2018 PREVIEW
The punk trailblazers supreme get the docu-film they’ve always deserved – Here To Be Heard.
Who and what will you be watching, reading and listening to in the year ahead? Read on for suggestions involving The Slits, The Damned, Bowie in Berlin, Roger Daltrey and a touring hologram of Roy Orbison.
“The frustrating thing for me was continually being told, ‘You can’t play’,” says Slits’ bassist Tessa Pollitt. “It happened to me just the other day in a record shop in Camden. This guy said to me, ‘But you couldn’t play, could you?’ It goes on and on and it’s only really because we were girls.” “And, it’s not understanding the beauty of punk,” adds Paloma McLardy, AKA Palmolive, The Slits’ Spanishborn drummer. She’s just flown from Massachusetts for the BFI London Film Festival premiere of a film about the band, Here To Be Heard: The Story Of The Slits, out in March. “It’s like when I look at children’s pictures,” says Paloma. “Someone who knows how to draw cannot put in a picture what a kid can. The Slits were those kids: Oh, this sounds nice with this… We were experimenting, and having fun in the process.” The pair are together for the first time in many years along with the film’s director, William Badgley, who makes thoughtful interjections but mostly listens as the two women laugh, reminisce and rage together as if they’d never been apart. Badgley’s film takes a similarly non-invasive approach. It doesn’t attempt to analyse or explain The Slits in a sociopolitical context. Rather, it is the latest essential step in the on-going corrective to the band’s marginalisation in punk history. Here To Be Heard, Badgley says, is The Slits telling their own story, via interviews with the band: Ari Up, Viv Albertine, Palmolive and Pollitt (whose ‘70s scrap book is a revelation). Original guitarist Kate Korus and later drummers Bruce Smith (The Pop Group/ PiL) and the Banshees’ Budgie, as well as the 2005 Slits reformation line-up, are also interviewed. Vivid archive footage and astute commentary from Don Letts, writer Vivien Goldman, producer Dennis Bovell, the Pistols’ Paul Cook and The Raincoats’ Gina Birch account for half the story, while the rest is told by Ari, whose documenting of the band’s US tour in 2005 was the catalyst for the film. Slits tour manager Jennifer Shagawat took hours of footage that was eventually handed over to Badgley. Ari appears by turns wild, funny, maniacal and reflective, her determined belief in the future of The Slits taking on a particular poignancy after her 2010 death. For Pollitt and Paloma, reliving The Slits has been positive. As for Ari, Tessa smiles, “she would have carried on being bonkers for ever.” They also have a message to the doubters. “My answer is to listen to the records!” she laughs. “Yes, we played on the records. It wasn’t the producer, it was us!” Jenny Bulley
“WE WERE EXPERIMENTING, AND HAVING FUN IN THE PROCESS.” Palmolive