if I were young, it would be, you know, a form of activism.
I would be, you know, I would get myself well educated, articulate, and I would make use of myself for you know, the natural world, for you know, just better the world in some way, I think it would be it would be that, you know, I look at young people like you know, Jack Harris and Alice ed I don't know if you know them, and you know, just going about the world trying to do a bit of good, you know, raise awareness, amount might stuther young people or yeah, So
I don't know, I feel it would be something like that. I don't know, you know, I think i'd have the guts to do it. I certainly didn't have the education to do it when when I was young. And yeah, but now for me, it would be writing. I really enjoy the long form of it. You know, it is daunting. You know, it just takes three years to get through to write a book, right, and through all that three years you more or less think it's shit. So it takes some weird kind of the same thing that drove
me to do those terrible gigs. Knowing that if I didn't keep doing them, I would never get better. And I had to stand there and be terrible for five minutes for two years until I got to the point where I could do that five minutes in tune. Not good, just in tune. And I knew that. And I think that's taught me now with the book, that I have
to stick with it for three years. With that, And again, I think every creative artist person, not entertainer type person, but has that feeling of you're standing like on a raft and uneven, see for three years you have to be able to bear that feeling. I can't bear it in any other walk of life, but I can bear it when I create. Funnily enough, I can't bear it in a relationship. I can't. You know, I can't bear uncertainty.
But and yet your whole kind of whole life is.
Based on it.
Life is that?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, tell me a bit about your second book then, because I still need to read that one.
Yeah. It's well, because I didn't get sort of vilified with the first book, because I.
Once I think you would.
Oh yeah, I had no idea. I wrote that, and I wrote it mostly at my kitchen table, and I because I got quite a low attention span and everything. I thought, oh my god, I can't bet. I'm not going to make this like homework. You know, every chapter I write, every word I write, has got to in some way turn me on, otherwise I'm not going to
do it. And so I would think of the most embarrassing things that ever happened to me, or you know, humiliating things and failures and all those kind of things, and for a laugh, to get myself going, i'd write about that, and I would be cringing as I wrote, and I would be laughing at myself, saying, thinking to myself, I've never seen that in a That's hilarious. But I'm not going to put it in the book obviously. But of course, once I'd finished those parts, they were so dynamic,
and they were so truthful and so necessary. I thought for young people especially to read and see all the failures, all the humiliations I've been through, because when they hear about me, they just hear she was in a band, and she's made some simo records, and she's written some books. They haven't heard the real CV. It's all the years
in between, all the failures in between so yeah. So when I handed it over to the publishers, I had a little bit of a breakdown because I thought, well, I'm going to be hated because it's a bit like you know in life. You think, if I tell people what I really think and feel, they're not going to like me. They're going to hate me. They're going to
think I'm stupid. But I put it all in the book for everyone to see, right, and what was extraordinary, and I think this is a lesson for life is people don't hate you when you say I have these evil thoughts. I've been you know, I'm insecure, I've been disloyal, I've been selfish, you know. And I wrote all those instances, and I thought I would be hated. Instead came back saying, oh, it's inspiring the last word. And that's really the main response I've had the books inspiring.
Because essentially you're saying things that everyone's kind of feeling and thinking, and they're like, oh, thank god, somebody somebody said I like that, and I just wouldn't tell me.
My favorite sort of comedy, you know, which is people being honest about what they really feel. But you know, you had a laugh to it as I did in the books as well. So when I didn't get hated after a few years with the first book, I thought, all right, they don't hate me, yet push it even. I can't help it. It's just it's a terrible sort of destructive thing in me. And so I thought, if they didn't hate me with the first book and I didn't shock them, did shock a bit, but I'm I'm
going to push it even further. I'm going to push myself even further. I'm going to admit to even more in the second book, which I didn't intend to actually make so personal, but intent, you know, as I said, I found out I was that woman with murderous thoughts, as I said at the beginning. So yes, I pushed it even further.
And it's it's cool to throw away unopen. And that title comes from you found after your mom passed away. You found her diaries, Yeah, and they said on them to throw away unopen. Do you think your mum, knowing you and type of person you are, do you think she ever thought for a second you would find that and throw it away unopen?
No way. My father had known me all my life, knows you know what an annoying rebellious alfhole I am would knew puverly well in a way. I'm presumed she did that to absolve herself when I told you to throw them away if you open it the Pandora's box, you know, and it wasn't really nice what was inside, you know, it was all the horrible accounts of her marriage and my father and our family life is very
sad and violent and horrible. And the funny thing is though, it just covered mainly nineteen sixty five to sixty seven, because you couldn't get a divorce in those days without proving male treatment, et cetera, et cetera. So all divorces, you know, people want to divorce, had to keep a diary of their home life to show the maltreatment. And my father kept a diary of the same two years nineteen sixty five to sixty seven. So there's me questing where my rage came from and what's the truth, and
why is our family so you know, screwed up? Et cetera, et cetera. You know, in my little detective book, I come across these two pieces of evidence.
Would they have done that completely independently?
Different solicitors?
Yeah right, yeah.
