Speaker 1: Loud and Quiet presents Midnight Chats.
Speaker 2: Hey folks, welcome to Midnight Chats and thank you for
Speaker 2: downloading episode sixty seven of the podcast. My guest tonight
Speaker 2: is a truly incredible one and someone that I was
Speaker 2: very excited to meet and record this episode with. Viv
Speaker 2: Albertine doesn't like to call herself an artist, but when
Speaker 2: you look at everything that she's done in her life,
Speaker 2: no other term seems to be able to sum it up.
Speaker 2: She's been a pioneer of punk, a film director, an actor,
Speaker 2: and in more recent years, an acclaimed writer and author.
Speaker 2: Since nineteen seventy six, she's been a feminist icon, and
Speaker 2: even when she was an aerobics instructor in the mid eighties,
Speaker 2: she did it from the point of view of a
Speaker 2: woman challenging what was expected of her from the patriarchal society.
Speaker 2: Her band, The Slits, remain underrated and are still pretty
Speaker 2: much overlooked when people talk about punk music in the
Speaker 2: mid to late seventies in the UK, everyone still likes
Speaker 2: to talk about the sex Pistols and the Clash and
Speaker 2: the Buzzcocks. But the thing about the Slits is they
Speaker 2: were a group of women in a punk band at
Speaker 2: time when women weren't in punk bands. They were the
Speaker 2: first to do it. They had no one to follow,
Speaker 2: there was no roadmap, and that's quite an incredible thing
Speaker 2: to have done, and it just doesn't seem to be mentioned.
Speaker 2: People are still obsessed with the cartoon character of Johnny
Speaker 2: Rotten and Sid Vicious. But more than that, I guess
Speaker 2: when you go back and listen to those Slits records,
Speaker 2: what stands out now is they were clearly the more
Speaker 2: interesting and experimental records to come out of punk music.
Speaker 2: The Slits were also putting on reggae and dub and
Speaker 2: lots of other things as well as rock and roll
Speaker 2: within their music. I mean, I could go on here
Speaker 2: now and talk about all of the things that Viv
Speaker 2: Albertin has done. I won't do that, but what I
Speaker 2: would suggest you do is read Viv's first book, her
Speaker 2: memoir called Close Clothes Clothes Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys Boys.
Speaker 2: It's an incredible memoir and it will tell you in
Speaker 2: much more detail and in a much funnier and more
Speaker 2: heartfelt way than I can about the life of Viv Albertine.
Speaker 2: It really is quite incredible of the things that she's
Speaker 2: done and We're very excited and happy to have her
Speaker 2: on this episode of the podcast. Please do subscribe if
Speaker 2: you like it. Check back our older episodes. There are
Speaker 2: sixty six before this one. Maybe avoid the first ten,
Speaker 2: but the most recent ones. I think we've kind of
Speaker 2: nailed it a little bit now. So thank you for listening.
Speaker 2: This is Midnight Chats from Loud and Quiet and this
Speaker 2: is Viva Albertine. Your first book, Closed Music, Music, Music, Boys,
Speaker 2: Boys Boys. I read when it first came out a
Speaker 2: few years ago, and because I knew we were meeting,
Speaker 2: I listened to it this weekend. It's so good, is it.
Speaker 3: It's got this young North London actress to read it
Speaker 3: because I wanted a young voice reading it.
Speaker 2: So does she read your second book? She does as well.
Speaker 2: She did a really good job for the first one. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but I did have to keep reminding myself that this
Speaker 2: isn't you because she was very yeah, just really a motive.
Speaker 2: You could tell she was a pro because I've listened
Speaker 2: to some audio books where the person's read it, who's
Speaker 2: written it, but they're not very just not very good
Speaker 2: at it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I won't know names.
Speaker 3: Because I was worried I've sound a bit Joyce Grenfell,
Speaker 3: I tend to I might overstress it, and I didn't know.
Speaker 3: I just felt that. And also then lots of sort
Speaker 3: of older men have written to me saying, why didn't
Speaker 3: you read your book, you know? And I thought, no,
Speaker 3: they want another piece of me, as if I haven't
Speaker 3: given enough, you know, and there's some very raw stuff
Speaker 3: in the book, and some sexual stuff whatever, and I thought, no,
Speaker 3: they'd love to hear me actually say it. I'm glad
Speaker 3: I didn't. It just gives me that little level distance.
Speaker 2: Would you have found it hard to read? Do you think?
Speaker 2: Because as you say, some of it is very raw
Speaker 2: stuff and the stuff you went through and your cancer
Speaker 2: all of that stuff. I imagine it was really hard to
Speaker 2: write it, but then to have to then read it
Speaker 2: out in a sound booth somewhere and read it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. I mean it's intense. It's not easy to do.
Speaker 3: So I thought someone who's used to using their voice
Speaker 3: like that would be better A bit for lazy get anyway,
Speaker 3: So that's another reason. But no, I just really glad.
Speaker 3: But you know what, you don't realize when you write
Speaker 3: a book. Some authors do realize it because I've read
Speaker 3: it since is be careful what you write about because
Speaker 3: you're going to be talking about it for the next
Speaker 3: couple of years. And it keeps it very present. And
Speaker 3: I find I dream a lot about things in the book,
Speaker 3: and you know, when I'm when I'm doing a sort
Speaker 3: of a talking tour or whatever, it keeps it very present.
Speaker 3: And you know, I always think as that, you know,
Speaker 3: the Hillsborough football disaster, and apparently the people who went
Speaker 3: to therapy remained much more damaged in the end because
Speaker 3: they kept.
Speaker 2: It so present, because they just keep to it, keep.
Speaker 3: Talking about it, kept it very present. I'm not saying
Speaker 3: that therapy doesn't work, but I do find writing You
Speaker 3: know that if I'd just written the book, that might
Speaker 3: have exorcised some of the demons I write about. But
Speaker 3: to have written the book and then go talking about
Speaker 3: it for two years, you know on tour.
Speaker 2: Did you when you wrote your second book, which came
Speaker 2: out last year, did you take that into account? Then no,
Speaker 2: you forgot.
Speaker 3: It's just that the trouble is you start to write
Speaker 3: and the book starts to take on a momentum of
Speaker 3: its own right, and as Stephen King says, you know,
Speaker 3: the book is the boss. It actually sort of starts
Speaker 3: to dictate to you what should be in, what should
Speaker 3: be out, what direction it goes in. It's not some
Speaker 3: magical process, but if you're sort of in tune and
Speaker 3: very honest about the process and not being sort of
Speaker 3: you know, not editing yourself too much, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 3: if you go where the book has to go, it
Speaker 3: has to go there flipping annoying. You know. I set
Speaker 3: out to write a sort of a novel about a
Speaker 3: middle aged woman who is so full of rage that
Speaker 3: she ends up committing murder, only to find about three
Speaker 3: months in I've put the sort of proverbial pen down
Speaker 3: and thought, hang on a minute, I am that woman.
Speaker 3: This is me myself exactly, and I have to face
Speaker 3: whatever you know, that rage. I have to go into
Speaker 3: what that rage is and explore it. You know. Three
Speaker 3: years later emerged with this book, which is nothing like
Speaker 3: what I intended when I started.
Speaker 2: Out, That is to throw away unopen, which I'm going
Speaker 2: to ask you about with your first book though, did
Speaker 2: you because the first book is kind of it is
Speaker 2: autobiography from life to about twenty thirteen, is that something
Speaker 2: like that? How did you find writing it? Did you
Speaker 2: find it hard because you did put everything's in there
Speaker 2: like Watson, or it's all there.
Speaker 3: Well, it wasn't. That wasn't intentional either, because I hadn't
Speaker 3: written a book before, didn't know if I could write,
Speaker 3: so it was quite scared, and I've probably written quite
Speaker 3: quite a lot before. I sort of stumbled upon that
Speaker 3: thing they say, where you find your voice. I started
Speaker 3: accidentally writing in the present tense, and suddenly the voice came,
Speaker 3: the book came alive, scratched everything I'd written before, and
Speaker 3: I started writing again in the present tense, as if
Speaker 3: I was there in the moment, which I really liked
Speaker 3: because you know when you watch horror films and you
Speaker 3: know the person in the horror film doesn't know that
Speaker 3: the Baddi's looking around the corner. I wanted to have
Speaker 3: that feeling that I was making all these stupid decisions
Speaker 3: and the reader would think, no, you idiot. You know,
Speaker 3: don't hide in the underground car park, or don't take
Speaker 3: those drugs with Johnny Thunders. But in the moment, those
Speaker 3: were the decisions I made, however bad they were. And
Speaker 3: I didn't want a clever voice, you know, my narrator's
Speaker 3: voice sing, you know, little did I know in two
Speaker 3: years time I would meet so and so, or I
Speaker 3: would be on stage with guitar. You know, that's sort
Speaker 3: of smart ass voice, yeah, top.
