We go to a party, it’s full of couples we know. I look around the room and note that in every couple, one or both of the partners has had an affair, and yet here they all are, smiling and staying together. Husband and I have been faithful to each other and yet we are miserable and falling apart.
23 YES TO NOTHING
2009
Keith Levene is back in my life for the first time in twenty years; he’s considered a great guitarist now. I knew he was great, but I just thought he was great amongst us lot. It’s only recently that everything and everyone from back then is starting to be re assessed and often credited with influencing what’s happening in music today.
We meet up in the BFI bar on the Southbank. It’s as if we’ve never been apart. Immediate intimacy, deep talk, an emotional reunion, he sheds a tear. He really is an extraordinarily sensitive man. I tell him I’ve picked up the guitar again but I can’t play it very well. He says, ‘I’ll teach you, Viv.’ I’m so touched that Keith would help me again, even though it does seem to be a crazy thing to be doing, but he never was one to judge situations the way everyone else does.
And so I drive to East London once a week to play with Keith. The first time is excruciating. I’m scared of driving on motorways, I’ve lost confidence in every area of my life. When I get there, he says, ‘Let’s hear some of your songs then.’ I get out my guitar, plug it in and sing and play a bit of a song for him. He’s sitting about a foot in front of me. My voice shakes, my fingers stumble. But he gets it.
I’ve noticed a pattern forming in my life, it happens every time something doesn’t work out – a friendship, the New Slits, my marriage – if I have the courage to walk away from it rather than stay and cling on for fear of the unknown future, it seems to take from four to six months at the very most for something even better to manifest in front of me. I think of it as saying Yes to Nothing. If your choice is either the wrong thing or nothing, however frightened you are, you’ve got to take nothing. Haven’t you? Hasn’t everyone?
No husband, no lover, no band, no money, no confidence.
Here goes nothing.
At my Hastings studio. Silk top – Kate Moss for Topshop; belt – Miu Miu; shorts – Sloggi. Father’s gold medallion and the boots Vivienne Westwood insisted I buy in 1977
24 A RAINY NIGHT IN NASHVILLE
2009
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
The Raincoats have invited me to support them on a short tour of America in September. Say yes, Viv. They’re popular in the States, so we’ll be playing big venues. I’ve never played more than three songs before when I’ve been solo; in America I’ll have to do a whole set. I rehearse every day at home and a couple of days before we leave I ask six friends to come and critique my set at Enterprise Rehearsal Studios in Denmark Passage, the sort of place that has drawings of cocks all over the ceiling. I play seven songs and say a bit to introduce each one. They give me some useful feedback, and then we go downstairs to sit in the sun, where we bump into the New Slits, who are also rehearsing here. A bit awkward with Ari but everyone else is cool about it.
At the airport my suitcase bursts open: CDs, pedals and clothes spill out all over the white marble floor. I rush off to an airport shop and buy two huge suitcases to spread the load, I’m way over my weight limit and have to pay extra. Gina Birch, the Raincoats’ singer/bass player, laughs her head off and says nothing’s changed. ‘You always had a huge suitcase stuffed full of clothes in the seventies!’
Two days to go before the first show, I stay in my room and practise like mad, then I discover that the treble knob and the lead input on my guitar are broken. I have to track down a guitar shop in San Francisco and get it mended just before the soundcheck.
I arrive at Mezzanine, a large ‘industrial chic’ venue, and make my way to the backstage area. Am I allowed back here? I’ve forgotten everything about playing a big gig. I’ve forgotten to write a set list, what to ask for in the soundcheck, what I need in the monitors, everything’s foreign to me. There’s a list of performers and their stage times pinned up on the dressing-room door. My name is on it. Oh no, this is real, not a dream. I’m not going to wake up. I actually have to go out there in front of hundreds of people and play and sing. I fight down the panic whilst I wait nervously in the wings and all too soon it’s time to go on. I walk out onto the stage feeling like a child in her first play. I stare out at the crowd, they stare back at me. I’ve got to get a grip of myself or I’ll turn into a frozen statue and have to be dragged off like I was in my primary-school assembly. A nervous gabbling voice races through my mind, I know what to do I’ll rush through the set cut out a couple of songs make it really short won’t do any of the talking no introductions I’ll … No. I’ll do what I planned to do. It’s now or never, otherwise I’ll never learn.
