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

by Viv Albertine

  ‘I prefer her singing “You Don’t Own Me”.’

  ‘Not the best version.’

  His hands are thrust deep into his pockets, his shoulders hunched, he walks very fast without any thought as to whether I can keep up (I can). And then it hits me, in a moment of divine clarity, like someone has struck a big old brass bell in my head, a true, clear note sings out: This is a man who walks alone. That’s it. He walks through life alone. That’s how he wants it. That’s how he likes it. That’s how he’s always done it and is always going to do it. It’s plain as day, the truth, revealed through the simple act of walking. I try with all my might to fight my insight, but there’s no going back, it’s lodged in my brain, and from this moment on it informs everything I say and do with Vincent. Underpinning all my words and actions is my belief that he’s not someone who can deliver on an emotional level. He’s lots of other interesting things, but he’s not that. And my subconscious steers me steadily away from him, even though my heart and my ego are begging to stay.

  We sit opposite each other in an empty, low-key Japanese restaurant. He reaches out across the table and gently pushes my hair back from my face.

  ‘Don’t be against me, Viv.’

  I’m not against him, it’s just that at last I’ve realised: This man can’t give me back my self. No man can. They can only reflect my anxiety, my confusion and my insecurity, straight back at me. I’ve got to rebuild myself on my own. Bollocks.

  Enter Patti Smith.

  No one else in the entire place, and in walks Patti Smith with a friend. She and Vincent nod at each other a tad frostily. Could there be a clearer sign to get on with my life, to resurrect the person that I was back in 1977, to pull my finger out and finish the job, than the woman who unlocked me appearing at this crucial moment?

  It’s time to go to the New Slits’ gig at Webster Hall. It’s fun getting all dressed up in the hotel room with Kate and my friend Angela. I first met Angela Jaeger in New York in 1980. She came backstage after the Slits played their first show at Danceteria on New Year’s Eve – an extremely pretty, creamy-skinned, straightforward young girl – she told us that her sister, Hilary, had a little club called Tier 3, she couldn’t pay us, but it was a very cool place, would we consider doing a gig there? So we went with her and played a show (and that’s where Vincent saw us play when he was eighteen). Angela and I have kept in touch ever since. She’s a great singer and was in Pigbag.

  For the New Slits show I wear a floaty cream Jim Morrison-type silk shirt by Kate Moss for Topshop and very wide black Balenciaga trousers – I’ve dwindled to a size six, that’s a US size two – trousers look great when you’re thin. I think thin girls look good dressed, but fuller girls look better undressed. We arrive at the hall. Ari has sent Maria outside to look for us and we’re waved in, skipping the queue. We all chat in the dressing room but the girls are busy being interviewed and putting on makeup; I don’t want to get in the way so we go out onto the balcony and dance to the music. I’m introduced to Chloë Sevigny, although I’ve met her before, I was going to cast her in my feature film, Oil Rig Girls (not been made yet). I’m tempted to ask her about Vincent, but what’s the point? I’m pretty sure I know what she’ll say and anyway, tonight’s all about the girls: the New Slits playing at a celebration of Chloë’s first collection for the label Opening Ceremony.

  I don’t feel jealous of the band, or wish I were part of them. I’m relieved to be in the audience. The place is packed, there’s a real buzz. They come on stage and start to play. Ari is still one of the best front people in the world. Up there with James Brown in my opinion. She’s as cheeky, sexy and irreverent as she was the first time I saw her perform, at the Coliseum in Harlesden back in 1976, when she was fourteen. It’s so strange to hear my old songs played back at me. I’m proud of them, they sound good, but I feel a bit territorial, like my children have been taken away and brought up by someone else.

  This evening has been so uplifting, I decide that if I can learn to play the guitar in time, I’m going to do a couple of shows with the New Slits and see how it works out. I’ll have some explaining to do when I get home, but seeing Ari and Tessa up there having fun, connecting with the audience, makes me think it’s not so ridiculous a concept.

