An Amazon Best Book of the Month, December 2014: Viv Albertine's memoir is a book is divided almost straight down the middle. Side One is the story of her upbringing in the north London suburb of Muswell Hill: It's the mid-seventies, and the Sex Pistols are at the head of a massive, angry (or at least frustrated) cultural insurgence. Her rebellious tendencies have led her into the center of punk culture, and inspired by its outsized personalities and confrontational style, she picks up a guitar, forsaking traditional training for the DIY ethos of the day. After her band with the pre-Pistols Sid Vicious (The Flowers of Romance--a possibly sardonic suggestion from Johnny Rotten) fails to launch, Albertine joins forces with The Slits, a ska-infused, all-girl outfit that, through the force of its collective will and audacity, elbows its way to the front of a stage filled with sharp, mostly male elbows. Everyone is wearing Vivenne Westwood's provocative clothing purchased from Malcolm McLaren's infamous boutique, SEX--at least as much as they could afford. Mick Jones of The Clash wanders in and out of the story, first as a gangly proto-punk spending all of his time and loose change trying to put together a band, and later as Albertine's on-again, off-again boyfriend (the classic London Calling track "Train in Vain" was inspired by her). It's a story in the best rock & roll tradition: Initiative leads. Ability chases. Success looms. Then someone bumps the turntable.

Side Two. The band has blown apart. Grownup problems ensue: education and career; marriage and kids; serious illness, divorce, and identity. The actor Vincent Gallo. Albertine moves through all of it, drawing from the same well of determination that compelled her to pick up the guitar for the first time. The two sides of the book may tell very different stories, but they share perspective and style that are both straightforward and ultimately uncompromising. If you love this music (and your library contains titles like Please Kill Me and Richard Hell's I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp), then this book is fascinating and essential. If not, it's fascinating and inspiring. It's occasionally coarse, and often terribly funny and fun.-- Jon Foro

“Ms. Albertine's book is wiry and cogent and fearless.… Her book has an honest, lo-fi grace. If it were better written, it would be worse.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Forget Katniss And Tris - Viv Albertine Is Your New Hero.” ―MTV.com

“A fully realized portrait of its author.” ―Rolling Stone, "10 Best Music Books of 2014"

“A memoir full of raw and uncompromising anecdote and opinion, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys is an unflinching account of a life lived on the frontiers of experience, by a true pioneer." (#1 on the "Books of the Year 2014” ―Rough Trade

“If you love this music, then this book is fascinating and essential. If not, it's fascinating and inspiring. It's occasionally coarse, and often terribly funny and fun.” ―Amazon.com, Amazon Book of the Month Featured Debut

“This honest, defiant book from the Slits' guitarist is a lesson in how to look back from middle age…no self-aggrandisement, but occasionally a quiet, defiant pride in her achievements. The list of which, I am delighted to note from her latest music, continues to grow.” ―The Guardian (UK)

“[A] blazing, rueful memoir.” ―Greil Marcus for barnesandnoble.com

“Viv Albertine's tell-all is a razor-edged self-portrait...Shot through with humor, pathos, and sheer strength of will, Albertine tells of finding early influences in Captain Beefheart and John Lennon, going to art school with on-and-off lover Mick Jones and a nascent Adam Ant, and forming the Flowers of Romance with Sid Vicious, all before pivotally teaming up with the Slits....The book is a testament to Albertine's unbending passion for music that's uplifting and heartbreaking in equal measure.” ―Pitchfork, "2014 Gift Guide"

“The best rock memoir by some distance of 2014 wasn't written by a big name such as John Lydon or Bernard Sumner but by Viv Albertine.” ―The Guardian, "The Best Music Books of 2014"

“Crammed with wicked observations and keen memories -- especially what and whom she was wearing throughout her fashion-obsessed life -- Albertine's book is sharp and quick-witted. She knows her way around a sentence and exudes confidence. Like singer Marianne Faithfull's revelatory autobiography Faithfull which detailed her life as a '60s ‘It' girl, Rolling Stones muse, junkie and chanteuse, Albertine throughout the decades questions assumptions of femininity, propriety and creativity.” ―The Los Angeles Times

