Original subtitles

In the beginning it was just

a very exciting time for me as a 17 year old.

And I had to break down all these barriers

of the society we were living in,

and you had to just do something about it.

You were in charge.

We don't care what you think we ought to be doing.

We're gonna do it our way.

They were definitely the queens of punk.

The Slits had attitude.

You had these four women

that were like sticks of dynamite

and the whole thing was like

this feminist explosion on stage.

They were threatening to men,

certainly empowering for women

and I just found them totally fascinating.

It was adventurous,

it was anarchic and it was female.

And I hadn't seen anything like that before.

It was something that I wanted to do

and suddenly I've been enabled to do it.

Rock and roll was about men

rebelling against their moms.

And the Slits used rock and roll

to rebel against everything.

The Slits were powerful ladies

that have opened the door for other ladies

because people didn't use to associate women

with playing instruments.

They were inventing a new kind of music.

It was completely outside of rock and roll.

It was completely outside of punk.

They terrified people

but it wasn't just like angry,

screaming, girls kind of terrifying

it was a deep psychology that, you know,

some people could not deal with these powerful women.

We had a mission, we were girls on a mission.

We were absolutely driven by it

and it was bigger than our petty little squabbles.

We were very strong, all of us.

The initial Slits had a potency

because of how different we were.

I was so shy, people called me the quiet one,

so this was just a whole world opening up for me.

Now you got to understand this is the beginning

of the whole punk rock explosion.

And everybody was trying to work out their shit

and it sort of said to people if you were brave enough

and you had a good idea you could be part of this shit too.

- Ah.

So what do I see here?

I see a photograph of myself outside the Roxy club;

all blotchy, stained with age.

That's why I've got these gloves on because I don't want,

I'm trying to protect these archive scrapbook.

The Slits scrapbook that I must have started

literally right at the beginning, 1976, '77.

We didn't obviously know each other then

but everything started at the Roxy club

in Covent Garden that doesn't exist anymore.

And all the bands, this was the first exposure

for the new bands to play at.

So all of the original punk bands played at the Roxy club.

Don Letts used to DJ reggae music

and the reason he was playing reggae music

is because it was right at the beginning of punk,

there were no punk records.

And on the first night I was invited

to introduce Generation X.

The first band that was on.

You know I was there really nervous as I am.

I was like okay, I'll do it.

Okay, I'll do it.

So I get on and I nervously go,

tonight we have Generation X.

And then there's some punkie girl

in the front going, who's that wally?

Okay, so here we have the first ever gig.

Ever, ever, first ever Slits gig.

Headlining is the Clash, then the Buzzcocks,

then Subway Sect, then the Slits.

I had literally joined the band two weeks before.

Hadn't played the bass.

Had to learn all of the songs in two weeks.

- Clash, Subway Sect, I didn't go to see them.

I went to see the Slits because I saw those other bands

all the time and I'd heard about the Slits

and I've been in a band with Palmolive,

the Flowers of Romance with Sid Vicious.

So I wanted to check out what she was doing.

I was thinking, I don't know,

I keep seeing them running around

with black plastic bin liners on, screaming and shouting.

They're probably not gonna be that good.

- Palmolive was starting to try

and play the drums and be in a band,

and one day she invited us to the first Slits gig.

And it was a life-changing thing.

There was just this complete raw energy and the music.

Some people said that it sounded terrible

and they couldn't play, but to my ears

it was the most delicious sound.

It unlocked something for me and suddenly

I was standing there thinking,

wow, I want to do this too.

- The way Palmolive drummed.

I mean she just gave it everything.

She was like Keith Moon 10 times over.

Really, really present, and really fierce.

Never seen a girl drum like that.

I mean never seen a guy drum like that.

- She radiated when she played live,

her eyes come alive and there was something

so magical about her.

- And Ari, who seemed such a big personality off stage,

suddenly was absolutely in her element.

Really confident lead singer.

The sort of lead singer you feel comfortable watching

because you can channel all your own sort of insecurities

through them and they become like a shaman.

