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

by Viv Albertine

  I trot after Mum to the launderette, pulling a brown plastic old-lady’s shopping trolley after me up the road, the dirty washing stuffed into a black bin bag inside. I’m so broken that this seems like a good thing to do on a Saturday night. I sit on a plastic chair, glazed eyes fixed on the rotating washing, and listen to Mum talk about her work as an estate manager at Camden Council. I have nothing to say, but she’s a good storyteller and makes me laugh. Most nights we eat too much – healthy stuff, lentil roast, potatoes, salad – but huge portions, so we link arms and go for a late-night walk around the streets of nearby St John’s Wood to try and get rid of the bloated feeling. I can’t find meaning in anything, so I may as well do meaningless things like go to the launderette and stare in rich people’s windows.

  2 WISHING AND WAITING

  1983

  Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.

  Douglas R. Hofstadter

  It may seem like I’m just drifting, but I have a strategy: wait. Yep, that’s it. Wait and something will turn up. I’ve always hustled life but this time I’m going to do what I’ve seen other people do and let something come to me.

  A year goes by and still nothing happens. I’ll still be sitting here in another year’s time at this rate. I’m obviously not the sort of person things just happen to. I ask myself the same question I always ask when I’m lost. What do I find most interesting right now? The LA fitness boom. I’ve been going to Pineapple Dance Centre and the Fitness Centre in Covent Garden every day, keeping fit. I love being physical, I haven’t used my body so fully before. I’ve always hated sports but envied the way boys get to use their bodies, not only by doing sport but mucking about and play-fighting. I’ve got so good at the classes that a couple of the teachers ask me to take over for them whilst they’re away. When one of them leaves, I’m given her class to teach. I build up more and more sessions until I have the busiest classes at Pineapple, much to the annoyance of the regular dance teachers. I teach aerobics. I’m only the second person in the UK to teach it. It was made popular by Jane Fonda in LA. I work on the front desk sometimes too. I like answering the telephone, ‘Good morning, Pineapple Dance Centre, Viviane speaking, how may I help you?’ I find it soothing. I like the people I work with too, they’re funny and down to earth, we have a laugh. Something weird happens when I laugh though, my face crumples up into a cry. Nothing I can do about it. I turn away so the others can’t see me. It reminds me of the Vietnam vet we met in California; maybe you can tell how much pain a person is in by watching them laugh.

  Teaching aerobics at the Fridge night club in Brixton, 1983

  I’m aware I’m undereducated in all areas, especially music. I hated that I couldn’t ever jam with anyone when I was in the Slits. I want to put this right, otherwise I’ll never be able to make music with other people, so I go to evening classes at Goldsmiths College in New Cross, to learn how to read music, practise playing guitar and develop my ear.

  But although I’m earning good money teaching aerobics and enjoying going to the music classes, I feel time is slipping by and my brain is atrophying. I’ve got to do something that stimulates my mind. So again I ask, what, for me, is the most interesting thing happening in the world at the moment? It’s got to be filmmaking. With directors like Scorsese, Tarkovsky, Godard and Cassavetes making great films, and experimental filmmakers Maya Deren, Chantal Akerman and Stan Brakhage being reassessed, independent film is challenging how people think and feel much more than music. Even more interesting is film theory, especially feminist film theory; it’s changed the way I watch a film, questioning what part the audience plays in the experience and the responsibility the filmmaker has not to reinforce stereotypes. The influential film theorist Laura Mulvey (author of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, published in 1975) is teaching at the London College of Printing, so that’s the college I want to go to. I want to do a degree in filmmaking at LCP and be taught by Laura Mulvey. I’m never going to enter into a discipline again without knowing the background of the subject. I learned that lesson in music. So now I have a goal: get a portfolio together and get into LCP.

  3 GET A LIFE

  1983–1988

  I join a filmmaking evening class and a life drawing class, and I visit Don Letts to ask if I can have some of the Slits footage to edit so I have something to show at the interview when I try and get into film school. He says, ‘Why don’t you make your own film?’ At first I don’t think I can do it. But I ask my friend Jeb, who can do anything, where to start if I want to make a film and he says, ‘You need a camera.’ Oh yeah. Jeb says if I tell him what to do, he’ll shoot the film. I decide to give it a go.