Speaker 2: And that voice kind of is a spoiler all the
Speaker 2: time as well, isn't it. Whereas if you don't know
Speaker 2: your story, and I didn't know post the Slits stuff,
Speaker 2: and actually found that half of the book really really
Speaker 2: interesting because I was like, oh, I don't know. I'm
Speaker 2: now in completely uncharted territory.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: At the beginning of the book, I knew you would
Speaker 2: meet the rest of the band and things like that,
Speaker 2: and then the band ends, and I was like, oh, well,
Speaker 2: where's this going? And you know these Whereas if you'd
Speaker 2: been as you say, kept saying, oh did I know
Speaker 2: that person would pop up in my.
Speaker 3: Life or I'd pick up a guitar again when I
Speaker 3: was fifteen. You know, it was sort of so knowing.
Speaker 3: And the whole point about one's own life, let alone
Speaker 3: a life in the seventies is how we crashed through
Speaker 3: it all without any role models, you know, no Internet,
Speaker 3: no sort of awareness of anything. Really, you know, so
Speaker 3: much time on our hands. That's about all we had.
Speaker 3: And there was a sort of compared today a certain innocence. Strangely, Yeah,
Speaker 3: so that's when i'd sort of discovered my voice.
Speaker 2: Sure, sort of.
Speaker 3: But second book just to say that I wrote in
Speaker 3: a past tense because it had to have a more
Speaker 3: thoughtful approach. And there's something about writing in present tense
Speaker 3: that is quite not childlike, but it's sort of it's
Speaker 3: less mature, which suited the first book. But yeah, I
Speaker 3: didn't think it's right for second book. But it's very
Speaker 3: hard to make something feel so immediate using the past tense.
Speaker 3: That was a challenge.
Speaker 2: My two overall thoughts on it, my impressions on it,
Speaker 2: I guess, well, one was how fearless you've been?
Speaker 3: I'm the most terrified person, and I sort of wanted
Speaker 3: to get that across that. You know, there's some self
Speaker 3: help book that's called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway,
Speaker 3: and that sort of sums me up in many ways,
Speaker 3: and I sort of wanted to sort of find out
Speaker 3: where that came from. In the second book. It's a
Speaker 3: bit of a detective story the second book. You know,
Speaker 3: why was I this person who picked up a guitar
Speaker 3: in the seventies, what was from a working class broken home,
Speaker 3: terrible education, bad comprehensive school, no particular talents. What made
Speaker 3: me when no other girls were doing it, pick up
Speaker 3: an electric guitar on top of that couldn't sing and
Speaker 3: couldn't play, had no music lessons, you know, and nobility
Speaker 3: in that area. And I thought that was an interesting
Speaker 3: thread to explore, one of the threads I explored, and
Speaker 3: I sort of traced it back and back and back
Speaker 3: to more or less to my mother. She made me
Speaker 3: that person who took those risks against my nature actually,
Speaker 3: and whether that's a good or bad thing, I don't
Speaker 3: really know. But there's this Gloria Steinem quote. This is
Speaker 3: the American feminist. I lived my mother's unlived life, and
Speaker 3: I think that sort of sums up me and a
Speaker 3: lot of women of my generation who whose mothers were
Speaker 3: so stifled, you know, after the Second World War and
Speaker 3: with the patriarchy so strong back in those days, that
Speaker 3: they sort of pumped up their daughters to have the
Speaker 3: opportunities they didn't have. Now, if we'd been a middle
Speaker 3: class and if I'd been clever, she would have, you know,
Speaker 3: pushed me off to university. She had not much to
Speaker 3: work with, so I think she thought and it's probably subconsciously,
Speaker 3: I'm just going to make her so angry, so full
Speaker 3: of rage, that that motivates her. It probably was an
Speaker 3: unconscious thing. So from very young, my mother made me
Speaker 3: aware of all the injustices of girls and women and
Speaker 3: the class I was born into and everything, until by
Speaker 3: the time I was sixteen, I was just a fury,
Speaker 3: a sort of whirling dervisher fury. So when I started
Speaker 3: to meet other people who were angry and what became
Speaker 3: known as punk, you know, we jeweled I think, that
Speaker 3: sort of group of people in London, and then gradually
Speaker 3: we met with people from Manchester and whatever, because we
Speaker 3: had the same sort of outlook on life. Most of
Speaker 3: us were misfits in one way or another. Quite a
Speaker 3: lot of us were working class and angry with nowhere
Speaker 3: to go, not particularly talented, and you know, it's Charles
Speaker 3: Brukowski who said, you know, be anything else you can be.
Speaker 3: You know, it was an absolute last resort in a way,
Speaker 3: to be in a punk band, even though it's quite
Speaker 3: revered nowadays. You know, if I was born now, I'd
Speaker 3: hope I could be something like a human rights lawyer
Speaker 3: or an architect. But I didn't have the equipment. It
Speaker 3: wasn't the time. I didn't know a girl could even
Speaker 3: be those things back then. So I took the one
Speaker 3: area when I saw it start to emerge that I
Speaker 3: took in a sort of leap.
Speaker 2: And would you back then, would your mum would she
Speaker 2: like encourage you in a simple way of saying, why
Speaker 2: don't you go and learn the guitar? It wasn't that,
Speaker 2: it was just this idea of her kind of she
Speaker 2: made you so angry that you just worked.
Speaker 3: She had no idea about the arts or anything. You know,
Speaker 3: it was outside her ken completely. But you know, because
Speaker 3: you know, Goden, when I get interviewed, especially by guys,
Speaker 3: they'll say, oh, tell me about Sidvisius, tell us about
Speaker 3: Keith Levine. Did he teach your guitar mac Jones or whatever?
Speaker 3: And I started thinking, well, I knew those guys eighteen
Speaker 3: months or something. You know, can't say that they are
Speaker 3: responsible for who I was, What made me that person
Speaker 3: who was quite different for a girl, you know. And
Speaker 3: as I said, I traced it back to my mother,
Speaker 3: but you know, from very young and i'd come home,
Speaker 3: you know, she let me hitch hikof to Amsterdam, not
Speaker 3: knowing what country it was in when I was seventeen
Speaker 3: or sixteen, and you know, stay out all night. She
Speaker 3: was very hands off. She wanted more than anything for
Speaker 3: me to have experienced travel. She never said that, but
Speaker 3: if I said, oh, Mom, I'm hitching hiking to Ansidam,
Speaker 3: what country is in? She'd say, oh, oh, good, good,
Speaker 3: you know, here's two pounds.
Speaker 2: Good for it.
Speaker 3: And if I came home and said, oh, Mom, I
Speaker 3: I think I've been spiked, you know, with some dragon.
Speaker 3: Had to go home for three go to bed for
Speaker 3: three days, you know, hallucinating, she'd bring me cups of teas.
Speaker 3: But she was supportive and almost sort of metaphorically clapping
Speaker 3: me as I told all these stories that would be
Speaker 3: terrifying any other mother, including me. Now I'm a mom,
Speaker 3: Do you see what I mean? She was my audience,
Speaker 3: and she.
Speaker 2: Was letting you figure it out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she's letting me figure out, which is a hard
Speaker 3: thing to do, and clapping every ridiculous failure or attempt
Speaker 3: along the way. And the funny thing is just to
Speaker 3: say that years later, when my daughter was born, who
Speaker 3: she was quite shy and passive when she was young,
Speaker 3: and my mother used to give her a pound every
Speaker 3: time she tried something, and didn't matter if she failed,
Speaker 3: and she never got a pound. If she won something
Speaker 3: or did well at something, she got a pound every
Speaker 3: time she tried something. So every time she went background
Speaker 3: to grandmother's house, she would say, oh, I put my
Speaker 3: hand up and volunteered for this, or I asked someone
Speaker 3: if I could do that, and she's got a pound.