Whenever me and Sid Vicious watched a band,

we'd think, are they as good as the pistols?

And here at last, I felt, was a singer

who was equal to Johnny Rotten.

Just as exciting, just as irreverent and iconoclastic

and then, on top of that, a girl.

I was absolutely won over, absolutely astounded that night

and I rang them up the next morning

from the phone box up the road

and said oh, if you ever want to get together and play,

I'd really like to play with you,

I thought you were fantastic last night.

- I was just 17, Ari was only 14.

It was just pure energy and attitude

that just made people go what the fuck is that?

We were coming from a very, sort of, gray population

just thinking what is there for us out there?

- Men ruled the world.

Men in bowler hats and three piece pinstripe suits.

They did rule England, those men.

It was a very sexist, very male,

very class ridden society where we were invisible really.

But, you know, because when no one was looking,

the rapscallions scuttled in.

Out of that came music.

- We just left home.

We didn't worry about where we were gonna stay.

And you just had to survive.

You'd find a way to survive

and you found like-minded people.

There was always a way basically, there was always a way.

And the reason I met the Slits,

it was because there was the News Of the World,

which was one of the Sunday sensational papers

and the headline is, these girls make

the Sex Pistols look like choir boys.

Here come the Punkesses!

Whoa!

The News of the World has been talking to the bands.

Our verdict, if the Punkesses

become a craze we're all crazy.

They have holes in their socks, sex on their minds

and vocabulary so pock-marked with four-letter words

they seem to say little else.

The name of this all-girl punk rock group is so vulgar

that we are unwilling to print it in a family newspaper.

I was still at college at the time,

playing in a group called the Castrators.

Suddenly the News of the World

are knocking on my door as a 17-year-old,

they wanna do a newspaper interview and it was shocking.

It was slammed on my dad's desk on Monday morning.

I tried ringing him up to say, I'm really sorry, Dad,

but he didn't want to talk to me.

That was it.

They had already established themselves as a band

but they hadn't played any gigs yet.

- I played with the Flowers of Romance

with Sid Vicious for a whole two weeks.

So we finished practicing and I'm there in the house alone.

So Sid Vicious is acting all macho-like.

I used to wear these mini skirts and fishnet tights

so, of course, he's hanging out for something

and I'm like not into him at all.

He goes, I hate blacks.

And I go, I hate people that hate blacks,

and then next time we have practice Sid goes, you're out.

So my experience with Sid,

it made me want to form a girls group.

It was clear in my mind, it was not that I hated guys.

Um, at all.

But I just felt that it would be simpler.

I wouldn't need to deal with that kinda stuff.

I packed my bags.

I just went to London without knowing anybody really.

I landed in this squat in 101.

One of the creative projects

that we rallied around was the 101ers.

Woody was the lead singer and very soon,

I was living with Woody who became Joe Strummer.

Joe wanted to go and be part of the punk movement.

He cut his hair and he spiked it.

Because he was all about changing image, changing looks,

so I adopted Palmolive.

So when the punks exploded

and everybody and their mother was having a band,

you know, like I want to have a band.

- It would have been summer of '76, I guess,

and Paloma came up to me and said,

do you know anybody who plays guitar?

She said, do you?

And I said, a little, and she said,

do you wanna be in a band?

And I said, okay we'll try it.

I vaguely remember meeting Ari at a Patti Smith gig

and thinking she might be a little bit too young

and brattish to pull it off.

- All the attention was on Patti Smith

but my attention was on Ari

because Ari was on the floor shouting at Nora, her mom,

effing this and effing that and like she was shouting

and she did not care about anything.

So I felt she had no inhibitions.

And so I said she would be great for a front person

in a band, in my band.

So I went and asked her.

I said, do you wanna be in a group with me?

We had a bass player at the beginning, Suzy Gutsy,

and she wasn't there very long.

- I wasn't getting on too well Arianna

and I think she wanted Tessa to be the bass player.

So I just left and went, did my own thing.

- So it was Kate, Kate was the one

that came up with the name The Slits.

- The name of the band shocked a lot of people.