  Vincent and I meet one more time before I leave for England. As we walk to a cafe, he tells me he’s so happy because he’s just found a rare record by the Poppy Family. He says it with exactly the same inflection that he used when he told me a couple of months ago that he was so happy he found me, like I was a rare vintage record or guitar for his collection. As we talk, I realise that since seeing Ari and Tessa play, I’ve already got stronger. I’ve got plans. I’ve changed, I’m not so vulnerable to his charms. Before we part, we hug – the first and last time we touch. Of course being held by Vincent Gallo is no ordinary affair, nothing about him is ordinary. He avoids my friendly kiss and pushes his cheekbone across my face, grazing me with his stubble, his mouth is in my hair as he crushes me into his chest – like Heathcliff – holding me so tight I can hardly breathe. I can only imagine what the rest would be like. No, better not. We separate and head off in different directions. I turn and watch him beetle around the corner and think, That is the last time I will ever see him.

  I go back to the hotel and bawl my eyes out in front of Kate. Not because Vincent and I aren’t John and Yoko, but because I have a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach signalling to me that without the crutch of an affair to distract me, without any money of my own to protect me, despite being unemployable and a very certain age, my marriage is over.

  Going to see Vincent in New York was like trying on a couture dress you know you can’t afford (a little trick of mine). Nine times out of ten it doesn’t suit you anyway, and it’s good you know, because then you don’t hanker after it any more. The truth is, Vincent is not my princent. And nor should or could he be. That’s a ridiculous thing to ask of anyone – god I’m such a slow learner, I bore myself.

  I walk back into my home, into my life, a different person. Husband is standing at the hob frying mushrooms. He looks over at me.

  ‘Did you have a good time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you see Vincent Gallo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He winces. ‘Did you fuck him?’

  ‘No.’

  I take my suitcase upstairs and press my forehead on the cool glass of the bedroom window. Rain splashes onto the shiny tropical leaves, slowly transforming the garden below from a fresh minty green blanket into a muddy brown pool. Our relationship is broken, and I have played a part in the breaking of it. My judgement became clouded – it was rusty – I haven’t needed it, safely swaddled in marriage and motherhood. I can judge a cake all right, and I can judge whether a necklace goes with a blouse. But I can’t judge if a man is sincere or not.

  I still can’t.

  18 TO PLAY GUITAR

  2008

  If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.

  Louise Bourgeois

  I don’t know what size I’ve dwindled to now, but I look disgusting. The mothers at school are concerned and ask if they can do anything to help. I take all my clothes in to the dry cleaner’s to have them altered because they’re hanging off me. The man behind the counter is worried about my weight, even though he’s never seen me before. I laugh it off, I’m not that thin. I think I’m looking quite svelte. A friend’s husband tells me I look terrible, he says, ‘You looked better before.’ My friend shushes him. Well, somebody had to say it.

  I’ve developed a terrible chesty cough. It’s agony. I go back to Dr Shah, he looks up from his desk, ‘You’re much too thin. What’s happened?’ I tell him my marriage is in trouble. He listens to my chest and tells me I have pneumonia. He prescribes me antibiotics and says, ‘I’m giving you one week to start putting some weight back on. If you haven’t by Friday, I’m sectioning you, admitting you to Hastings Hospital and puttin
g you on a drip.’

  No way I’m going to that hospital. I buy a load of protein drinks and force myself to drink them, as well as eating as much pasta and bread as I can bear. I lie in bed. I can’t function. I can hardly breathe. I think I might be dying. What I’m actually doing is facing the truth: Husband and I don’t love each other any more, no, it’s worse than that, we don’t like each other any more.

  After two weeks I’ve put on enough weight to satisfy the doctor I’m getting better and the pneumonia is showing signs of clearing.

  I have a goal: learn to play guitar in five months and be ready for the New Slits gig. I feel like a contestant on the reality-TV show Faking It. Take a bored Hastings housewife and turn her into a punk-rock guitarist in five months. I go to the local music shop – in the sleepy old town of Rye – which just happens to be a great guitar shop run by Richard Kingsman, the guitarist with the band Straight Eight. It was his pedals Ari pissed over at the Music Machine, back in the seventies. I buy a second-hand Fender Squier for eighty quid, a little practice amp, a guitar lead and a couple of picks. I think Richard will laugh at this middle-aged woman coming in to buy an electric guitar but he’s encouraging and acts like it’s the most normal thing in the world; he even shows me a couple of ‘vamps’ (chord sequences) to practise.

