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

by Viv Albertine

  For Arla

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Side One

  1. Masturbation

  2. Arcadia

  3. Pet Sounds

  4. Bad Boys

  5. The Belt

  6. You Can’t Do That

  7. Chic

  8. John and Yoko

  9. Gone

  10. The Kinks

  11. Shit and Blood

  12. Too Cool for School

  13. Woodcraft Folk

  14. Music Music Music

  15. Hello, I Love You

  16. Amsterdam

  17. Art School

  18. Dingwalls

  19. 22 Davis Road

  20. Peacock

  21. Horses

  22. First Love

  23. The Leap

  24. Viv and Mick

  25. The Clash

  26. First Guitar

  27. The Roxy

  28. Mick and Viv

  29. Something in the Air

  30. Twist of Fate

  31. Shock

  32. Blow Job

  33. Chained

  34. The Shop

  35. The Flowers of Romance

  36. The 100 Club

  37. Christmas ’76

  38. Me and Johnny T

  39. Heroin

  40. Shift

  41. Sidney’s Dream

  42. The Coliseum

  43. Daventry Street

  44. The Slits

  45. Ari Up

  46. White Riot

  47. Jubilee

  48. Peel Session

  49. Abortion

  50. Sid and Nancy

  51. Personality Crisis

  52. Songwriting

  53. Grapevine

  54. Cut

  55. Simply What’s Happening

  56. Space Is the Place

  57. Return of the Giant Slits

  58. Overdose

  59. The End

  Side Two

  1. Lost

  2. Wishing and Waiting

  3. Get a Life

  4. Camera Obscura

  5. The Pact

  6. Nab the Biker

  7. The Wonderful World of Work

  8. Baby Blu

  9. Hell

  10. Heaven and Hell

  11. Blood on the Tracks

  12. The White House

  13. Hastings Housewife Rebels

  14. Beautiful Fortress

  15. The Letter

  16. The Year of Saying Yes

  17. Fairytale in New York

  18. To Play Guitar

  19. Bel Canto

  20. A Matter of Death and Life

  21. The New Slits

  22. Falling Apart

  23. Yes to Nothing

  24. A Rainy Night in Nashville

  25. Liberation

  26. Sex and Blood

  27. Flesh and MILF

  28. The Midfield General

  29. Beautiful Psycho

  30. Lives Well Lived

  31. The Vermilion Border

  32. Friendly Fire

  33. False Start

  34. Feeling the Weird

  35. Aloneness

  36. An Orange

  Clothes Music Boys

  List of Illustrations

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  If you don’t want to slip up tomorrow, speak the truth today.

  Bruce Lee

  Anyone who writes an autobiography is either a twat or broke. I’m a bit of both. Once I got going, I did make myself laugh a couple of times and learnt a few things, as patterns emerged that I hadn’t noticed before. Hopefully you’ll have a bit of a laugh and learn a few things too.

  The title comes from something my mother used to say to me: ‘Clothes, clothes, clothes, music, music, music, boys, boys, boys – that’s all you ever think about!’ She would chant this refrain when I came home from school every day with no clue about the content of my lessons but able to describe in minute detail what the teacher was wearing, raving about the boys I fancied and predicting which records were going to be hits.

  This is an extremely subjective book, a scrapbook of memories. The experiences documented here left an indelible emotional imprint on me; they shaped and scarred me. And I was present at every one. Let others who were there tell their versions if they want to. This is mine.

  Some names have been changed to protect the guilty.

  For those in a hurry …

  Sex references: pages 3, 32, 38, 113–5, 370–2, 380

  Drugs references: pages 54–5, 147–9, 230, 376–7

  Punk rock references: pages 84–6, 89–90, 136–8, 142–3, 153–4

  Side One

  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 b
y 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.

  Mum and Dad

  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.

  With my little sister

  4 BAD BOYS

  1962

  The classroom door opens and in strides our headmaster, flanked by two identical, scruffy boys. Mr Mitchell announces to the class that the boys’ names are Colin and Raymond and they’ve been expelled from their last school for bad behaviour. He looks down at the twins and says:

  ‘St James’ is a church school: we believe in redemption and we are going to give you another chance.’

  Colin and Raymond scowl up at him; they are not happy to be here or grateful for their second chance. They look at us clean-haired, well-behaved children in our maroon blazers, starched white shirts and striped ties with contempt. Their holey grey socks are crumpled around their ankles, they don’t wear silly short-shorts like all the other boys in my class – their shorts are long, right down to their scabby knees. They have greasy brown fringes hanging in their eyes. One of them has a scar on his freckled cheek. I think to myself, Thank goodness, two good-looking boys at school at last. I want to clap my hands together with glee. I don’t know where this thought comes from. I don’t recognise it. I’ve never cared about boys before, up until now they’ve been invisible to me, not important in my world. No one’s ever told me about bad boys, that they’re sexy and compelling, or to stay away from them. I work all this out by myself, today – at eight years old, in Class Three.