“An extraordinarily candid chronicle…even the most casual fans will find it a captivating and very personal account of an artist's life, of overcoming the self-doubt that lingers even in the face of artistic triumph.” ―Future of Music Coalition, "Our Favorite Music Books of 2014"

“A profoundly unsparing and affectionate memoir… I haven't seen anything that captures the different sides of punks so well… there is an enormous tenderness to Albertine's memoir…Clothes is as great as the music was and deserves a place on the shelf beside London Calling.” ―Bookforum

“The Slits guitarist chronicles what it was like to live through punk's first wave. 57 Books to Read This Fall, Fall Preview Feature” ―New York Magazine

“Funny, sad, and evocative.” ―Sunday Times, "Pop Music Book of the Year" (UK)

“A frank and fearless account of sex, drugs and life on the cultural frontline.” ―Esquire Weekly

“[A] bold, empowering work.” ―Publishers Weekly

“Viv from the get-go was fabulous, exciting, cool and inarguably integral to the history of punk. Her book, an eyewitness account of love, chaos and reflection, is a gender slashing, guitar smashing report from the radical front.” ―Thurston Moore

“I saw Viv Albertine of The Slits…How do I feel? Lucky….I realized I hadn't really witnessed fearlessness in a long time, at least not at a rock show. As one of my friends put it, more succinctly: ‘This was one of the punkest things I have ever seen.'” ―Carrie Brownstein (Portlandia) reviewing Viv Albertine show in Brooklyn for NPR Music in 2009

“Oh @viv_albertine I salute you. Such honesty!” ―Nigella Lawson on Twitter

“Viv Albertine was a member of all-female punk band The Slits. That's a fascinating stroy in itself, but her upbringing and, more importantly, her frank and visceral style make this a really gripping read. Shocking and enjoyable.” ―The Bookseller (A Top 5 Monthly Bookseller Choice for June)

“While we see the world through Albertine's eyes, it's the rare, raw, glimpse into the birth of punk that makes this book so relevant…. Hearing the story from a woman's point of view makes for very interesting reading… The pace is sharp and punchy, just like punk lyrics… Rarely can a book be so personal yet still resonate with a whole movement--and beyond.” ―Stylist Magazine (UK)

“[Albertine's] book is both a bold chronicle of her personal ups and downs and a historical document that blows holes in the established punk narrative in which men are the major players and women merely window dressing.” ―The Independent (UK)

“'With a title that is an incantation and a picture of the gorgeous author on its cover, Viv Albertine's autobiography is quite something. It promises a punk snog'n'tell, but is a real tease: strident, uncertain, compelling, with a structure that jerks all over the place via snapshots of Albertine's life. This is maddening and magnificent all at the same time.” ―Suzanne Moore, The Guardian (UK)

“Unflinching, candid, revelatory: the perils of being a pioneer.” ―Jon Savage, award-winning author of England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond

“A brutally honest book about the blood, guts, sweat and tears that went into becoming a woman in the Seventies. You don't need to be a fan of the Slits or even punk to be gripped from the off” ―The Telegraph (UK)

“Her voice is important in the back story of women in British rock, but she is now as original and interesting an entertainer in words as in music.” ―The Times (UK)

Clothes...Music...Boys...

A Memoir

St. Martin's Press

1 MASTURBATION

Never did it. Never wanted to do it. There was no reason not to, no oppression, I wasn’t told it was wrong and I don’t think it’s wrong. I just didn’t think of it at all. I didn’t naturally want to do it, so I didn’t know it existed. By the time my hormones kicked in, at about thirteen years old, I was being felt-up by boys and that was enough for me. Bit by bit the experimentation went further until I first had sex with my regular boyfriend when I was fifteen. We were together for three years and are still friends now, which I think is nice. In all the time since my first sexual experience I haven’t masturbated, although I did try once after being nagged by friends when I complained I was lonely. But to me, masturbating when lonely is like drinking alcohol when you’re sad: it exacerbates the pain. It’s not that I don’t touch my breasts (they’re much nicer now I’ve put on a little weight) or touch between my legs or smell my fingers, I do all that, I like doing that, tucked up all warm and cosy in bed at night. But it never leads on to masturbation. Can’t be bothered. I don’t have fantasies much either – except once when I was pregnant and all hormoned up. I felt very aroused and had a violent fantasy about being fucked by a pack of rabid, wild dogs in the front garden. I later miscarried – that’ll teach me. This fantasy didn’t make me want to masturbate, I ran the scenario through my head a couple of times, wrote it down and never had a thought like it again. Honest.

