THE MOTHER OF ALL PUNK ROCKERS
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Viv Albertine
Faber & Faber€20.70
Between 1977 and 1981 Viv Albertine was the guitarist and songwriter in The Slits, the pioneering all-female punk group that blazed a trail for, among others, Neneh Cherry, Courtney Love and Lady Gaga.
The Slits were always a confrontational bunch, and Albertine’s terrific memoir is cut from the same cloth. To call it frank and unflinching doesn’t quite do it justice. Employing a no-nonsense prose style, she writes without any obvious filter.
The naked truth is etched into every page. An excruciating sexual encounter with Johnny Rotten – ‘Quentin Crisp and Kenneth Williams mixed with the Artful Dodger’ – is recalled in eye-watering close-up. She takes heroin for the first and only time with the notorious Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls, one of numerous kinda-sorta boyfriends, and shares a flat (and a bed) with a shy and sexually unconfident Sid Vicious.
She falls in love with The Clash’s Mick Jones and aborts their baby. Jones writes the classic Clash kiss-off Train In Vain about her, but they remain close. Later she recounts beatings, intimate medical procedures and loveless sex in her 50s. None of it is pretty but it’s hugely compelling.
Written in diary-style present tense, the book is, like an LP, divided into sides one and two,. The first follows Albertine from her difficult upbringing (her French father leaves when she is 11) into the milieu of punk, still in its embryonic and exciting phase. She is very good on London in the Seventies: the squats, the scuzz, the tribal allegiances, the simmering and everpresent threat of violence.
If side one has the hits, side two provides the emotional heft. When The Slits split, Albertine is ‘burnt out and my heart is broken. Every time I hear a song I feel physical pain’.
The latter stages of the book are dominated by a series of almost unbearably visceral descriptions of Albertine’s struggle to have a baby. She is seized by a kind of madness in which her marriage, her career and her body are left ravaged by 13 operations, 11 IVF treatments, two miscarriages and the removal of her gall bladder.
It is powerful stuff, devoid of self-pity, and deeply moving. Just weeks after her longed-for daughter is born, Albertine is diagnosed with cervical cancer.
Slowly she reclaims her health and creative spark. She releases an acclaimed album in 2010 but her artistic rejuvenation comes at the expense of her marriage, and she makes no bones about feeling lonely and uncertain as she nears 60.
Like her music, this brave, funny, honest autobiography doesn’t offer easy answers, and is all the more admirable for it.