  As our class marches in a crocodile through the leafy streets of Muswell Hill to the dining hall, I can’t take my eyes off these two delinquents. I want to drink them in. I screw my neck round and end up walking backwards just to stare at them. I’m disappointed that we’re not at the same table at lunch, but at least I’m directly behind Colin, sitting at a long trestle table with my back to him. I feel excited, a new kind of excitement, a bubbling, choking, gurgling feeling rises up from my navy-blue regulation school knickers into my chest. The effort of keeping this energy contained is revving me up even more. There’s only one thing I can think of doing to release the tension and get Colin’s attention: I poke him in the back. He takes no notice, so I poke him again. This time he spins round and snarls at me, baring his teeth like an animal under attack, but I’m buzzing on this new feeling and once he’s turned away from me, I poke him again.

  In junior-school uniform, 1963

  ‘If you do that again I’ll smash your face in.’

  I’ve never been threatened by a boy before and I don’t like it, I think I might cry. I have a feeling that this is not how it’s supposed to go if you like someone, but the adrenalin coursing through my blood obliterates my common sense. I can’t believe what I’m doing, I must be out of my mind, I risk everything, pushing all feelings of fear, pride and self-protection aside – I stretch out my arm and poke him again.

  Colin swivels round. Everyone stops chattering and stares at us. I look for a teacher to come and save me but nobody’s near so I grip the bench tightly and stare straight back at Colin, waiting for the punch. His mouth twists into a sly smile.

  ‘I think she likes me.’

  From this moment on, we are inseparable.

  5 THE BELT

  1963

  But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper Than the strong man in his wrath.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

  ‘The Cry of the Children’

  I live with my mother, father and little sister, on the ground floor of my grandmother’s house in Muswell Hill, North London. The house smells of moth balls and we have to be quiet all the time, even in the garden – I really identify with Anne Frank tiptoeing around her loft – because of the nerves of Miss Cole, the tenant living on the top floor. Our flat has no living room and we share a bathroom with my grandmother. There are no carpets, just bare boards and a threadbare oriental rug in the kitchen. The only furniture we have is three beds, a mottled green Formica-topped dining table with tubular steel legs and four dining chairs covered with torn yellow plastic with hairy black stuffing poking out of the slits. This dining-room set was shipped over with us from Australia.

  I can’t imagine what a happy home is like: parents cuddling and laughing, music playing, books on the shelves, discussions round the table? We don’t have any of that, but if Mum’s happy, I’m happy. The trouble is, she isn’t happy very often because my dad is odd and difficult and not as quick-minded as her – and also we’re poor. Every night I lie in bed listening through the wall to Mum tidying up the kitchen. She opens and closes cupboard doors, bangs pots and pans, and I try to interpret the sounds, to gauge by the strength of the door slams, the ferociousness of plates clattering together, the way the knives and forks are tossed into a drawer, if she’s in a good mood or not. Usually not. Occasionally I think, That door was closed gently, that saucepan was put away softly, she’s feeling OK, and I go off to sleep, happy.

  Tonight, my eyes are swollen from crying and there are red welts across the back of my legs; the marks hurt so badly I have to lie on my side. Mum’s tucked me and my sister up in bed, given us both a kiss and turned off the light but I’m wide awake, straining to hear through the bedroom wall. I close my eyes, concentrating on the sounds to see if she’s got over the upset earlier. I can hear Dad talking to her. What’s he doing
in our home, this big hairy beast? Lots of dads seem like that to me: awkward, in the way, out of place, filling up the rooms with their clumsy bodies. They should’ve gone off into the wild to hunt bison after their children were born and not come back; that’s how it was meant to be. My dad’s not like other dads though, he’s worse: hairy all over his body, with a stubbly chin that’s sprinkled with shaving cuts. He sticks little bits of toilet paper onto the nicks to stem the bleeding. Most of the time his neck and chin are covered in tiny white petals with red specks in the middle of each one. Halfway through the day, little red dots begin to reappear on his chin and he goes back to the sink for another shave. His deep voice, made even stranger by his French accent, rumbles and reverberates through the walls and he’s always clearing his throat of what sounds like great gobs of phlegm. He’s so … masculine, so … foreign – a cross between Fred Flintstone and a French version of Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire.

  Earlier today two things happened, one that’s never happened before and one that happens a lot. We had people round, not friends – I don’t think Mum and Dad have any friends – but a couple of aunties and uncles. I was so excited, rushing round picking all the bits of fluff off the threadbare rug under the table – Oh no! it’s so bare you can see right through to the strings – as we don’t have a vacuum cleaner, straightening the chairs, making the beds. That’s the first time I’d seen our flat through other people’s eyes and I realised we lived in a dump.

  By about three o’clock, everyone had arrived. I was in the kitchen putting homemade rock cakes onto a plate when I heard my dad telling a story about how him and Mum ran a fish-and-chip shop when they lived in Canada and everything that went wrong with it. They burnt the chips, made the batter out of the wrong flour, couldn’t feed a coach party that came in, told them to come back tomorrow. Mum and Dad laughed their heads off about it. That’s the thing that’s never happened before: Mum and Dad laughed together.