Speaker 2: The other thing that I couldn't ignore in the book
Speaker 2: is how rude men have been to you. I don't
Speaker 2: just mean that in the sense of physical abuse. I
Speaker 2: just mean there are the recurring theme of people kind
Speaker 2: of being so blunt with you and kind of so
Speaker 2: bizarrely straight in a way that no one I know
Speaker 2: has ever spoken to in those ways, even to the
Speaker 2: extent where towards the end of the book where you
Speaker 2: talk about writing that book and your manager at the
Speaker 2: time got upset that you wanted to write it yourself
Speaker 2: and kind of said, well do that if you want
Speaker 2: it to be shit, then yeah, that was my manager,
Speaker 2: and that's your manager. But that's kind of throughout the book.
Speaker 2: There are people that and it's always guys that kind
Speaker 2: of say that thing to you. I was quite shocked
Speaker 2: by it because it just seems what is it that
Speaker 2: people think they could talk to you that way?
Speaker 3: Well, partly, you know, and he wasn't back in those times.
Speaker 3: But it started from my father who spoke to me
Speaker 3: like that. You know. It started that I was a
Speaker 3: working class girl who had ideas above her station, and
Speaker 3: my father put me down for that. And every man
Speaker 3: I came across, most boyfriends, you know, the boys boys
Speaker 3: boys in the title are the hurdles to be celebrated. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, they every step of the way tried to
Speaker 3: hobble me emotionally, you know, right all the way up
Speaker 3: to my husband. I'm afraid to say, you know, you're rubbish,
Speaker 3: ash shit, you're too old, you can't do that. And
Speaker 3: I just think to be a woman sort of on
Speaker 3: your own battling, you know. To me, the thread of
Speaker 3: the first book is here's a young woman who just
Speaker 3: wanted to be a creative person, and my god, did
Speaker 3: they do everything they could could to stop me. And
Speaker 3: this wasn't, you know, just the uncool guys. This was
Speaker 3: the cool guys as well. There was that little cohort
Speaker 3: in punk time who didn't do that, and that was
Speaker 3: very much the emanating from Vivian Westwood and malcol McLaren,
Speaker 3: who were very open minded people, and it would have
Speaker 3: been very uncall to put down a woman, you know,
Speaker 3: especially as Vivian was kind of at the pinnacle of
Speaker 3: it all and very strong and sort of it was
Speaker 3: very unusual. She's very unsmiling, very strong, first creative woman
Speaker 3: I ever met in my life. Really, that was the
Speaker 3: first time I came across men who didn't put me
Speaker 3: down or try and stop me being creative. But as
Speaker 3: soon as that was over, it all started again. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and even within that, I mean, although my mates in
Speaker 3: other bands and a few people who hung out together
Speaker 3: in London at the time were supportive, not saying anything particularly,
Speaker 3: but just not putting me down. And you know, the
Speaker 3: rest of the lips everyone else we came across was
Speaker 3: spitting at us, trying to stab us, attack us, rapists,
Speaker 3: stop us getting gigs. We weren't allowed to be played
Speaker 3: on the radio. I mean, in every you know, not
Speaker 3: didn't want to sign us. We got stopped in every
Speaker 3: way we could buy men the whole time, I mean.
Speaker 3: And all I can say is, first of all, I
Speaker 3: suppose I was going against what men were used to do,
Speaker 3: and what the power, you know, I was somehow threatening
Speaker 3: the power that they I mean, they felt so threatened,
Speaker 3: especially in the seventies. And I guess men, now that
Speaker 3: manager who said to me, now, you shouldn't write the
Speaker 3: book yourself. You should get some young journalists to write
Speaker 3: it for you. And I said, I really want to
Speaker 3: give it a go, and he said, oh, well, if
Speaker 3: you know, Gorde known, if you want it to be shit.
Speaker 3: I mean, I realized later that he felt he wouldn't
Speaker 3: have a hand in it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what's underneath it all all the time. I'm
Speaker 3: losing my power if I if I you know, instead
Speaker 3: of saying, oh, Viv, but if you write it yourself,
Speaker 3: I feel like I won't have any hand in it,
Speaker 3: and I won't What role will I have? He said
Speaker 3: that to me at one point, What role will I have?
Speaker 3: And that's when I put two and two together. If
Speaker 3: people will only honest about it, you could say, well,
Speaker 3: you know, I'll bounce the ideas off you. You know,
Speaker 3: be great if you could be beside me whilst I
Speaker 3: write it. Let's you know, let's embark on it, you know,
Speaker 3: help me tell me where I'm being twat in the book.
Speaker 3: And where I don't you know, doesn't read honestly or whatever.
Speaker 3: But no, you know, just tell you it will be shit,
Speaker 3: put you down, and honestly, don't think for one minute
Speaker 3: I didn't think I would be shit if I wrote
Speaker 3: it myself. It's not like people say that, you think, no,
Speaker 3: I won't. I'm going to do it anyway. Everyone who
Speaker 3: writes or plays or paints or whatever thinks they'll be shit.
Speaker 3: So to have someone say that to you, you know,
Speaker 3: it probably took me months and months to get the
Speaker 3: courage to start writing after he said that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I found I've every time someone said that to
Speaker 2: you in the book, I always found it really quite shocking,
Speaker 2: just because I suppose I've never no one said has
Speaker 2: said that to me. But I've also any of my
Speaker 2: female friends and my wife, I've never heard of them
Speaker 2: being spoken to.
Speaker 3: Are the artists, because that is a whole You see
Speaker 3: women who work within organizations, women who organize you know, women.
Speaker 3: There's something about a woman being an artist which is
Speaker 3: utterly threatening because to be an artist and it's a word,
Speaker 3: you know, I haven't been comfortable using about myself, not
Speaker 3: least because my husband said, you're not an artist, you're
Speaker 3: a wenka. When I was trying to make music. It's
Speaker 3: a pretentious word. But the thing is to be an artist,
Speaker 3: you know, you have to absolutely immerse yourself in the world.
Speaker 3: You have to be a selfish bastard. I mean, you
Speaker 3: have to put the work above the people around you
Speaker 3: in terms of what goes into it, how honest you
Speaker 3: are about it. And that's any discipline, you know, any
Speaker 3: genre or whatever. And society still now isn't set up
Speaker 3: for women to behave like that. I know young women
Speaker 3: in bands who tour and everything, they're so lonely, they're
Speaker 3: so isolated because a guy doesn't want to go on
Speaker 3: tour with a woman. A guy can't very easily stand
Speaker 3: and watch a woman be on stage and you know,
Speaker 3: sit do all the signing afterwards, you know, or her
Speaker 3: beat writing songs, what she's really thinking inside. I mean
Speaker 3: in a relationship, you keep that quiet, you don't say
Speaker 3: all that stuff. So the world doesn't set up for
Speaker 3: women to be artists. It's a hard thing to be.
Speaker 3: Nearly every female artist I know who really goes there
Speaker 3: is solitary, isolated in some way. You know, from any age,
Speaker 3: you know, from twenty five to sixty five seventy all
Speaker 3: the women I know who really go for it and
Speaker 3: more or less on their own and is to do
Speaker 3: with we still live in a patriarchy. And even though
Speaker 3: people say, you know, men are always saying to me
Speaker 3: like you, oh, I wouldn't do that to my wife,
Speaker 3: or I'd love a girlfriend like that, they don't have
Speaker 3: girlfriends like that. They don't have difficult you know. And
Speaker 3: whereas that you're allowed as a man in society from
Speaker 3: as far back as I can, you know, think to
Speaker 3: be a bit wild, a bit difficult, you know, the
Speaker 3: tortured artist, the tortured genius, and you'll always find he'll
Speaker 3: always find a nice young woman to travel with him
Speaker 3: and you know, cook for him and support him and
Speaker 3: protect him from the outside world or too many people
Speaker 3: trying to get to him and let him make his work.