It called to mind violence for some people,

and pornography to others.

It had a lot of different meanings

depending on who you were.

And we did want to change peoples image

of what females might be.

- We had seen an article

in the News of the World with the Castrators,

so we grabbed Tessa from there.

So it was Kate, Tessa, Ari, and I.

- I hadn't finished my college course

but who wouldn't want to be involved

in something more exciting than finishing your exam stuff.

So I blew that, told the college I'm leaving.

Two weeks later we're on stage.

First gig.

Kate taught me the bass lines when I joined the group.

So Kate, to me, was very kind

but obviously I only knew her for a short period of time.

She did two gigs with us and shortly afterwards

she left or was thrown out, however you want to put it.

- Viv and the others got together

and they decided to be a band.

And I was told that I was no longer in the band.

And then, almost immediately afterwards,

they asked me to be the manager which I turned down.

I felt rejected but, you know, life is full of rejections.

- At that time, the White Riot tour comes up

and the Slits are offered a spot on the bill.

Another brilliant line-up, Clash, Buzzcocks, Slits.

- At this period Don Letts attempted to manage us.

And it says here June the 25th 1977, Melody maker.

- I Went along to a Slits rehearsal in Daventry street

and me and Ari absolutely clicked.

Very, very different to rehearsing with Sid Vicious

and I had rehearsed with Johnny Thunders a bit as well

and I'd felt very awkward and very out of my depth

and didn't really flow, but the minute

I hit that basement with those girls

it was absolutely meant to be.

- One, two, three, four.

And that was it, we were a band.

When The Slits were offered the White Riot tour

and I'd only been with them three weeks

and we could barely play, there was no question

of saying no, we're not ready.

It's like yeah go for it, go for it.

And then the next thing you know

we're out in front of a thousand people.

Ready!

One, two, three, four!

It was all so new.

Exciting, I mean people were so excited

to see it and we were so excited that they were excited.

It was just such a high.

- But we didn't really know how to play,

so sometimes we would be playing different songs

and we couldn't even tell sometimes.

Sometimes we could tell.

We were just together for the gig.

Now we were in a van with the Clash, driving for hours.

It was exciting and we were on the bus every day

but we were very much kept under heavy manners.

Ari was not to leave her seat

or speak on any coach journey.

- Bus driver on the White Riot tour, Norman,

he had to be bribed to let them on the bus.

And they didn't do anything to him directly.

He was just so threatened

on some sort of deep psychological level.

Just their presence, just the look in their eyes

before they even opened their mouth, you know.

- It kind of got to us a bit actually,

it made us act badly.

As it does you know if people expect

the worst of you, you kind of give it.

The other bands, and certainly their managers,

became like the establishment to us.

- When we got to somewhere

people would say, they're too outrageous.

I remember being so disappointed because you get to a hotel,

you wanna party and no, no, you have to go to the rooms.

Of course we didn't really listen to them too much

but the fact that we couldn't was like, come on.

The guys were just as bad but we were more

shocking to them, I think, because we were girls.

And they didn't expect that from a girl.

- There was one incident where we walked

into this hotel and the graffiti, The Slits,

as soon as we walked into the hotel,

they refused to allow us to stay in that hotel

just because of this thing written on my guitar case.

We sort of signed in and then signed out straight away.

So that was ground breaking for us that tour was,

thank you so much, The Clash.

And here we have, is this Ari saying we're not musicians.

The ultimate test of creative talent

and potential is the extent to which

an artist puts across original ideas

in a manner transcending the limitations of technique.

That the Slits do this is beyond question,

only spoilsports could dismiss them as a joke.

Do they consider themselves musicians?

No, not at all, says Viv and that's not because

we cant play brilliantly, its because if we do

we'll be misrepresented.

We've heard about musicians and anyway,

is that what we play, music?

Says Palmolive, if men don't like us

to be free that's their problem.

If they don't like it they can fuck off.

Ari Up quote, the reason why there's hardly

any girl rock and roll stars is because

most girls are not strong enough in their own minds.

The Slits talk about the lyrics of their songs.