Different solicitors unaware, you know, but you know, rushing off to they had separate bedrooms. By then scribbling down, you know, Kathleen just did blah blah blah, and her you know, saying, you know, he just threatened to hit me, right, And of course I had my own memory of those two years, which I thought was a truthful memory, But then I had these three completely different accounts of the same situations.
I recognized all the situations, all the incidents that happened, and it was a lesson to me that, you know, VIVI, you can go on plowing away looking for the truth as long as you like, but everyone has a different truth, a different memory. So it was very hard for me to accept in a way that there was no absolute truth that I could get to to find out why things have gone so wrong within my family. But I did come to an understanding of why we were all
like we were. And you know, I suppose I grew a bit because I couldn't be so black and white am I thinking he was wrong?
She was right.
I remembered best all that had to go in, you know, in the evidence before me. Yes, I did try and write the book like a detective story. You know, it's a bit of a page turner. There are bodies and clues and things, but they're psychological crimes, which I do think happened in families a lot, you know, emotional and psychological crimes, and I just wanted to find out who'd done the murders, who was guilty, and it just wasn't that straightforward.
Sure have people been shocked to the extent that you thought they might be?
Yeah? Well, basically there's the night my mother died is woven through the book. It was a very traumatic night, lasted about ten hours, nine or ten hours, and it was so traumatic that I found I couldn't write about it as one scene, and I couldn't think about it. I could only let it into my head as I ever thought about it, in little bursts. And I realized, God, that's exactly how one would remember a trauma, you know,
traumatic event. Your memory and your mind protects you by only letting you think of, you know, having little flashes of it come back to you. So I couldn't write it in one long scene in the book. It punctuates the book, this terrible one night, and the writing around it gradually brings you towards understanding why that one night
happened like it did. So yeah, so you have I have these little bursts of remembering of these this terrible night, but I also have, you know, a proper chapter in between, which starts to set you up, because I didn't want my awfulness to be reached too early in the book
by the reader. The reader had to be led to an understanding of the environment and the circumstances that led me to behave like I did that night, and that took a lot of setting up and a lot of research into why what made me the person that was that person that night?
You know, as it's so personal once again, even more kind of almost more more than the first book, because it zeros in on something that is so important in your world. You mentioned that you release a book and then you have to carry on talking about it and then therefore it stays with you. And that book came out in May of last year. How have you found these kind of things where where people are asking you about it?
It's traumatic. It is traumatic. It keeps it present in my mind. It means, you know, I'm dreaming, dream about it. I haven't let it go as one would normally heal. But the good side of it is I have gained a much wider understanding of the situation, so when I do stop talking about it, I will be actually quite far on. But yeah, you know, I've been The paperbacks come out now, so I've started talking about it again.
But also when people come up to me afterwards, they say something like that happened, just like that happened to me, and I can't help but think, well, why the hell has no one spoken about this before? You know, the taboos I'm tackling in it really are around death, siblings, family. You know, it's a universal story, and people are beginning to confess the same sort of things have happened at deathbeds, in their lives and their families. But when I stood
there thinking what the hell do I do? As my mum was dying and this situation was unfolding, which I won't go into too much because it's kind of it's a spoiler. But I couldn't think, because I, you know, trawled my mind of any help, any book, I'd read, any article, any conversation with a friend, any bit of gossip that would help me in that situation. It's so unspoken you know, the sibling rivalry, how to behave at deathbed.
All that kind of thing is not spoken about, but it's huge and common and it's necessary for us to be honest about it. But you know, I it's cost me to write that sort of thing. It's cost me in my peace of mind, and it's cost me probably within my family relationships. And as I say again, to go deeply into any work, whatever the discipline, costs the creative person. You know, if you're going to go there.
I love the first line of your first book, which is anyone who writes an autobiography is either a twap or broke. I'm a bit of book and I'm a bit of both. Yeah, which is an incredible opening line.
I wanted a Jane Austiness first line.
You know, it's so good?
Do you?
But having done that, having done that, had that experience of writing autobur and not just writing on but if we are right and one that, as I say it, the reason I think it's so good is because it's got a bit of everything, and it's really exciting. It's funny, it's tragic and heartbreaking. It's kind of got everything you need. And do you do you kind of at this stage in life, think kind of please that you have lived a life where you've got a memoir in you that is worth writing.
Honestly, you know, if my daughter said to me, I want to live a life like you lived, Mommy, I'd say, please don't. It's you know, getting like two thirds through now, it's so uncomfortable. It's it's so exhausting, the fighting and the fighting, the mental fighting, you know, and keep picking yourself up and trying to you know, I would think it's just a valid to live a quiet, kind, happy, contented life. And I think that's just as valid a life.
And if I'd have had the tools to live that life, I think there would have been, you know, a better life because I don't think like we in the West, you know, sort of famous people or people who have made records or are to be deified. You know, I don't agree with that. I don't agree with worshiping on I don't think anyone's better than anyone else. So I
don't agree with fetishizing guitars or paintings, you know. So I going along that line, I don't think to have lived a noisy life or have made his stamps at some other people have heard it is a better life, and it's certainly for a woman very very uncomfortable life.
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