Speaker 3: You know, women are still trained to be okay with
Speaker 3: that role, and men are still seen as sort of
Speaker 3: enigmatic and mysterious in that role, whereas a woman in
Speaker 3: that role, no, there's no place for you. And I
Speaker 3: know that, you know, I know that from my life,
Speaker 3: and I know that from now younger women in I
Speaker 3: know trying to do it and so I kind of
Speaker 3: wanted to make it clear in both books that choosing
Speaker 3: and I don't mean a creative life in terms of
Speaker 3: being an entertainer, but creative life in terms of going
Speaker 3: into all the dark spaces and making a piece out
Speaker 3: of them. Choosing that life is not glamorous and it's
Speaker 3: not comfortable and it's lonely. So I wanted to be
Speaker 3: honest about that as well in the book. There are
Speaker 3: consequences to being this rebel or being this outsider. You know,
Speaker 3: that sort of language is used on T shirts in
Speaker 3: Prime Mark and this and that. You know, choose difference,
Speaker 3: be this, be that live the dream, No, to really
Speaker 3: do that, and to go against the norms of society,
Speaker 3: you know, whether it's within relationships, how you have relationships
Speaker 3: or don't have them, what you do with your work,
Speaker 3: how honest you are, you will be you will be
Speaker 3: left out. And it's not an easy thing for a
Speaker 3: human and so and it's.
Speaker 2: Not fair, but sure, And I've heard you say before
Speaker 2: that it's exhausting. Well, it's tiring, Like you've got to
Speaker 2: this stage and aarking You're like, they're just exhausted by this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I am. I'm exhausted by the fight, you know,
Speaker 3: and as are the other slits, and as are other females.
Speaker 3: I know, you know, we find ways to sort of
Speaker 3: protect ourselves. But there hasn't there isn't really a model yet,
Speaker 3: a model of behavior. You know. I often talk to
Speaker 3: women after, you know, after they've done a talk and
Speaker 3: they come to get their books signed or whatever, and
Speaker 3: you know, they've maybe left their husbands, or they're trying
Speaker 3: something new at fifty, or they're young girls who're not
Speaker 3: quite sure, you know, left art school or school, and
Speaker 3: they don't know quite which way to go. And there
Speaker 3: aren't still that many models of behavior for us to follow,
Speaker 3: whereas there are so many for men to follow. You know,
Speaker 3: the Slits we had no role models. We made up
Speaker 3: as we went along. We made up the music, we
Speaker 3: made out how we stood, what we wore. We'd never
Speaker 3: seen anyone and everyone who came to see us play
Speaker 3: in the seventies, which is hard to get your head
Speaker 3: around now, everyone in the audience would look at us
Speaker 3: and had never seen a girl on stage before with
Speaker 3: an electric guitar playing drums. Audiences of hundreds of people
Speaker 3: had never seen it before. They'd just stand there with
Speaker 3: their mouths open, you know, and in Nemy that the
Speaker 3: journalists would write things like girls look shit with guitars
Speaker 3: because they hadn't even seen our proportions with a guitar,
Speaker 3: you know. And we'd spend ages in our rehearsal rooms,
Speaker 3: you know, thinking can I wear a mini skirt or
Speaker 3: can I wear a two two with a guitar? You know,
Speaker 3: And how shocking I felt the first time I went
Speaker 3: on stage in a mini skirt holding a guitar, because
Speaker 3: you'd never seen little skinny girl's legs hanging out of
Speaker 3: a guitar like that, or you'd never seen a too too.
Speaker 3: It's all okay now, but it had never been seen before.
Speaker 3: That's before they even heard what we did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which they didn't like either.
Speaker 3: Some of them, well, I don't know. I think they
Speaker 3: got the spirit of it. And you know, we were
Speaker 3: very exciting live, but it was very different times. I mean,
Speaker 3: there would be gangs of skinheads who would come, who
Speaker 3: would try and pull us off stage and you know,
Speaker 3: beat us up and beat up other people in the audience.
Speaker 3: And you know, quite often a gig would descend into violence,
Speaker 3: and we would always be showered in gob and spit
Speaker 3: every gig, and it's hard to realize what filthy, violent,
Speaker 3: kind of desperate times the seventies were.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's look back on in kind of with a
Speaker 2: rose tinted view from anyone that wasn't there My age,
Speaker 2: for example, you know, the golden age of punk, and
Speaker 2: I wish I was there.
Speaker 3: Most people wouldn't have cut it, wouldn't have chosen. It
Speaker 3: would have been too scared. It was not an easy choice.
Speaker 3: You know. Our people put up their hands when I
Speaker 3: do talks at art schools and things and say it's, oh,
Speaker 3: it's not fair. You know, you lot have done everything.
Speaker 3: There's nothing like yet left for us young people to
Speaker 3: do or rebel against. And I'd just say, with that attitude,
Speaker 3: you wouldn't have done it anyway, because you had to
Speaker 3: be You had to put take your life in your
Speaker 3: hands every time we walk down the street, to dress
Speaker 3: like a punk in the seventies, to go against everything
Speaker 3: that you know, your parents or teachers, you know, not
Speaker 3: earn any money, and live in Scots till I was thirty.
Speaker 3: You know, it's not romantic living in a scot squat.
Speaker 3: Most people say I was lucky you didn't have to
Speaker 3: you lived in squats. Hardly anyone lived in a squat.
Speaker 3: It was a terrifying thing to do. Break into a house,
Speaker 3: you know, go against the law, risk being arrested, you know,
Speaker 3: no heating that people like you said, they completely romanticize it.
Speaker 3: Most people wouldn't have had the guts to do what
Speaker 3: we did, and most people didn't even back then, because.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of people think also that everyone
Speaker 2: was a punk, like they think that in seventy seven,
Speaker 2: every single person the whole of London, yeah, was a
Speaker 2: punk and go into these punk shows. But it was
Speaker 2: you know, obviously a very small minority of people who
Speaker 2: were in that world.
Speaker 3: We stood out a mile. We looked like literally looked
Speaker 3: like aliens on the street. You know, it was starting
Speaker 3: to be talked about in parliament. Who are these strange
Speaker 3: people walking around? They've got to be stopped, spat at,
Speaker 3: stabbed as you walk past someone because how you looked.
Speaker 3: I mean, and you know, and men would their attitude
Speaker 3: would be to us girls, you know, the slits. You know,
Speaker 3: if you're not going to dress like a woman and
Speaker 3: act like a woman, because we were noisy, and we
Speaker 3: wore these weird clothes, all mixed up you know, taking
Speaker 3: the mickey out of what women should wear, you know,
Speaker 3: so I'd have a two to two an S and
Speaker 3: M gear and men's DMS on which you know, girls
Speaker 3: didn't wear about then, and they'd think, right, all the
Speaker 3: bets are off. We can attack you, we can beat
Speaker 3: you up, we can you know, try and rape you,
Speaker 3: because you're not like proper women.
Speaker 2: In the moment of being in the Slits, which you
Speaker 2: joined in seventy six and the band strew up in
Speaker 2: eighty two, in that time, did you know that you
Speaker 2: were changing things? Did you have a sense of that
Speaker 2: this was going to affect everything going forward like all music.
Speaker 3: It didn't, though, did it. It felt like it was
Speaker 3: a big void afterwards. At the time, we knew we
Speaker 3: were doing something incredibly important. We knew we were different,
Speaker 3: We knew we were first felt very responsible about everything
Speaker 3: we wrote and how we sang it, and what voice
Speaker 3: we sang in, and how we stood every little thing.
Speaker 3: You know. I'd done sociology comprehensive school, I'd been to
Speaker 3: art school. I had an awareness, you know, which I
Speaker 3: think I very much brought to the band to look
Speaker 3: at everything we did, and they were very all, very
Speaker 3: extraordinary women in the band. I don't know how we
Speaker 3: came together, but we were an odd bunch. But you know,
Speaker 3: then the eighties came and Thatcher came and wham, and
Speaker 3: it just disappeared. Yeah. No, it didn't feel like at
Speaker 3: all until almost now ish that we're being rediscovered talked
Speaker 3: about again. It didn't feel like it did have an effect.
Speaker 2: Once the band split up in eighty two, the world
Speaker 2: as you knew it was over. Your band was kind
Speaker 2: of everything to you. Punk was dead, Punk was dead.
Speaker 2: One was interested and you sold your guitars. Was there
Speaker 2: any part of you that thought, oh, well I need
Speaker 2: to get a new band now I need to.