  I set up the little amp next to the kitchen table, cut the nails on my left hand right back to little stumps, and after my daughter’s gone to bed I try to get my fingers back around those chord shapes that I used to be able to play twenty-five years ago. I’ve completely lost it. I have to start from scratch. I remember the shapes, but my fingers can’t make them on the neck of the guitar, so I sit there night after night, my tongue sticking out as I concentrate on spreading my fingers apart and keeping them pressed on the strings long enough to strum a chord. I ignore the pain of the wire cutting into the pads of my fingers. I don’t watch TV, read newspapers, meet anyone for coffee or lunch or do anything that will take a second away from my playing. I just do the minimum I have to do domestically and that’s it. Everything else stops. I take the guitar with me wherever I go, it’s always in the back of the car; if my daughter’s at a tennis lesson, I sit in the car, push the front seat back and practise whilst I wait for her. I take it to my studio in Hastings and play for a couple of hours before I have to drive back to school and pick her up. I play it in the car park at school for ten minutes until the bell goes and she comes out; I even play it on the train if I’m in an empty carriage. I’m seething and burning with determination and drive. I will do this. I have no idea why, or where it’s going, but nothing in the world is going to stop me. I play to survive. I’ve got to express myself to stop imploding into depression, so I write songs. I buy a little exercise book, just like the old days, and scribble down snatches of thoughts and conversations, quotes, anything that resonates, and attempt my first song. I have no idea how to put chords together any more or what works lyrically, but I have to write about what I’m feeling or I’ll burst.

  I need some help to learn how to play guitar again, I need a teacher. Richard from the guitar shop says, ‘Well, it’s got to be Nelson King, hasn’t it?’

  I’m standing outside a dinky little cottage on the outskirts of Hastings, flowers round the door and everything, my Squier in a droopy black plastic case on my back, feeling a fool. I ring the bell. Nelson King answers, friendly, smiling, longish hair, non-judgemental. I don’t tell him about the Slits; as far as he knows, I’m just a woman who wants to play electric guitar. He’s fine with that, not because he’s a teacher, but because he’s such an open-minded person, a true musician. I go to him every week and he shows me some scales and bits and pieces. I start to feel more confident, not about my playing, but about telling him my secrets. I confess I’ve written some songs and he wants to hear them. I can’t sing, but I trust him so completely that I stumble through them anyway, it’s excruciatingly embarrassing for me, but nothing is going to stop me doing this. He loves the songs, he can hear past all the mistakes and the out-of-tune singing and says I must sing them myself, not get somebody else to do it. ‘I can hear a lovely voice in there,’ he says.

  To prove he’s right he records me singing and playing in his home studio, adds a bit of bass and drums, and when he’s mixed it, emails the track over to me. I rush upstairs to the computer in the bedroom and play the song. My voice is appallingly, sickeningly terrible. I can bear less than a minute before I shut it off. I’m crushed, he was wrong; my voice is awful and I can’t do it. I call Nelson in tears and say I’m not coming to the lessons ever again, I’ve faced the truth, I’m rubbish, I give up. Then I go to the doctor and get antidepressants. I don’t do this lightly. I’ve always been prone to depression, I’m melancholic, I’ve fought it all my life – last year it occurred to me to ask my mother, ‘Mum, does everyone have a knot of pain and anxiety in their chest every day, from the moment they wake up in the morning until they go to bed at night, like I do?’ She looked worried and said, ‘No.’

  I can imagine the pain and stress that’s ahead of me now my marriage is falling apart and the stable family I’ve created for my daughter is disintegrating – I admit defeat. Give me the pills.

  Nelson calls and persuades me to come over for one more lesson. When I get there he says, ‘I’m not going to teach you chords or scales any more, you have a unique guitar style and I don’t want to ruin it.’ It’s only because I trust Nelson with my whole heart that I believe him. I don’t believe in myself, but I believe in his belief in me. He continues, ‘I’m going to take you to some open mike sessions and get you playing live.’ He must be mad. I can’t stand up in front of people and play and sing. I would rather die. Remember, Viv, the Year of Saying Yes. So what if I die? So what if I’m crap and make a fool of myself? I know that no one ever does anything or gets anywhere without failure and foolishness. I’ve got to do it. Nelson has made me an offer I can’t refuse, the bugger.