  I’m not going to cook up a story, that’s too daunting a task; I’ll just film three interesting girls I know and then cut the footage together to the Slits song ‘Typical Girls’. I don’t know how to edit a film either, but I’ll face that problem when I come to it. My three girls are the dancer and choreographer Gaby Agis, my friend Helen, who’s in a girls’ netball team, and the chanteuse Anne Pigalle. I choose a location for each of them and hire a Super 8 camera, splicer and Steenbeck editing machine. I know about long shots, medium shots and close-ups from my evening classes. I film Anne Pigalle getting up in the morning, I shoot Gaby in one very long sweeping take, running along the wall of a formal garden in Chiswick Park, and Helen and her netball team meeting up and playing a match in Hackney.

  I take the finished film, my life drawings and other bits and pieces, including the Slits’ records, to the interview. I’m so passionate about my work and want to get onto the course so badly that my hands tremble and my voice wobbles with emotion; they must think I’m a nutter. I’ve done my best, nothing left to do now but wait. I feel my life depends on whether I get into film school or not, and I know that Mum does too, even though she’s trying not to show it. Every morning as I go off to teach aerobics, she watches me out of the window to see if I’ve received a letter from the college. I shake my head up at her every day and mouth, No.

  One day there’s a letter from LCP on the mat in the communal hallway. I don’t panic, I don’t feel anything, it’s too important. I scan the contents: I’m in. As I close the front gate behind me, I look up and there’s Mum at the window of our top-floor flat looking down at me. I smile and wave the letter at her and start to head up the road. She flings open the window, ‘Wait, wait!’ She runs down the stairs and makes me tell her face to face that I’ve got onto the film and photography degree course at the London College of Printing.

  Over the next three years I learn a lot of new words and expressions, like mise-en-scène, the male gaze, sexual objectification, counter cinema, second-wave feminism, semiotics, signifiers, scopophilia and orientalism, and read texts by many film theorists, including Laura Mulvey, Molly Haskell, E. Ann Kaplan, Richard Dyer and Christian Metz. I study Freud and Lacan, Derrida, Foucault and Nietzsche (all forgotten now, so don’t stop me and expect that calibre of conversation). I learn to deconstruct films by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Douglas Sirk, Michael Powell and John Ford. I also make short films and begin to get to grips with expressing myself in a new medium. I understand sound, and I have a strong visual sense, but being responsible for the message I convey through the medium of film is something I’m having to learn. I’m out of my depth, but so is everyone else on the course. I’m daunted by the essay writing but get a great piece of advice from Laura Mulvey: ‘Think what you want to say and then say it as clearly as possible.’ I work hard, I never miss a lecture. I try and overachieve, like all mature students. People given a second chance know the value of their reprieve.

  Whenever I get a free period, I set off to the college library and work systematically through the Dewey system, taking each book off the shelf one by one and adding, in black biro, ‘/she’ and ‘/woman’ to every ‘he’ and ‘man’. I do this for the whole three years but I never finish (and luckily I never get caught).
I do it with righteous indignation; there is hardly one book in the whole library that doesn’t use only the generic male pronoun. As if only men think and feel and discover and read. We’ve been taught on this course that every single mark and sound on film or the page is important and laden with meaning, and yet every book in this library talks only to men. Language is important: it shapes minds, it can include, exclude, incite, hurt and destroy. If language isn’t powerful, why not call your teacher a cunt?

  4 CAMERA OBSCURA

  1984

  They always say time changes things, but actually you have to change them yourself.

  Andy Warhol

  I keep thinking about my father; I don’t think I’ll have a healthy relationship with a man whilst my relationship with him is non-existent. Over the years he’s blown up in my head to Michelin Man proportions. His stocky French frame is always there, at the back of my mind, but due to lack of contact and bad memories, his image has distorted into the shadowy figure of a bogeyman.