All right, all right lets do the splits, shall we?

Yeah, yeah.

This is a bit about splitting up with a boy.

No it's just about, you know

- About guys fucking, hey!

This is our drummer and bass player.

And lets do the split is about fucking,

guys fucking us about and we tell them to fuck off.

- We were crazy, and people knew that,

that's what they were expecting and that was fine with us.

That was our life but then we would finish the gig

and then go home and then the next day

we would do it again, so our whole life was the group.

- The Slits were forming their own constituency

and their own aesthetic and it was truly original.

- When the four Slits walked along, we were like a gang.

You know, we could almost practically hear

our theme tune behind us you know,

jungle drums and everything.

But because of how we looked, the hair and everything,

they couldn't tell if we were male or female or even human.

And they were scared.

They were scared of us.

These guys didn't know whether to fuck us

or kill us basically, they were so confused.

- You have to understand that when we walk the street

people did not look like the way we looked.

Your outfit had to express this new vision that we had.

Like you wanted to shock people out of their complacency,

so we would have people coming to hit us

or people just going to the other side of the street

just because of the way we looked.

- England is a sort of country of little factions

they followed their band but we weren't following a band.

We were the band.

- Nowadays, you can wear whatever you like.

You can choose your look, you can choose your outfit

but back then society told you what was acceptable.

- Girls were supposed to not go out until they were ready.

And being ready meant everything in it's place,

the make up perfect, the hair perfect.

Calm yourself down, go out.

The Slits they were wearing chaos and they were being chaos.

Their fun was more important

than what anybody thought about it,

especially what men thought about it.

You were talking about a generation of young women

who'd been brought up to feel that everything they did

was wrong unless they did the right thing

and the right thing is sitting quiet, being biddable.

If you jumped off that railway track,

you jumped into ugly territory.

Those barbs, they hurt the people that they were aimed at.

They were intended to hurt

and intended to make people feel wrong.

Part of what was written about in lyrics

and part of what was articulated on stage

was a celebration of that wrongness.

- It was girls reclaiming our own space

and identity for ourselves.

- Because everything was up for grabs.

Presenting yourself in a truly original way

that looked as topsy-turvy as their sound sounded.

It was like a new paradigm for females.

So they were provocative, they were outrageous

but also they were having fun

because they hadn't been manufactured,

they weren't having to please

some, usually 99.999% of the time, male boss,

you know they were presenting themselves

and pitching themselves the way they wanted to.

Un-reconstructed.

Without giving a fuck.

Here we have Palmolive, Viv, Ari,

and what's interesting about these pair

of jeans I'm wearing, you see it has a slit

in the pocket at the back.

Now these are the jeans that Ari got stabbed in.

This guy just comes up behind her

and just slices her through the coat,

through her jeans and says, here's a slit for you,

and he's gone.

These were violent times which we have to remember

and it took a lot of nerve to dress the way you did

and walk down the street on your own as we often were.

I think it's just human nature.

People love a fight.

Don't we all.

Okay, here we have the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Which one do you think the Slits were?

The ugly.

Would you describe yourselves as a punk band?

Chorus: No!

Viv: we're just the Slits, we are what we are,

like the Sex Pistols are what they are.

The newspapers invented this punk shit,

they've got to label everything.

They call us punkettes.

What kind of shit is that?

We're just ordinary, normal girls

that's why we want to be in 19,

because we think that fashion is crap.

We want to show girls that you don't have to be pretty

and skinny to get into a group.

You can be just what you are,

you can be wild-looking people

with personalities and not stereotypes.

Why did you choose the name Slits?

Palmolive: it's a vicious name.

Ari: it has three meanings; slitting someone open,

a slit in the side of a skirt and dot, dot, dot.

We all know what that is.

Et cetera, et cetera, you know.

- I had no role models as a female musician.

There was no one I wanted to be.

So much so that it didn't even occur to me

to even be a female musician.

The Kinks went to my school

and Rod Stewart went to my school.

It never occurred to me to think

I could possibly be in a band myself.

I was mad about music from the age of nine or 10,

which in the '60s and '70s was unusual.