Speaker 3: No, no, I did. I did for about a your
Speaker 3: or so. I went to Goldsmith's to try and learn
Speaker 3: a bit more about music because I couldn't even jam.
Speaker 3: I was so self taught. I didn't know how to
Speaker 3: jam or play with other musicians. But you know, as
Speaker 3: the world that during that year, the world was changing,
Speaker 3: it was getting more fach right, you know, more consumers,
Speaker 3: more capitalist. You know, no radio station would play that
Speaker 3: kind of music. That the whole sort of the window closed,
Speaker 3: and I think, you know, Britain, Small Island, Small Island,
Speaker 3: mentality just two radio stations. We didn't have loads of
Speaker 3: TV channels like now, loads of radio stations. Two radio stations,
Speaker 3: you know, one program once a week that played music
Speaker 3: on TV. It was like, no, there's no room few
Speaker 3: on the island anymore. Fuck off, we're getting you know,
Speaker 3: the new thing new Romantics or the new thing wham
Speaker 3: and you know eighties pop or and whereas in America
Speaker 3: things can sort of keep festering and but you can
Speaker 3: be something and stay in your genre for the rest
Speaker 3: of your life and find fans. It's a big country,
Speaker 3: loads of TV, loads of radio, but back then just
Speaker 3: wasn't room on the island, which I think is why
Speaker 3: we're so good at sort of subcultures and pop culture
Speaker 3: because actually turn around so quickly in Britain. Not anymore
Speaker 3: now we've got the internetwork more global. But that's why
Speaker 3: we were good at it and why we're not anymore,
Speaker 3: because we're not small anymore. But yes, so we were
Speaker 3: very aware that what we were doing was extraordinary, and
Speaker 3: we were very responsible and felt very passionate about it,
Speaker 3: I mean, but at the same time shocked that as
Speaker 3: the eighties came, no one took up the cudgels and
Speaker 3: you know and sort of you know, an even right
Speaker 3: girl when I you know, I went to hear some
Speaker 3: bands and everything, and it was great, there were female bands.
Speaker 3: But what and I don't think has ever been bettered
Speaker 3: that slitsted that's never been betted, is how experimental we
Speaker 3: were with our music, you know, in our rhythms, in
Speaker 3: our words.
Speaker 2: That's something that people don't give you enough credit for it.
Speaker 2: And I think I think it's almost as if because
Speaker 2: you were women, the music is kind of like, oh
Speaker 2: and it was women doing it, yeah, but they don't
Speaker 2: actually think about the music.
Speaker 3: The music is extraord ordinary that we made because we
Speaker 3: would determine not to play old cliches, you know, twelve bar,
Speaker 3: twelve bar, blue card structures, first chorus verse. You know,
Speaker 3: we thought, well, consciously, if we're breaking everything down, let's
Speaker 3: break everything down. That means, you know that the actual
Speaker 3: form of what we make has to be revolutionary as well.
Speaker 3: But you know, all the other bands, much as I
Speaker 3: love them, Clash the Pistols or whatever, they were just
Speaker 3: rock and roll bands with different haircuts, you know, and
Speaker 3: no one still seems to get that. And still now
Speaker 3: you know, the bands that are making money out of punk?
Speaker 3: Are those old rock and roll bands you know who
Speaker 3: are being played on adverts, who you know, get used
Speaker 3: on BBC or Channel four programs, you know, they never
Speaker 3: use the Slits never. We don't make a penny still
Speaker 3: now we've never made a penny from our album even
Speaker 3: But did you.
Speaker 2: Have a moment where you realized that in the underground
Speaker 2: world that people still talk about the Slits and love
Speaker 2: this references Slits and younger.
Speaker 3: Bands, Well, it never happened. It didn't start to happen
Speaker 3: till the Internet, and I think young people started to,
Speaker 3: you know, look at a band they liked and then
Speaker 3: hear a reference, and bit by bit they traced back
Speaker 3: to the Slits and thought, oh, this is where it
Speaker 3: started more or less, you know whatever, for those bands.
Speaker 3: Few bands kind enough to mention us and admit we
Speaker 3: were an influence. So I think young people rediscovered us
Speaker 3: around honestly around two thousand and six, seven eight.
Speaker 2: In that late as that sure, so in that interim
Speaker 2: between eighty two and then because in twenty five years,
Speaker 2: in twenty five years that in that period you started
Speaker 2: directing films instead and music videos and did keep fit.
Speaker 2: It got very good at keep Fit.
Speaker 3: Well, it wasn't cool Keeper.
Speaker 2: It wasn't cool keep.
Speaker 3: It was a new thing, aerobics that come out from America.
Speaker 3: Now people always laugh at that. But the thing is, again,
Speaker 3: it's so hard. I have to keep explaining what it
Speaker 3: was like back then. But women didn't use their bodies.
Speaker 3: Girls didn't use their bodies. You never saw a girl
Speaker 3: jog in the street. You never saw a girl in
Speaker 3: a tracksuit. Girls weren't in gyms. They were just for bodybuilders.
Speaker 3: Girls were passive. So to when I started to train,
Speaker 3: and I also did, you know, kung fu and things
Speaker 3: like that. But when I started to train my body,
Speaker 3: it was not what girls did. And then this movement
Speaker 3: started that came from California via Jane Fonder. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: I remember reading her book on it and her saying,
Speaker 3: you know that instead of letting the guys always, you know,
Speaker 3: do the climb up the mountain or take the kids
Speaker 3: on the lake or whatever. You know, she had built
Speaker 3: her body so she could now do that. But until then,
Speaker 3: people don't realize the seventies, it was like the forties,
Speaker 3: you know, the mentality at the time. Women didn't do
Speaker 3: the physical stuff. They didn't go up the mountain. You
Speaker 3: know what, they didn't even know a woman could run
Speaker 3: a marathon in the seventies. They weren't allowed to, didn't
Speaker 3: think the body could do it. You know, so young people,
Speaker 3: because we more or less dressed the same and listen
Speaker 3: to the same music. Now, you know, I'm in my
Speaker 3: sixties and I might wear the same clothes as my
Speaker 3: kid who's in her twenties, but we had a very
Speaker 3: very different life. And because just because I can talk,
Speaker 3: or I was in a band and the band has
Speaker 3: kind of been rediscovered and I wear the same clothes,
Speaker 3: doesn't mean I had a practically Victorian environment that I
Speaker 3: grew up in. So for me to start using my
Speaker 3: body and train it and not to do dance just
Speaker 3: to get muscles and get fit, I mean, and then
Speaker 3: really it's quite rare. Even now people are beginning to say,
Speaker 3: you know, fit is better than thin, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: It's still not really got there. But for a woman
Speaker 3: to be doing that instead of and not just to
Speaker 3: dance and twirl about, but just to have muscles and
Speaker 3: be able to run and you know, hike and do
Speaker 3: all those things row whatever was unusual.
Speaker 2: During that time. Then had you backed away music.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I am someone who I can't do something unless
Speaker 3: I am absolutely passionate about it. And I was became
Speaker 3: passionate about film. I thought, No, I always look at
Speaker 3: life and think, now, what's the most radical, exciting thing
Speaker 3: going on at the moment, And I'm going to try
Speaker 3: and put myself in the middle of that. I kind
Speaker 3: of don't care about the means.
Speaker 2: That's a really rare thing to do.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to fetishize guitars, you know, that's what
Speaker 3: guys do. A fetishize guitars, and it has to be
Speaker 3: guitar and churn out and another album and another album. No,
Speaker 3: I'd turn my attention to something else which is buzzy
Speaker 3: and interesting. And I looked around and I think, you know,
Speaker 3: I think films. Film in the seventies were so exciting
Speaker 3: what it was beginning to do, you know, the realism,
Speaker 3: et cetera, et cetera. You know, on the back of
Speaker 3: the sixties film, but American especially and French film, and so,
Speaker 3: you know, took a couple of years to get a
Speaker 3: portfolio together and made some short films, went to film school.
Speaker 3: You know, it's not easy to shift disciplines. But and
Speaker 3: I've always thought myself as a complete jack of all
Speaker 3: trades until I wrote the book and put the whole
Speaker 3: thing and all the shifts in between two cardboard covers.