  Both my parents have tendencies towards reclusiveness, especially my father. After my parents’ divorce, he moved back to Toulon to be near his family. Most of them have died now, leaving him isolated for the last ten years. He can’t be bothered with the effort it takes to make and keep a friend.

  I write and ask him if he’d like to meet me in Perpignan, where I’m teaching an aerobics holiday course for a week. He replies by return that he’ll be there. I can feel his excitement coming off the page.

  On the day I’ve arranged to meet my father I pop out onto the balcony of our holiday apartment to hang my bikini up to dry. I hear a scuffling noise in the courtyard below and look down to see a hunched little man with a greying Beatle haircut, scurrying about with an anxious look on his face. He’s dressed in old-fashioned flared jeans from the 1970s and a short-sleeved blue shirt, unbuttoned to reveal a large gold medallion nestling on his greying hairy chest. He’s muttering to himself. Rumpelstiltskin springs to mind. My heart explodes. I just know this peculiar little hobgoblin of a man is my father. You know when your mates at school used to point at a homeless man shuffling across the road and say, ‘Hey, Viv, there’s your dad!’ for a laugh? Well, that is my dad. I rush back into the apartment before he sees me. I don’t understand; when I look back at photos of him, he’s really good-looking. Maybe it’s like Oscar Wilde said, a man’s face is his autobiography. I suppose if I had seen him age, day by day, it wouldn’t be such a shock, but he’s stuck in a fashion time-warp and he’s all bent over and … Oh god, please don’t let him find me. And please don’t let the girls see what a strange, ugly, mad-looking dad I have.

  A knock on the door tells me god isn’t listening and the crazy man has found me. How do I address this man I haven’t seen for fifteen years? I can’t call him ‘Dad’. I hustle him out of the apartment and we go and sit on the beach, throwing pebbles into the sea as we make small talk. Not easy: I have years of anger, confusion and resentment bottled up inside me, and I let it all out. He gives his side of the story, and slowly we arrive at a truce. As we talk, the comic-book baddie in my mind peels away, layer by layer, to reveal a vulnerable, simple man. A relationship with my father has begun.

  I decide to get to know him and visit him in France once a year, staying at his apartment. He talks in his sleep, I can hear him from my room. He keeps a baseball bat beside his bed (it’s a southern French thing, they keep them in their cars too). I’m worried that if I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night he’ll come flying at me and smash me over the head with it, forgetting I’m staying with him. He seems very disturbed by my visit, or maybe he thrashes and frets like this every night. He swears to himself as he washes up. Really bad swearing, I think it might be about my mum: ‘Fucking cunt, she’s a fucking cunt.’ When I talk to him about it, he’s totally unaware of what he’s doing. I’m scared, revolted. No one has a dad as bad as mine. Obviously there are worse fathers in the world, it’s just that I don’t know them, so in my world, I’ve got the worst one.

  I try to communicate with him and tell him about my life, what I’ve been doing. ‘I was in a group, Dad. Made records and toured.’

  ‘Don’t talk about it. I don’t want to know. Never mention it again,’ he says.

  I have a choice: I can get all upset and self-pitying about his attitude, boo hoo, my dad doesn’t love me, isn’t proud of me, or accept that he is damaged. I decide to be calm and level-headed about it: This man is incapable of love. He is to be pitied. And I never mention my life in music again. From that moment on I only talk to him about neutral things – health, weather, history – because I understand that for some reason, that’s all he can cope with. It’s not me, it’s him who has a problem, and I really can’t use up any more time and energy on being a victim of my father’s inadequacies. I have got to get on with my life.

  5 THE PACT

  1987

  To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

  Bertrand Russell

  I graduate from film school in July 1987 with a 2.1. My boyfriend, Olly, who’s on the course with me, and nine years younger than me, gets a first. I’m furious. We split up.