Yet absolutely immersed in music as I was,

never occurred to me to be in a band

until I saw Johnny Rotten on stage

and then it was like a huge whoosh of everything.

Bang, bang, bang coming into my head at the same time.

So I watch this sort of androgynous guy

from North London like me,

comprehensive state schooling like me.

The only thing was that he was a boy

but he was so sort of androgynous and white,

and limp in a way that I think I managed

to overcome the fact that he was a boy

and think I'm gonna buy a guitar.

I went out the next day and bought an electric guitar

even though I couldn't play.

- After the White Riot tour, we were all fired up

and excited and actually lots of things were going on.

But there was a slight shift where the Pistols come,

which was Malcom really, is becoming commercial.

It shifted from them being colleagues in crime

to them being the establishment.

The Slits went through 13 managers in our time.

Some lasted a few weeks, some lasted a few months,

some ripped us off, some ran away.

And always picking us up when it all went wrong

and it always went wrong, was Nora.

- Nora's house in Shepherds Bush

was a great meeting point for various members

of the whole original, early punk movement from 1976.

A lot of interesting people passed through that place

and Nora was excited and happy

and welcoming to all these people.

- All right, ma?

Nora was a German promoter of music.

She worked with groups like the Cream and Jimi Hendrix.

Which meant Ari was in contact

with all these people in her early childhood.

- Nora's house was a place we came together.

It was just a safe, clean place.

Some meals provided.

We were horrible to her and she was so nice to us.

She had the ability to just laugh

and roll with it and ignore it.

- Every Christmas she'd buy a really big Christmas tree

and put real candles on little silver holders

with you know flickering real lights.

She was like all of our mother in a way.

- I think to Ari, the Slits were like her family,

we were like the sisters she never had being an only child

so I think that made Nora happy, and I felt safe as well.

I felt I found my people, kind of thing,

because as I said I'm quite a solitary person.

So this is a show we did

where we you're trying to mix reggae, funk, and punk.

For the first time in the UK,

three different cultures meet live.

So we were trying to just mix

all these different types of music

and hope that it would work

and sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't

but the connection with punk and reggae is huge.

Put on the record.

- A bridge trying with the lines.

- Oh come on! - I can give it to you.

- The reason the punks liked reggae

was the lyrics were about shit they understood.

I need a roof over my head,

money in my pocket, chant down Babylon.

Music that spoke about how we could live

and how we could do it together.

And, yeah, they didn't mind the weed either, you know.

The thing is with the Slits,

the way we played reggae we filtered it through our music,

and we filtered it through ourselves

and our lack of technical ability.

For us it fused our whole sound.

- In the 1950's there was a huge influx of immigrants

from the Caribbean to come and work on the underground

or do the jobs that British people didn't wanna do,

thinking they'll have a bright future here

and the attitude they got from the general population

all over England was extremely racist.

So they were a rebellious generation,

we just happened to collide at that point in time.

- If anybody defined the punky reggae party

that Bob Marley sang about it was the Slits.

Particularly Ari, who was the first white dreadlocks

that most people had ever seen.

She even shocked the very cool Bob Marley.

The first time I heard the song Punky Reggae Party

it mentioned the Slits.

It had that line which later became

the Damned, the Jam, the Clash.

In the early versions he talks about the Slits,

so they had a lot of confrontation everywhere they went.

- As a girl it was difficult because we were brought up

to be self conscious about how we looked,

to be feminine, to smile and any scrutiny about us

and our love lives and our bodies was very painful to bare.

The Rastas were just sort of beginning

to come up in London as well

and they were very into women being at home

and not showing their hair.

So just as I was beginning to branch out

and feel like I really looked like myself

for once in my life these men

that I really quite respected

were sort of putting it all back down again,

so the scrutiny was even more painful.

The youth of those '70s were nothing in society.

Girls until then had been terribly, terribly self conscious.

I can't, you know, I can't do it.

I'm not a fucking genius.

Until that moment you never questioned a dentist,

a doctor, a headmaster, a teacher.

Anyone male.