Speaker 3: And suddenly, because I've done that, it's made it valid,
Speaker 3: and it's also made it valid to myself. So whereas
Speaker 3: I thought I'm a complete failure, I just shift from
Speaker 3: one thing to the other. I wrote it in the
Speaker 3: book and didn't get a bad reaction from the book,
Speaker 3: and it's made it sort of okay, and people saying, oh,
Speaker 3: that's really good the way you shift, Whereas it's always
Speaker 3: been thought of as a complete failure within my lifetime,
Speaker 3: especially in Britain America, they don't mind you shifting disciplines.
Speaker 3: Britain they find it hard to accept your serious if
Speaker 3: you shift.
Speaker 2: It's really rare, isn't it. Because people who are in
Speaker 2: a band and you have some success and you make
Speaker 2: a record and that band splits up, the most natural
Speaker 2: thing that people do is go, well, I need to
Speaker 2: start a new band now because I need to hold
Speaker 2: on to It's my identity, it's everything about me, it's
Speaker 2: this band. Do you consider yourself a filmmaker over a musician.
Speaker 3: No, the filmmaker was the hardest of all because the
Speaker 3: money it takes to make a film or you know,
Speaker 3: and the amount of collaboration and producers, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: It's the hardest medium to be back then. So we
Speaker 3: didn't have little film camera you know, cameras on our phones.
Speaker 3: You couldn't shoot even a little DVD digital camera, I mean,
Speaker 3: great big, whopping things when I was at film school,
Speaker 3: So I couldn't do anything really personal in that medium.
Speaker 3: I could now, but I didn't then, So I don't
Speaker 3: really even count that bit particularly. But what it really
Speaker 3: did do for me, though, is I did quite a
Speaker 3: lot of script writing. It made me even more visually aware.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'd already been to art school, but you know,
Speaker 3: in my ducking and diving, i'd managed to get myself
Speaker 3: to another one. And it all went towards when I
Speaker 3: came to write a book and I thought, I can't write.
Speaker 3: I haven't got even you know, English a level, and
Speaker 3: let alone all these other writers got degrees in creative
Speaker 3: writing and everything. And I sat down, I think this
Speaker 3: is a really good exercise for anyone. I think, what
Speaker 3: can I bring? What have I got I really understand rhythm,
Speaker 3: and what's talking and writing if words if it's not
Speaker 3: about rhythm, And what's the structure of a book if
Speaker 3: it's not a rhythm. And I kind of wrote it
Speaker 3: like an album, with each chapter almost just a track,
Speaker 3: you know. And I brought to bear all the rules
Speaker 3: I had, which were, you know, no long winded guitar solo,
Speaker 3: so there'll be no great, big windy passages. You know,
Speaker 3: when you finish saying what you're saying, like with the
Speaker 3: end of a song, you finish the song. You don't
Speaker 3: go waffling off with a big sort of fade out
Speaker 3: at the end, et cetera, et cetera. So I brought
Speaker 3: what I did know, you know, and I brought the
Speaker 3: life I had lived to the book. I brought my
Speaker 3: visual awareness. So when I had to write something that
Speaker 3: had happened, like you know, when me and Mick Jones
Speaker 3: fled in love on Forte Bella Road or whatever, I thought,
Speaker 3: how do I didn't even know where to start? And
Speaker 3: I thought, well, I'll just see it like I see
Speaker 3: a film when I'm storyboarding, and I'll just write what
Speaker 3: I see. So it made it. Both books are quite visual.
Speaker 3: I think because of that. I know about editing because
Speaker 3: I've edited so much film work, you know, over the years,
Speaker 3: because I did work in TV and film for quite
Speaker 3: a long time. So and I just think anyone is
Speaker 3: daunted by a project should think what can I bring?
Speaker 3: Never mind, you haven't got the you know. And that's
Speaker 3: the one great legacy of punk for me personally, and
Speaker 3: I hope it's resonated for other people, is you don't
Speaker 3: have to be a virtuo, so to have something to
Speaker 3: say and to have the right to say it, and actually,
Speaker 3: on top of that, probably make quite a big splash
Speaker 3: with it. In fact, I think if you can draw
Speaker 3: on what you do have and put that in, you know,
Speaker 3: into what bring that to bed in whatever you do,
Speaker 3: you'll make a better work than someone who's been trained.
Speaker 2: You did go back to music briefly released a solo
Speaker 2: album and a couple of EPs. But are you done
Speaker 2: with that now? Do you feel you feel like?
Speaker 3: I feel like I'm done with it? But of course
Speaker 3: when I did those, my god, I was so passionate
Speaker 3: about it, you know, to the point where I blew
Speaker 3: everything out of the water, my marriage and everything to
Speaker 3: make that album. You know, that's That's why being a
Speaker 3: female artist doesn't go down too well in the normal
Speaker 3: run of things, you know, because you know, if you're
Speaker 3: in a relationship and they're threatened by you doing that,
Speaker 3: you know, what do you and give you an ultimatum
Speaker 3: saying either you make that music or it's you know,
Speaker 3: you either do that or you do the marriage. You
Speaker 3: don't do both. You know. I don't know how many
Speaker 3: people say, well, see you.
Speaker 2: Then you wanted to. You were so committed to making
Speaker 2: that record that you and it's one of the kind
Speaker 2: of the loveliest sections of the book, the stories of
Speaker 2: you learning the guitar again and go into open mic
Speaker 2: nights and driving three hours with a squire crap little
Speaker 2: yeah thing, crap little guitar, new guitar because you'd sold
Speaker 2: all your guitars because that was packed away, that that
Speaker 2: was all done. And you drive three hours to an
Speaker 2: open mic and you'd you'd be agonizing, you wouldn't want
Speaker 2: to necessarily do it, which comes back to this thing.
Speaker 2: If you kind of what fears you, what are you
Speaker 2: most scared off, then go and do it. And you'd
Speaker 2: sing in these pubs and then you drive three hours
Speaker 2: home and but that whole section of the book. I
Speaker 2: just think is I guess kind of almost sums you up,
Speaker 2: like it feels like it sums up you know, that
Speaker 2: kind of dedication to feeling you have to do it
Speaker 2: almost have ack came from.
Speaker 3: I almost didn't recognize myself. I was so driven, I
Speaker 3: have to write these songs. I have to get them
Speaker 3: out there. You know, nothing else, you know, apart from
Speaker 3: my daughter matters. You know, I'd put her to bed,
Speaker 3: and then if I'd go with this, guitar, couldn't sing,
Speaker 3: come play, hadn't touched the guitar for twenty five years.
Speaker 3: Even when I did play before, I was completely self taught,
Speaker 3: So it's not like I had anything to fall back on.
Speaker 3: And yeah, I was absolutely driven to do it. And
Speaker 3: there was no I'm going to have a career in this,
Speaker 3: you know, I was fifty five. It's not like there
Speaker 3: was any reward in it financially or any quos.
Speaker 2: Was it then that made you do it?
Speaker 3: I don't do. You know what it was almost like
Speaker 3: in height situations where you know, we don't use that
Speaker 3: much of our brains as humans, you know, we probably
Speaker 3: couldn't even cope with what we could possibly see and
Speaker 3: hear if we And I really feel like I was
Speaker 3: in a situation where this higher self kicked in and
Speaker 3: completely took over and just ran me. And it was like, Viv,
Speaker 3: you have still got something in you and you know
Speaker 3: the marriage is over and you've got to make a
Speaker 3: life for yourself and your daughter. But more than anything,
Speaker 3: maybe it's because you know, the brush with cancer, and
Speaker 3: it actually was more than a brush. It was pretty
Speaker 3: touch and go. You know, it had been like ten
Speaker 3: years since that had happed. Maybe suddenly that had kicked in, like,
Speaker 3: you know, grab life, Grab life, because people always say,
Speaker 3: you know, after cancer, you feel like every day is
Speaker 3: you know, to be lived, like you'll last. I didn't
Speaker 3: get that at all. I was terrified. For ten years.
Speaker 3: I was scared. I was sort of traumatized. But this
Speaker 3: madness did kick in and I would go and do
Speaker 3: those open mics, put my daughter to bed, drive miles,
Speaker 3: you know, down windy c side roads, depths of hell
Speaker 3: and going to a pub of four blokes of Ponytails
Speaker 3: play really badly, seeing out of tune, shaking so much,
Speaker 3: even strum the guitar. You know, it's so embarrassing. It
Speaker 3: was so embarrassing.