  I’m ejected out of the protective environment of film school and into the world of work, at speed, like zooming down a water chute, legs in the air, and landing hard on my arse on the mat of real life. I begin working immediately with an independent video production company called Dogray Productions, directing videos for alternative bands like the Mekons. I churn out music videos, a couple a week, and all of them get selected by the new music station MTV. I’m too busy to be scared or smug. I go through all the usual stuff that happens in the world of work: I’m stabbed in the back a couple of times, lose jobs, win jobs, get tougher, shag a runner (hello, Dom), work too hard, fuck up sometimes, blag and hustle and get better at directing. I film early live performances by Big Black and Butthole Surfers. I make two short films. I work for Channel 4 and the BBC non-stop. I earn good money, buy a little flat in Balham, save up for my tax. I buy nice clothes: Azzedine Alaïa, Romeo Gigli, Katharine Hamnett. I’m living in the 1980s. I’m not in love though – it would all be so perfect if I were in love. Loneliness gnaws away at me, the ache in the middle of my body keeps me awake at night. I call Mum every evening. ‘I’m so lonely, Mum. I just want someone to hold me.’

  My friend Mo and I are so fed up with being single, we decide to do something about it. We make a pact, which has three parts:

  One: We’re going to go out with any guy who asks us. Any guy. Old, young, fat, thin, rich, poor, ugly or beautiful. And we are going to give that guy three dates, even if we want to kill ourselves after the first one. No man is to be dismissed until he’s had three chances. That’s because it can take time for a person to reveal themselves and for us to override our own prejudices and nerves.

  Two: Mo and I have to ask out two guys a month. It doesn’t matter who they are, if we like them or not, it’s the act of asking that’s important. We’ve just got to fulfil the quota, two a month. By asking guys out, we begin to understand what a man goes through when he asks a girl out – the nerves, the fear of rejection, the courage, the humiliation. Until now, I haven’t really been rejected because the way a girl usually lets a guy know she likes him, with looks, hints, smiles, telling a friend of his, means we don’t directly experience rejection. And the first couple of times it happens to me, it hurts. But after a while, I think, Oh well, I’ve filled my quota. On to the next one. Who can I ask out next? Mustn’t let Mo down. By reporting back to each other, the humiliation is easier to handle. And the more I do it, the quicker I move on.

  Three: Whenever we go out, men must be included in the party. It’s so much easier to take refuge in the company of your girlfriends after a hard day’s work but it’s not going to help us meet anyone. So we always make sure a couple of guys are invited along, even if they are just friends. At least that way we can practise talking to men, it’s a whole different thing fr
om talking to girls.

  This pact does something amazing to both of us: after three months of dating any guy who comes along, our expectations are considerably lowered and we become realistic.

  During this time, I come across a lot of dodgy guys. There’s the one I meet in Groucho’s, who I’m brave enough to ask, ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ ‘No,’ he replies, so I say, ‘Do you want one?’ We go out a couple of times but he’s rude to waiters, so that’s the end of that. A guy I date for a few months slaps me round the face. We’re outside a pub in Soho, he points across the road as a friend of his walks by. ‘You see that guy over there?’ he says. ‘He’s a millionaire.’ The millionaire is scruffy and young. ‘Really?’ I answer. That’s when he slaps me. I just walk away. Mum instilled that into me from an early age, ‘Never let a man hit you twice. If a man ever strikes you, never go back. If you go back, he’ll do it again.’

  I see Malcolm McLaren at a club one night. My girlfriend Debbion comes over to me and says, ‘I just overheard that guy Nils [Stevenson] asking Malcolm, “Who do you like?” And Malcolm said, “Viv’s nice.” Then Nils said, “I’ll get her for you.”’

  I bump into Malcolm quite often over the next few months and we become friendly – we are at a lot of the same parties, we’re both trying to break into film. We often go out to dinner together, to the Ivy or somewhere in Notting Hill Gate. Once, at the end of the evening, he asks me to come up to his room at the Westbury Hotel where he’s staying, but I laugh and say, ‘No way, you must be joking.’ He looks hurt. I don’t trust him. It’s not that I don’t trust him because I think he wants my body, that’s OK if I want it too; I just don’t trust him as a person, his morals.