Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.
A Memoir
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4.6 • 55 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A feminist musician icon, Viv Albertine reveals the rocking, uncompromising story of her life on the front lines at the birth of the British punk movement and beyond in this exciting, humorous, and inspiring memoir.
Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
Viv Albertine is a pioneer. As lead guitarist and songwriter for the seminal band The Slits, she influenced a future generation of artists including Kurt Cobain and Carrie Brownstein. She formed a band with Sid Vicious and was there the night he met Nancy Spungeon. She tempted Johnny Thunders…toured America with the Clash…dated Mick Jones…and inspired the classic Clash anthem “Train in Vain.” But Albertine was no mere muse. In Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys., Albertine delivers a unique and unfiltered look at a traditionally male-dominated scene.
Her story is so much more than a music memoir. Albertine’s narrative is nothing less than a fierce correspondence from a life on the fringes of culture. The author recalls rebelling from conformity and patriarchal society ever since her days as an adolescent girl in the same London suburb of Muswell Hill where the Kinks formed. With brash honesty—and an unforgiving memory—Albertine writes of immersing herself into punk culture among the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks. Of her devastation when the Slits broke up and her reinvention as a director and screenwriter. Or abortion, marriage, motherhood, and surviving cancer. Navigating infidelity and negotiating divorce. And launching her comeback as a solo artist with her debut album, The Vermilion Border.
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. is a raw chronicle of music, fashion, love, sex, feminism, and more that connects the early days of punk to the Riot Grrl movement and beyond. But even more profoundly, Viv Albertine’s remarkable memoir is the story of an empowered woman staying true to herself and making it on her own in the modern world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An undercurrent of low self-esteem runs through this episodic, mannered memoir by former punk rocker Albertine, guitarist for the Slits. In spare, frank prose, she recounts her early infatuation with Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, her success as a guitarist in an unheard-of all-girl band in the late 1970s, and her later troubles, when her marriage failed and her career stalled out. Growing up in the 1960s in Muswell Hill, North London, as the child of an unstable marriage, Albertine found a revolutionary, exciting "new world" in music by John Lennon and the Kinks. Her Corsican-born father criticized her when she announced that she wanted to be a pop singer: "You're not chic enough." So she settled for being a groupie: cadging fab clothes from Kensington Market ("glam rock"), attending Hornsey Art School, and dating Mick Jones of the Clash, who helped her buy her first guitar. Dressed in tattered punk wear from the Sex shop at the end of King's Road, she played with Sid in her first band, Flowers of Romance. Once Sid drifted to the Sex Pistols, Albertine joined the Slits, fronted by the classically trained 15-year-old, Ari Up. Albertine tracks the halcyon days of the band, touring and recording, which lasted until Tessa Pollitt's overdose in 1982. In "Side Two" of her memoir, Albertine writes about years of uneven romance, trying to get pregnant, and trying to find fulfillment as a Hastings "housewife." At the end of this bold, empowering work, Albertine returns to playing guitar to give her life direction again.
Customer Reviews
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys
Rare, raw, real. Read it and live. Thanks Viv.
5th time reading this
And just as good, if not better, with each read.