I take a deep breath, and off I go. I do my chats and play the songs with all my passion and the audience love it. They’re open and receptive, they laugh (at the right bits) and call out to me, I could stay up here communicating with them forever. By the end of the set, I’m reluctant to leave the stage.
Tonight we play the Echo in LA. A guitar string breaks just as I’m about to go on. I never break guitar strings – I can’t remember how to change a string and haven’t got any spares. The duo Rainbow Arabia are here, they take me backstage and introduce me to a guitarist who kindly gives me one of his spare strings.
One particular song in my set, ‘In Vitro’, is very hard for me to sing, a difficult melody change happens twice in it. I always dread the change and often sing it out of tune – but a weird thing happens each time I play it in America: the right notes come into my mind a split second before I have to sing them. It’s amazing what the brain can do when all your senses are heightened.
Afterwards we go back to the hotel, no raving for us, everyone calls their family back in England. I’ve been told not to call; I will wake my daughter up and it’s too expensive. The rest of the band think it’s odd and rather sad that I have no contact with home; this is the terrible place Husband and I have got to in our relationship.
I’ve arranged to play three small solo shows during a gap in the middle of the tour. First Chicago, a nice little gig organised by my friend Jon Langford from the Mekons, then Austin, Texas, where I meet a cute young Christian couple at my gig and go to church with them the next day, just to see what it’s like. It’s like High School Musical, held in a large school hall with a rock band and the words to the songs projected behind the speakers. The hall is rammed with a thousand young people. Then off to Nashville. Exciting, such a musical town; maybe Jack White will come to my show. I’m picked up from the airport by friends of a friend and taken to a motel. I have a few hours until the soundcheck. I sit on the beige bed in the beige room, god I feel lonely. I miss my daughter so much I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t bear the ache in my heart. Now I understand why musicians on the road take drugs, take lovers; right now I’d take anything to kill this unbearable loneliness. I pull the beige curtains aside and stare out of the window across a never-ending car park. It’s pouring with rain, blue neon light from the hotel sign shimmers in the puddles. A slick wet bruise of tarmac. Black and blue desolation.
What am I doing here for god’s sake? If something happens to my baby, how long will it take me to get to her? How many hours am I away? Fourteen. My thoughts start tunnelling down into a rabbit warren of nightmare scenarios: If she gets ill, she could die in fourteen hours, I won’t be there beside her when she needs me most. I imagine her calling out for me, but where am I? In a shitty motel, looking out over a car park in Nashville, for what? To play a bunch of three-minute songs.
Time to go to the gig. Three people turn up. Well, this is a test. Disappointed and dying inside, I promise myself that when the tour ends I’ll never leave my daughter again – fuck the songs and the self-expression. I play and sing my heart out f
or those three people. My little audience and the bar staff are very into it, they say they feel like they witnessed something very special. (They did, that show was the most intense and intimate of the tour.) Back at heartbreak hotel, I receive an email from one of the three people in the audience saying he hopes I can find it in my heart to give god another chance (‘I don’t believe in god’ is a lyric in one of my songs). I climb into bed and text my dear friend Traci telling her that I’ve had it. She calls me and we talk until I fall asleep, a friendly voice on a rainy night in Nashville. Feels like it’s raining all over the world.
Off to New York tomorrow, I can’t wait to see the Raincoats again, they have become my family for these two weeks. All the money from selling my merchandise is nicked out of my bag at the airport.