(Please god let that old computer I wrote it on be smashed into a million pieces and not lying on its side in a landfill site somewhere, waiting to be dug up and analysed sometime in the future, like Lucy the Australopithecus fossil.)

Here we go then, (genital) warts an’ all …

2 ARCADIA

1958

My family arrived in England from Sydney, Australia, when I was four years old. My sister and I had three toys each: a Chinese rag doll, a teddy bear and a koala bear. We were not precious about our toys. The dolls were repeatedly buried in the back garden, eventually we forgot where they were and they perished in the earth. The teddies we would hold by their feet and smash them at each other in vicious fights until they were torn and mangled, with eyes and ears missing. We didn’t touch the koalas because they were covered in real fur and felt creepy.

We sailed from Australia to England on a ship called the Arcadia, according to a miniature red-and-white life-belt hanging on a nail in the bathroom. It was a six-week journey. One of my earliest memories is of my mother and father tucking my sister and me up in bunk beds in our cabin. They told us they were going to dinner, they wouldn’t be long, and if we were worried about anything, to press the buzzer by the bed and someone would go and get them. This all sounded perfectly reasonable to us, so we snuggled down and off they went.

About thirty seconds later, we were gripped by terror. I was four, my sister was two. Once the door was shut and my parents had gone, the reality of being alone at night in this strange place was unbearable. We started crying. I pressed the buzzer. After what seemed like ages and quite a lot of pressing, a steward appeared and told us everything was fine and we should go back to sleep. He left. Still scared, I pressed the buzzer again. For a very long time no one came, so I carried on. Eventually the steward came back and shouted, ‘If you press that buzzer once more, the ship will sink and your mummy and daddy will drown.’ I didn’t stop pressing and Mum and Dad didn’t drown, they came back from dinner to find us bawling.

At four years old I learnt an important lesson: grown-ups lie.

3 PET SOUNDS

I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy and free.

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

My sister and I were quite feral little girls. We weren’t like girls at all for a few years, quite unemotional, verging on cruel. We had a dog called Candy. She was a white Yorkshire terrier and she ate her own poo. Her breath smelt. After she had an operation (so she couldn’t have puppies), she lay in her basket trying to chew the scab off her wound. I suppose we all do that in a way.

My sister and I taught Candy to sleep on her back, tucked up under a blanket with her front paws peeping over the top. On Guy Fawkes Night we dressed her up in a bonnet and a long white dress (one of our christening gowns), sat her in a doll’s pushchair and wheeled her round Muswell Hill Broadway asking for ‘a penny for the guy’. We didn’t get much, but that wasn’t the point.

We got bored with Candy quite quickly and stopped taking her for walks. The only time we called out ‘Walkies!’ and rattled her lead was when we couldn’t get her in from the back garden at night. Eventually she caught on and wouldn’t come in at all.

One day somebody put an anonymous note through our door, ‘You don’t know me but I know your poor little dog…’ Telling us off for being mean to Candy. We gave her away.

We had a cat too, Tippy. We used to build traps for her in the garden. We would dig a pit, cover it with leaves and twigs, then wait for her to fall into it, which of course she never did. So we tried to push her in instead. She ran away.

Lastly we had three goldfish, Flamingo, Flipper and Ringo, all from the local fair. Flamingo died after a few days, Flipper died a couple of weeks later and was eaten by Ringo. Ringo had a nervous breakdown (no doubt guilty about eating Flipper) and started standing on his head at the bottom of the fish tank for hours at a time. Eventually I couldn’t stand it any more so I flushed him down the loo. When the bowl cleared, he was still there, standing on his head. It took lots of flushes to get rid of him. That image of Ringo on his head at the bottom of the loo still haunts me.

Copyright © 2014 by Viv Albertine