Speaker 2: After the show, After the show, would you have this
Speaker 2: sense of euphoria of having done it?
Speaker 3: Cringe because I was so bad. I had one friend
Speaker 3: who came with me if she hadn't been there. She
Speaker 3: used to come all the way down from London to
Speaker 3: sit with me, and she would be bright red in
Speaker 3: the audience. And then I'd walk out past the men,
Speaker 3: you know, the sort of men with ponytails, only four
Speaker 3: or five people in the pub looking down at the carpet,
Speaker 3: and they would be looking down at the carpet so
Speaker 3: as not to catch my eye. The embarrassment. No, there was.
Speaker 3: There was no euphoria, because it would have been euphoria
Speaker 3: if I'd been good and I'd killed it. But I
Speaker 3: was hopeless, hopeless. It is, you know, squawking middle aged woman.
Speaker 2: But you'd go back the next week.
Speaker 3: Yeah, i'ld go back because I was driven it completely
Speaker 3: and I don't know where that volcano and me came
Speaker 3: from it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you were saying that you kind of look at
Speaker 2: the arts and the world and think, what is the
Speaker 2: what is the most exciting thing happening right now? And
Speaker 2: can I get can I get in on that? Is
Speaker 2: it writing for you now? Because you have written two books.
Speaker 3: For me personally, it would be writing. But if I
Speaker 3: were young, it would be, you know, a form of activism.
Speaker 3: I would be, you know, I would get myself well educated, articulate,
Speaker 3: and I would make use of myself for you know,
Speaker 3: the natural world, for you know, just better the world
Speaker 3: in some way, I think it would be it would
Speaker 3: be that, you know, I look at young people like
Speaker 3: you know, Jack Harris and Alice ed I don't know
Speaker 3: if you know them, and you know, just going about
Speaker 3: the world trying to do a bit of good, you know,
Speaker 3: raise awareness, amount might stuther young people or yeah, So
Speaker 3: I don't know, I feel it would be something like that.
Speaker 3: I don't know, you know, I think i'd have the
Speaker 3: guts to do it. I certainly didn't have the education
Speaker 3: to do it when when I was young. And yeah,
Speaker 3: but now for me, it would be writing. I really
Speaker 3: enjoy the long form of it. You know, it is daunting.
Speaker 3: You know, it just takes three years to get through
Speaker 3: to write a book, right, and through all that three
Speaker 3: years you more or less think it's shit. So it
Speaker 3: takes some weird kind of the same thing that drove
Speaker 3: me to do those terrible gigs. Knowing that if I
Speaker 3: didn't keep doing them, I would never get better. And
Speaker 3: I had to stand there and be terrible for five
Speaker 3: minutes for two years until I got to the point
Speaker 3: where I could do that five minutes in tune. Not good,
Speaker 3: just in tune. And I knew that. And I think
Speaker 3: that's taught me now with the book, that I have
Speaker 3: to stick with it for three years. With that, And again,
Speaker 3: I think every creative artist person, not entertainer type person,
Speaker 3: but has that feeling of you're standing like on a
Speaker 3: raft and uneven, see for three years you have to
Speaker 3: be able to bear that feeling. I can't bear it
Speaker 3: in any other walk of life, but I can bear
Speaker 3: it when I create. Funnily enough, I can't bear it
Speaker 3: in a relationship. I can't. You know, I can't bear uncertainty.
Speaker 2: But and yet your whole kind of whole life is.
Speaker 3: Based on it.
Speaker 2: Life is that?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, tell me a bit about your second book then,
Speaker 2: because I still need to read that one.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's well, because I didn't get sort of vilified
Speaker 3: with the first book, because I.
Speaker 2: Once I think you would.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I had no idea. I wrote that, and
Speaker 3: I wrote it mostly at my kitchen table, and I
Speaker 3: because I got quite a low attention span and everything.
Speaker 3: I thought, oh my god, I can't bet. I'm not
Speaker 3: going to make this like homework. You know, every chapter
Speaker 3: I write, every word I write, has got to in
Speaker 3: some way turn me on, otherwise I'm not going to
Speaker 3: do it. And so I would think of the most
Speaker 3: embarrassing things that ever happened to me, or you know,
Speaker 3: humiliating things and failures and all those kind of things,
Speaker 3: and for a laugh, to get myself going, i'd write
Speaker 3: about that, and I would be cringing as I wrote,
Speaker 3: and I would be laughing at myself, saying, thinking to myself,
Speaker 3: I've never seen that in a That's hilarious. But I'm
Speaker 3: not going to put it in the book obviously. But
Speaker 3: of course, once I'd finished those parts, they were so dynamic,
Speaker 3: and they were so truthful and so necessary. I thought
Speaker 3: for young people especially to read and see all the failures,
Speaker 3: all the humiliations I've been through, because when they hear
Speaker 3: about me, they just hear she was in a band,
Speaker 3: and she's made some simo records, and she's written some books.
Speaker 3: They haven't heard the real CV. It's all the years
Speaker 3: in between, all the failures in between so yeah. So
Speaker 3: when I handed it over to the publishers, I had
Speaker 3: a little bit of a breakdown because I thought, well,
Speaker 3: I'm going to be hated because it's a bit like
Speaker 3: you know in life. You think, if I tell people
Speaker 3: what I really think and feel, they're not going to
Speaker 3: like me. They're going to hate me. They're going to
Speaker 3: think I'm stupid. But I put it all in the
Speaker 3: book for everyone to see, right, and what was extraordinary,
Speaker 3: and I think this is a lesson for life is
Speaker 3: people don't hate you when you say I have these
Speaker 3: evil thoughts. I've been you know, I'm insecure, I've been disloyal,
Speaker 3: I've been selfish, you know. And I wrote all those instances,
Speaker 3: and I thought I would be hated. Instead came back saying, oh,
Speaker 3: it's inspiring the last word. And that's really the main
Speaker 3: response I've had the books inspiring.
Speaker 2: Because essentially you're saying things that everyone's kind of feeling
Speaker 2: and thinking, and they're like, oh, thank god, somebody somebody
Speaker 2: said I like that, and I just wouldn't tell me.
Speaker 3: My favorite sort of comedy, you know, which is people
Speaker 3: being honest about what they really feel. But you know,
Speaker 3: you had a laugh to it as I did in
Speaker 3: the books as well. So when I didn't get hated
Speaker 3: after a few years with the first book, I thought,
Speaker 3: all right, they don't hate me, yet push it even.
Speaker 3: I can't help it. It's just it's a terrible sort
Speaker 3: of destructive thing in me. And so I thought, if
Speaker 3: they didn't hate me with the first book and I
Speaker 3: didn't shock them, did shock a bit, but I'm I'm
Speaker 3: going to push it even further. I'm going to push
Speaker 3: myself even further. I'm going to admit to even more
Speaker 3: in the second book, which I didn't intend to actually
Speaker 3: make so personal, but intent, you know, as I said,
Speaker 3: I found out I was that woman with murderous thoughts,
Speaker 3: as I said at the beginning. So yes, I pushed
Speaker 3: it even further.
Speaker 2: And it's it's cool to throw away unopen. And that
Speaker 2: title comes from you found after your mom passed away.
Speaker 2: You found her diaries, Yeah, and they said on them
Speaker 2: to throw away unopen. Do you think your mum, knowing
Speaker 2: you and type of person you are, do you think
Speaker 2: she ever thought for a second you would find that
Speaker 2: and throw it away unopen?
Speaker 3: No way. My father had known me all my life,
Speaker 3: knows you know what an annoying rebellious alfhole I am
Speaker 3: would knew puverly well in a way. I'm presumed she
Speaker 3: did that to absolve herself when I told you to
Speaker 3: throw them away if you open it the Pandora's box,
Speaker 3: you know, and it wasn't really nice what was inside,
Speaker 3: you know, it was all the horrible accounts of her
Speaker 3: marriage and my father and our family life is very
Speaker 3: sad and violent and horrible. And the funny thing is though,
Speaker 3: it just covered mainly nineteen sixty five to sixty seven,
Speaker 3: because you couldn't get a divorce in those days without
Speaker 3: proving male treatment, et cetera, et cetera. So all divorces,
Speaker 3: you know, people want to divorce, had to keep a
Speaker 3: diary of their home life to show the maltreatment. And
Speaker 3: my father kept a diary of the same two years
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty five to sixty seven. So there's me questing
Speaker 3: where my rage came from and what's the truth, and
Speaker 3: why is our family so you know, screwed up? Et cetera,
Speaker 3: et cetera. You know, in my little detective book, I
Speaker 3: come across these two pieces of evidence.