I arrive at the Knitting Factory in New York exhausted, haven’t slept for two weeks – from nerves, not from having a crazy time – but because I’m so tired I’m very relaxed; that’s the great thing about touring, you get to know your material so well that you can sink into it and play around with it. My last song, ‘Confessions of a MILF’, goes down well; I get very emotional during it, feeling the adrenalin pump through my body, right up into my brain as I close my eyes and let go. There’s a young boy squealing with excitement at the front of the stage, and I hear a girl laugh knowingly when I sing the line ‘There’s no place like home’ from The Wizard of Oz.
The next day I see Palmolive; she is still close to the Raincoats and they’ve invited her over to stay the night at the hotel. We get caught by the hotel manager bundling mattresses into the lift – we all want to sleep in the same room together. I see Palmolive’s cheeky face light up as she charms her way out of trouble, just like the old days.
Gina shows me an online review of my show, the first time someone has written about me playing live. I’ve reprinted it below, not to toot my own trumpet but because the writer explains what I’m doing more objectively than I can. This review gives me the courage to keep going and helps wipe that terrible night in Nashville from my mind. Until I read this I really wasn’t sure if I was mad or not. Thank you, Carrie Brownstein. (Sounds like a Gertrude Stein book or a Woody Allen movie title.)
On Friday, I saw Viv Albertine of The Slits, Softpower (featuring Mary Timony) and The Raincoats play at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn. How do I feel? Lucky.
As I wrote last week on this blog, The Raincoats influenced nearly every musician that sprang forth from Olympia and countless other similar towns and scenes across the US. Needless to say – or perhaps I do need to say it – so did The Slits.
So, at the Knitting Factory on Friday, watching not The Raincoats (who were fantastic, by the way) but Viv Albertine, I realized I hadn’t really witnessed fearlessness in a long time, at least not at a rock show. As one of my friends put it, more succinctly: ‘This was one of the punkest things I have ever seen.’
If there is a voice in music that’s seldom heard, it’s that of a middle-aged woman singing about the trappings of motherhood, traditions and marriage. A woman who isn’t trying to please or nurture anyone, but who instead illuminates a lifestyle that’s so ubiquitous as to be rendered nearly invisible. She places in front of you – serves you up – an image of the repressive side of domesticity, the stifling nature of the mundane, and turns every comfort and assumption you hold on its head. It raises questions that no one wants to ask a wife or a mother, particularly one’s own. Are you happy? Was I enough? What are you sacrificing, and are those sacrifices worth it? And when someone is brave enough – honest enough – to confront the difficulty of it all, the strange, often irreconcilable dichotomy of being a mother and an artist, a woman and an artist (and why should it be a dichotomy?), frankly it’s scary as hell. It makes people uncomfortable. And this sentiment of unease, especially coming from a woman in her 50s, sounds somewhat silly, even juvenile. Why? Because after a certain point, we’re supposed to feel settled, or at the very least resigned.
I haven’t even mentioned that Albertine’s guitar playing is beautiful and unsettling in its strangeness. It’s not simple, but rather a distortion of the facile. Sort of like the subjects of her songs.
I’ll say it again: I felt lucky to be there.
Seen anything punk in a while?
Review by Carrie Brownstein (guitarist formerly for Sleater-Kinney and now Wild Flag), 19 October 2009, for Monitor Mix
25 LIBERATION
2009
For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think …
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
My father has been taken to hospital; he was heard calling out for help in a feeble voice by his neighbour who, kicking the front door in – not easy, my father is so paranoid, it was reinforced with planks of wood, steel plates, three locks and a padlock – found him lying on the sofa emaciated and dehydrated. I fly to France to see him, missing Neil Young at the Hop Farm Festival. I’m overcome with a sense of duty for some reason. I sit on the edge of his bed and hold his hand: he has a very strong grip. Maybe he’s going to be fine. I call my daughter and she chats to him on the phone, which perks him up, makes him smile. But later he starts ranting in French. I don’t know what he’s saying, he sounds angry, I ask him if he wants me to leave, he grips my hand even tighter and says, ‘No, no, no.’
The two French doctors in charge of my father look at me snootily and ask how could this have happened, an old man dying alone in his apartment with no one giving a damn? I bring them documentation to show I hired a male nurse to visit my father three times a week – much against his will. My father told him not to come any more, without my knowledge. He was closing down, letting the light bulbs burn out one by one until his apartment, his mind and his body went dark.