  I do have one other supporter: my eight-year-old daughter. My little girl, who has never seen her mother do anything except housework and being a wife, accepts me sitting down at the kitchen table every night and trying to learn to play guitar and write songs. She thinks it’s a wonderful thing for her mother to be doing. I involve her as much as I can in the process, asking her advice on lyrics, rhymes and middle eights. She’s very musical and I value her opinion. Then one day as I’m struggling with the bar chords I get frustrated and let go. I thrash at the guitar, zinging up and down the strings, strumming wildly. From this outburst comes a strange but very Viv-like riff – oriental, modal, lots of open strings ringing – and I know I’m back. My daughter looks up from her homework and with an emotional catch in her voice says, ‘Mummy, you were born to play guitar.’

  That phrase, and the way she says it, sustains me for years.

  19 BEL CANTO

  2008

  The better a singer’s voice, the harder it is to believe what they’re saying.

  David Byrne

  I feel ridiculous going to my studio to rehearse, plodding through the rain and greyness of Hastings, electric guitar slung on my back. What a fool, what a fraud. I trudge out of the car park, past the pound shop, through the underpass, glance sideways out of my hood at the thrashing waves and empty bus shelters; could it be any grimmer? Still, I’d rather be rebuilding myself in Hastings than anywhere else. I feel as if I am on the edge of the world here, or at least on the edge of England. This is a town that people come to when they want to get as far away from other people as possible. This is a town of renegades, musicians, writers, artists, drug takers, teenage mothers and pyromaniacs. It’s lawless, a frontier town, where anything goes and everything’s acceptable, even failure. I fucking love Hastings.

  Andy Guinaire, a friend and brilliant pedal steel guitarist – who played with the Faces amongst others – comes to an open mike night and tells me to buy a better guitar. ‘That one sounds like you’re rattling a drawer full of cutlery.’ So I go and buy my first Telecaster fo
r twenty-five years from Richard in Rye, a pink flower-print Fender Telecoustic.

  I’m still going to the art school once a week, and I confide in Tony Bennett – the first person I say it out loud to – that my marriage is over. He looks unfazed and replies calmly that he sees marriages fall apart all the time amongst his students. He explains that it’s because you have to dig deep into yourself to make the work and you can’t help but get to know yourself better, who you really are and what you really want. It’s bound to have an impact all through your life.

  I think back to Tony saying he recognised my voice when he heard me on the radio; I’ve always thought I have a very ordinary North London voice, but a few people have commented that the timbre of it is unusual. I don’t think they meant it in a good way, just that it’s a bit odd. Once when I was at a play centre with my daughter, a woman I hadn’t seen for ten years came up and said, ‘Is that you, Viv? I recognised your voice. You’ve got such a distinctive voice.’ I decide not to take it personally but to use this oddness in my voice and turn it to my advantage. I’m no chanteuse, but if I’m true to myself, true to ‘punk’ ethics and use my voice naturally and honestly, maybe it will be enough that it’s distinctive and personal like the songs. I start to let this idea roll around my mind. I go to the guitar shop, and this time I ask Richard if he knows a good singing teacher.

  Sandra Scott. What a find. She lives in a black wood fisherman’s cottage, with a canary-yellow front door, on the edge of Rye. Every time I go in, I feel like I’m being gobbled up by a fat, squat blackbird with a yellow beak. I tell Sandra I don’t want to learn how to sing, I don’t want to sound mannered, I don’t want to change my voice in any way, I just want to learn how to open my mouth and let my voice come out. I’m so shy and scared that I can’t make a sound. I spend a lot of the lesson time sitting in front of the log fire crying. Winter turns to spring and as the seasons change, I fall apart in front of Sandra’s eyes and stitch myself back together again. She teaches me the bel canto method of projecting your voice through your nose and the front of your face using the chambers in your skull as resonators (‘singing into the mask’). Most untrained people sing from their throats, which gives no resonance, no warmth, and is very weak. With bel canto you can still use your voice even if you’re unwell, which is helpful because I always seem to have a cold.