And if we can have a Beatles section...
All-girl punk band, 1976-81. Became famous for not being able to play their instruments, despite the fact that they obviously could. Hit high point with two excellent sessions for John Peel (both in Peel’s personal top ten sessions of all time) and superbly-produced dub-crossover opus Cut. The cover of the latter featured the band topless and caked in mud (‘They couldn’t see the joke,’ whined guitarist Viv Albertine. ‘The fact that we were a bit fat, I mean...’). Only real low point came with excruciatingly evangelical ‘In The Beginning There Was Rhythm’, an ad-libbed abomination about nothing.
Scary under-aged German singer Ari Up, who wore Silver Jubilee knickers over her tights and had a wank on Whistle Test, is now John Lydon’s step-daughter. Equally scary drummer Palmolive currently plays in a Christian rock band called (prepare to wince) Hi Fi and is now called Paloma McLardy. Tessa Pollitt (which sounds like a rubbish punk moniker, but is actually her real name) works in martial arts, while Viv Albertine is a film director. They’ve all got kids.
The Slits were magical. But anyone who says they were the forerunners of girl power will get a kick up the cunt.
1. Although they formed in 1976 and gigged extensively through the glory years of punk, The Slits did not make any records until 1979. Bootlegs and manky cinefilm aside, the only official record of their early material survives in their first two Peel sessions, broadcast on 27/9/77 and 22/5/78 respectively. Lyrical comparisons with the album Cut (Island, September 1979) make interesting reading.
The first example is the song ‘So Tough’, which is clearly an attack (affectionately or otherwise) on Sid Vicious, who - prior to The Slits’ inception - had sacked drummer Palmolive and guitarist Viv Albertine from his early band The Flowers Of Romance. Johnny Rotten doesn’t get off lightly either. ‘You have fun and experience/Nothing he does ever makes sense/Sid is only curious/John don’t take it serious’ sang Ari, while the others sarcastically chorused ‘So tough!’ and ‘So strong!’ to mock his supposed machismo. On the album version (released seven months after Vicious’ death), both ‘Sid’ and ‘John’ were replaced with an ambiguous male pronoun (‘He is only curious..’ etc).
The reference to Sid hanging around with someone who’s a ‘good fuck’ (hitherto broadcast on the second Peel session) was changed to a non-sweary alternative for the LP, which seems odd. Was it an artistic decision by The Slits to tone down the venom in the song? The LP version is considerably softer in other ways too, with the reference to ‘needle marks and shooting up’ changed to ‘ice cream and cherry cheesecakes’.
In general, it remains unclear what Radio 1’s policy was concerning expletives at this time. ‘Shoplifting’ (from the first session) was victim to very obvious censorship on the line ‘Ten nickers [sic] for the lot, we paid fuck all’, where Ari slurred ‘we paid ffff...all’ instead. The Peel Sessions version also contains the line ‘Mr Paki won’t lose much’, which may take listeners aback slightly, and this was changed for the LP to ‘Babylon Yen won’t lose much’. The original line was almost certainly a result of naivety on the group’s part (in the same tradition of Siouxsie Sioux’s swastika armbands), although Palmolive’s handwritten lyrics refer to ‘Mr Packy’, which could have been the name of a King’s Road boutique for all we know.
The other contributing factor to the change in ‘Shoplifting’ may have been the presence of black producer Dennis Bovell. The Beatles and Billy Preston anyone?
[NOTE: Punk rock is a minefield of edit news, none more so than in Julien Temple’s The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1979) where (a) they couldn’t get clearance for the Bill Grundy Today interview (1/12/76) and so replaced the intended clip with a crude, jabbering voice-over and the caption ‘CENSORED BY THAMES TV’ in lieu of visuals, and (b) someone somewhere got worried by Sue Catwoman’s prepubescent muff and so decided to obscure it by drawing on a pair of electronic pants. Meanwhile, Sid Vicious wandering around the Jewish quarter of Paris in a swastika t-shirt to the horror of the inhabitants (a nasty piece of film-making, unfair to everyone...including the pretty vacant Vicious) didn’t phase anyone. By the way, an audienceful of twentysomethings at the test-screening for Temple’s Pistols biopic The Filth And The Fury (2000) were confused by the references to Silver Jubilee celebrations, believing them to be something to do with the London Underground. Whether Temple will re-cut the film to allow for their ignorance remains to be seen.]