It’s my third visit to the hospital. After I’ve checked in with the doctors I go and see how my father’s doing. He shouts out, ‘Maman, Maman!’ over and over again. The man in the next bed answers, ‘Je viens!’ My father is placated for a few minutes, he thinks she’s coming. Here he is, at the end of his life, calling for his mother. Could there be any more proof of her power? Even while dying he manages to be ugly and obnoxious. He keeps coughing up huge lumps of dark yellow phlegm and spitting it with great force across the room. It goes in all directions, I never know where it’s going to land next. I dodge around the room, desperately wanting to leave, I’m frightened I’ll catch something. A cleaner comes in and I mutter, ‘Je suis desolé,’ I’m so embarrassed that she has to clean up this mess; she starts to mop up the slimy lumps spattered all over the floor and gets spat on. I feel terrible. I stand right in the corner by the door, a huge pellet of gob flies towards me, I duck out of the room and go home.
Back in England I get a phone call. ‘Hello? Viviane Albertine?’ French accent.
‘Yes, speaking.’
‘I am sorry to have to tell you, your father, he has died today.’
I don’t say anything. I hope I’m conveying shock and sadness with my silence, because I think it would be terrible for the doctor to know I’m feeling nothing.
I have to go back to France and sort out the practicalities. To sort out a parent’s death is bad enough, but in a foreign country, in a foreign language, it’s daunting. But there’s no one else to do it – my sister lives on the other side of the world – so I take it one step at a time, put one foot in front of the other, and get on with it. If I actually thought about what was ahead, I would panic.
So: first step – fly to Toulon. Second step – check into a hotel. Third step – go to the hospital. They tell me to find a funeral director. I go to the morgue in the basement, they give me a card with the address of a funeral director in Toulon. Fourth step – get a taxi to the funeral parlour. I muddle through the meeting with the funeral director. I really like the thick glass 1930s door to the office and keep staring at it. When he leaves the room for a minute I take a picture of it on my phone. Fifth step
– buy cleaning materials and rubbish bags and clean the apartment. This takes a whole week, working morning to night in thirty-degree heat. My father was a hermit and a hoarder; his apartment is the cave of a hermit and a hoarder. It’s crammed full with newspapers, boxes, bottles, biscuit wrappers, paper bags, tins, tools, clothes, letters, everything you come across in life. Ceiling-high towers of newspapers, mazes of cereal boxes, there’s hardly an inch of floor space. Even the wardrobes are full of empty cake wrappers, all smoothed out and laid one on top of the other, thousands of them. He sure did like his madeleines. There are hundreds of old containers put aside for possible reuse. I can’t rush through these towers of debris though, because three-quarters of the way down a tottering pile, sandwiched between a cake wrapper and a pizza box, I find his passport, or a lovely old family photograph; I even come across his will in an old biscuit tin. Every single piece of paper has to be sifted through. As I go through the flat, room by room, I think about his life; I can see a shape to it now it’s over. Now it has a beginning, a middle and an end.
He was born in Corsica to a rural family, he was the youngest of five children, pretty, blond and indulged. The other kids resented him. He was a bit Asperger’s, didn’t quite fit in. He joined the Free French Navy and met my mum at Queensway ice-skating rink in London during the war. They married and emigrated to Canada, then Australia. They had two girls and came back to England. He trained to be an engineer. He was always an outsider. Divorce. Loneliness. Mental breakdown. Moved back to Toulon. Lived alone for the rest of his life, all bitter and twisted, bent over and muttering to himself. What a waste of a life. Well, not me. That’s not going to be my story. But how can I possibly be normal when I’ve come from this sort of a parent, these embarrassing genes? I pack, bag up and scrub furiously, gradually erasing the crazy man from the apartment. But I can’t erase him from my blood. Neighbours call it ‘the mad house’. I am the daughter of the mad man who lived in the mad house.
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. Page 31