Viv Albertine, the charismatic guitarist for seminal London punk band The Slits, dropped a memoir last year entitled Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. In it, she detailed her teenhood in London when punk was at its peak and the rise and decline of both that and The Slits.
In this interview, she’s frank and lovely about discussing some of the obstacles young women in the punk scene faced, and how they subverted them by becoming even punker. That infamous first Slits album cover, in which the band posed nude and covered in mud, was a response to that: “it was us saying look, there’s nothing wrong with our naked bodies,” she says, “but we want to take them back, thank you very much.”