Speaker 2: Would they have done that completely independently?
Speaker 3: Different solicitors?
Speaker 2: Yeah right, yeah.
Speaker 3: Different solicitors unaware, you know, but you know, rushing off
Speaker 3: to they had separate bedrooms. By then scribbling down, you know,
Speaker 3: Kathleen just did blah blah blah, and her you know, saying,
Speaker 3: you know, he just threatened to hit me, right, And
Speaker 3: of course I had my own memory of those two years,
Speaker 3: which I thought was a truthful memory, But then I
Speaker 3: had these three completely different accounts of the same situations.
Speaker 3: I recognized all the situations, all the incidents that happened,
Speaker 3: and it was a lesson to me that, you know, VIVI,
Speaker 3: you can go on plowing away looking for the truth
Speaker 3: as long as you like, but everyone has a different truth,
Speaker 3: a different memory. So it was very hard for me
Speaker 3: to accept in a way that there was no absolute
Speaker 3: truth that I could get to to find out why
Speaker 3: things have gone so wrong within my family. But I
Speaker 3: did come to an understanding of why we were all
Speaker 3: like we were. And you know, I suppose I grew
Speaker 3: a bit because I couldn't be so black and white
Speaker 3: am I thinking he was wrong?
Speaker 2: She was right.
Speaker 3: I remembered best all that had to go in, you know,
Speaker 3: in the evidence before me. Yes, I did try and
Speaker 3: write the book like a detective story. You know, it's
Speaker 3: a bit of a page turner. There are bodies and
Speaker 3: clues and things, but they're psychological crimes, which I do
Speaker 3: think happened in families a lot, you know, emotional and
Speaker 3: psychological crimes, and I just wanted to find out who'd
Speaker 3: done the murders, who was guilty, and it just wasn't
Speaker 3: that straightforward.
Speaker 2: Sure have people been shocked to the extent that you
Speaker 2: thought they might be?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Well, basically there's the night my mother died is
Speaker 3: woven through the book. It was a very traumatic night,
Speaker 3: lasted about ten hours, nine or ten hours, and it
Speaker 3: was so traumatic that I found I couldn't write about
Speaker 3: it as one scene, and I couldn't think about it.
Speaker 3: I could only let it into my head as I
Speaker 3: ever thought about it, in little bursts. And I realized, God,
Speaker 3: that's exactly how one would remember a trauma, you know,
Speaker 3: traumatic event. Your memory and your mind protects you by
Speaker 3: only letting you think of, you know, having little flashes
Speaker 3: of it come back to you. So I couldn't write
Speaker 3: it in one long scene in the book. It punctuates
Speaker 3: the book, this terrible one night, and the writing around
Speaker 3: it gradually brings you towards understanding why that one night
Speaker 3: happened like it did. So yeah, so you have I
Speaker 3: have these little bursts of remembering of these this terrible night,
Speaker 3: but I also have, you know, a proper chapter in between,
Speaker 3: which starts to set you up, because I didn't want
Speaker 3: my awfulness to be reached too early in the book
Speaker 3: by the reader. The reader had to be led to
Speaker 3: an understanding of the environment and the circumstances that led
Speaker 3: me to behave like I did that night, and that
Speaker 3: took a lot of setting up and a lot of
Speaker 3: research into why what made me the person that was
Speaker 3: that person that night?
Speaker 2: You know, as it's so personal once again, even more
Speaker 2: kind of almost more more than the first book, because
Speaker 2: it zeros in on something that is so important in
Speaker 2: your world. You mentioned that you release a book and
Speaker 2: then you have to carry on talking about it and
Speaker 2: then therefore it stays with you. And that book came
Speaker 2: out in May of last year. How have you found
Speaker 2: these kind of things where where people are asking you
Speaker 2: about it?
Speaker 3: It's traumatic. It is traumatic. It keeps it present in
Speaker 3: my mind. It means, you know, I'm dreaming, dream about it.
Speaker 3: I haven't let it go as one would normally heal.
Speaker 3: But the good side of it is I have gained
Speaker 3: a much wider understanding of the situation, so when I
Speaker 3: do stop talking about it, I will be actually quite
Speaker 3: far on. But yeah, you know, I've been The paperbacks
Speaker 3: come out now, so I've started talking about it again.
Speaker 3: But also when people come up to me afterwards, they
Speaker 3: say something like that happened, just like that happened to me,
Speaker 3: and I can't help but think, well, why the hell
Speaker 3: has no one spoken about this before? You know, the
Speaker 3: taboos I'm tackling in it really are around death, siblings, family.
Speaker 3: You know, it's a universal story, and people are beginning
Speaker 3: to confess the same sort of things have happened at deathbeds,
Speaker 3: in their lives and their families. But when I stood
Speaker 3: there thinking what the hell do I do? As my
Speaker 3: mum was dying and this situation was unfolding, which I
Speaker 3: won't go into too much because it's kind of it's
Speaker 3: a spoiler. But I couldn't think, because I, you know,
Speaker 3: trawled my mind of any help, any book, I'd read,
Speaker 3: any article, any conversation with a friend, any bit of
Speaker 3: gossip that would help me in that situation. It's so
Speaker 3: unspoken you know, the sibling rivalry, how to behave at deathbed.
Speaker 3: All that kind of thing is not spoken about, but
Speaker 3: it's huge and common and it's necessary for us to
Speaker 3: be honest about it. But you know, I it's cost
Speaker 3: me to write that sort of thing. It's cost me
Speaker 3: in my peace of mind, and it's cost me probably
Speaker 3: within my family relationships. And as I say again, to
Speaker 3: go deeply into any work, whatever the discipline, costs the
Speaker 3: creative person. You know, if you're going to go there.
Speaker 2: I love the first line of your first book, which
Speaker 2: is anyone who writes an autobiography is either a twap
Speaker 2: or broke. I'm a bit of book and I'm a
Speaker 2: bit of both. Yeah, which is an incredible opening line.
Speaker 3: I wanted a Jane Austiness first line.
Speaker 2: You know, it's so good?
Speaker 3: Do you?
Speaker 2: But having done that, having done that, had that experience
Speaker 2: of writing autobur and not just writing on but if
Speaker 2: we are right and one that, as I say it,
Speaker 2: the reason I think it's so good is because it's
Speaker 2: got a bit of everything, and it's really exciting. It's funny,
Speaker 2: it's tragic and heartbreaking. It's kind of got everything you need.
Speaker 2: And do you do you kind of at this stage
Speaker 2: in life, think kind of please that you have lived
Speaker 2: a life where you've got a memoir in you that
Speaker 2: is worth writing.
Speaker 3: Honestly, you know, if my daughter said to me, I
Speaker 3: want to live a life like you lived, Mommy, I'd say,
Speaker 3: please don't. It's you know, getting like two thirds through now,
Speaker 3: it's so uncomfortable. It's it's so exhausting, the fighting and
Speaker 3: the fighting, the mental fighting, you know, and keep picking
Speaker 3: yourself up and trying to you know, I would think
Speaker 3: it's just a valid to live a quiet, kind, happy,
Speaker 3: contented life. And I think that's just as valid a life.
Speaker 3: And if I'd have had the tools to live that life,
Speaker 3: I think there would have been, you know, a better
Speaker 3: life because I don't think like we in the West,
Speaker 3: you know, sort of famous people or people who have
Speaker 3: made records or are to be deified. You know, I
Speaker 3: don't agree with that. I don't agree with worshiping on
Speaker 3: I don't think anyone's better than anyone else. So I
Speaker 3: don't agree with fetishizing guitars or paintings, you know. So
Speaker 3: I going along that line, I don't think to have
Speaker 3: lived a noisy life or have made his stamps at
Speaker 3: some other people have heard it is a better life,
Speaker 3: and it's certainly for a woman very very uncomfortable life.
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