A SLITS DISCOGRAPHY
7" single: "TYPICAL GIRLS" (b/w "I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE")Island WIP 6505 (September 1979)
12" single: "TYPICAL GIRLS (BRINK STYLE)" (b/w "I HEARD IT THROUGH
THE GRAPEVINE" & "LIEBE AND ROMANZE")
Album: "CUT"
Instant Hit
[2’41]
Total running time: 32’01
7" single:
"IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS RHYTHM" (b/w "WHERE
THERE’S A WILL" by The Pop Group)
Album: UNTITLED aka "BOOTLEG RETROSPECTIVE"
An official - and genuinely untitled - album, designed to look like a bootleg. The sleeve was completely white, and the song titles were scrawled crudely on the inner label. The Slits, being nice middle-class girls, obviously hadn’t seen many bootlegs or they’d have realised that said LPs always feature really elaborate designs and a neatly-typed tracklisting. Like this one, in fact::
Number One Enemy
*Alternate title for ‘Vindictive’ (See Peel Sessions)
7" single:
"MAN NEXT DOOR" (b/w "MAN
NEXT DOOR (VERSION)"
7" single: "ANIMAL SPACE" (b/w
"ANIMAL SPACIER")
7" single: "EARTHBEAT" (b/w "BEGIN AGAIN RHYTHM")
12" single: "EARTHBEAT" (b/w "EARTHDUB" & "BEGIN
AGAIN RHYTHM")
Album: "THE
RETURN OF THE GIANT SLITS" with 7" single: "AMERICAN RADIO INTERVIEW" (b/w "FACE DUB"), also incorporated onto cassette release
We could only find a white label version of this one, which pissed us off because, y’know, we wanted to know what was on it.
It’s this, anyway:
Earthbeat
*New mix, incorporating both ‘Animal Space’ and its instrumental flip side. Fans could now enjoy a fade-out chorus that didn’t fade out! And a bit in the middle that went ‘boing’.
Post-split releases:
EP: "THE PEEL SESSION 19.9.77" (First session)
Vindictive [2’24]
Total running time: 9’35
Mini album:
"THE PEEL SESSIONS" (First and second sessions)
As above, plus:
So Tough
[2’17]
Total running time: 18’13
Recorded 17 April 1978; broadcast 22 May
1978
Note. A third Peel session was recorded on 12 October 1981 for transmission on 26 October: ‘Difficult Fun’, followed by ‘In The Beginning There Was Rhythm’ and ‘Earthbeat & Wedding Song’ (two segued tracks?). Neneh Cherry was on backing vocals, with Bruce on drums, Steve on keyboards and Sean on bass (2 tracks only).
Album: "IN THE
BEGINNING: A LIVE ANTHOLOGY, 1977-81"
Vindictive [3’00]
This performance appears to be unedited, and is recorded - worryingly well - in stereo. Ari Up (who announces that she has changed her name to Ari Peat) complains that she cannot hear herself sing, to which an off-mic fan implores ‘But you sound great!’.
Acoustic home demo (featuring Nina Hagen):
German television masturbatress Hagen’s connection with The Slits is ambiguous, but this demo was recorded in Nora Forster (Mrs Up)’s living-room. It prematurely fades out, presumably depriving us of ‘Shall we switch it off now?’ or ‘Tea’s ready, girls’ laffs.
Recorded in Cincinnati and San Francisco,
1980:
Recorded at the Hammersmith Palais, December
1981 (with Neneh Cherry):
Total running time: 62’51 TV & film appearances :
Something Else (BBC2, 1978) Clip shown on Peel Night, with ‘Shoplifting’ overdubbed (BBC2, August 1999)
Typical Girls: Promo video (1979; 5m)
Dancing In The Street: ‘No Fun’ (BBC2, 1996; 50m)
Women In Rock (1980)
Jubilee (Dir:
Derek Jarman, 1978; 100m)
Something A Bloke In Camden Told Us About (1978)
The Punk Rock Movie (Dir: Don Letts,
1977)
Interspersed between the rehearsal footage is the following dialogue: Footage of the band (sans Pollitt) running through ‘Number One Enemy’. Photographer Crystal Clear takes pictures. An original poster for ‘The Harder They Come’ is on the wall, as are a couple of mattresses.
PALMOLIVE She’s fucking useless, right. She’s crap, she can’t play…
ARI She can’t play proper…she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and then she takes the fucking drugs, right? I mean, she doesn’t concentrate, she doesn’t try. But, you know…she doesn’t even try to play the bass off the records, y’know. She’s not into reggae, she hasn’t one reggae…
VIV Not one scrap of equipment…
PALMOLIVE We got it…
VIV We bought it for her…
PALMOLIVE Yeah, we wanted to show her, we pursed her, we thought we’d try one gig with her…
ARI And she doesn’t even listen to a record. When she doesn’t try to play the bass off the record, it’s really important…
Another burst of ‘Number One Enemy’
ARI God! She goes on like this, if she’s at a gig, like, fuckin’ hell, I…oh, I dunno…
CRYSTAL Is it Nick?
VIV Yeah.
PALMOLIVE No…it’s not anyone’s…
ARI Have they come after you?
Well, it seems to end there.
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© 2000 - 2001 some of the corpses are amusing
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