All right, put it on again, I'm just finished.

Come on then.

You know, feel and look back on that time

as an extremely painful time for me.

I was a very self conscious girl

and someone who helped me through that,

without actually doing anything

but just being herself, was Ari.

So that's the four original Slits

at their best, I would say, at our peak.

- The music slowly got a little better.

We started to play the same song here and there, you know.

People were very thrilled to see us

and the papers always gave us really good reports.

We were very strong, all of us,

and I think the initial Slits had a potency

because of how different we were.

We were still like excited about each other

and being in the band and we felt it

with the same intensity.

And here we have Don Letts's, The Punk Rock Movie.

Because Don, from the beginning,

was documenting everything on his Super 8 camera.

He caught everything.

We were rehearsing for the White Riot tour.

So for some reason, don't ask me why,

somewhere I just decided to take a pill.

Someone went, oh do you want a pill,

I was like, yeah why not?

It was like half an hour later,

just before the rehearsal,

I start feeling a bit woozy like, whoa, oh,

and they're just furious with me.

She's fucking useless, she's crap.

She can't play a proper rehearsal.

She doesn't concentrate, she doesn't try.

You know she doesn't even try to play.

- Palmolive's saying, oh what's wrong with her, you know,

we got her the bass, we got her the equipment,

what's she think she's doing?

Yeah she's useless, blah, whatever

and then I realized I am on the verge

of being thrown out of the group.

There's no going back after that.

So I just rehearsed night and day on my own,

make sure I know the songs back to front,

make sure there's no way they're gonna throw me out.

I cannot lose this opportunity.

Fucking hell!

- And what happened?

I rehearsed so hard I convinced them to keep me.

- We started of all very naive, you know, full of energy.

We were always very, very close.

We were like sisters and we bickered like sisters,

but anyone threatened us from the outside

and we would have killed for each other.

Literally would have killed, especially for Ari,

who I felt incredible protective of

even though she drove me the most mad.

- We were very different but we really got on well,

I think we were a good balance to each other.

But I mean we were so opposite to each other

that energy that we created together

was very potent and very timely.

- And there were times when it was so difficult

and I so wanted to leave, but I knew

with them I was a bigger person.

We had a mission, we were girls on a mission.

We were absolutely driven by it

and it was bigger than our petty little squabbles.

This mission that we were on, sort of obliterated

any of the little petty day to day problems

that we had amongst each other.

Losing Palmolive probably took a bit of that away.

That was quite a big change.

- The Slits were high octane.

On any given day some explosion could have happened

that could have changed the landscape,

and it quite often did.

I mean one moment Palmolive was there, then she wasn't.

And so Slits last gig with Palmolive.

Last year, best ever.

After that, Pam joined Raincoats.

Towards the end of my involvement

with the Slits, was some things that I started questioning.

Almost like looking at a punk, a little straight in the face

and saying, you know what, there is more.

And I didn't feel the group could accept my questioning.

And so then, suddenly, it felt like instead of being free

it was actually very restrictive.

And so Tessa came up to me and said,

you're not in the group anymore.

I think it was sad because Tessa

was my closest friend at that time.

- It was obvious within the group that,

I hate to say it, that we needed a new drummer

and this was very traumatic to me because Paloma,

Palmolive was my best friend at the time.

We shared a squat and I was appointed to tell her

that she was not in the group anymore.

And it just totally did me in.

- And so I figured I'd be in another group,

like with the Raincoats, I joined the Raincoats.

And then really came down six months.

Think it didn't take me that long,

then I was able to say, no I'm not doing this.

Going out of punk, it was almost like a withdrawal.

It really felt like this barren emptiness.

That was every day, wake up,

it was the Slits or the Raincoats,

so suddenly, like that, not to be there,

I just wanted to leave London.

At that time I started thinking,

what about spiritual things?

If God is there, I wanna meet him.

So we packed our bags and we left for India

and we went to this Ashram

and we had our adventures there

but I did not feel the guru was God.

- We decided, the Slits decided,

we wanted to be on Island records.

No other record company would do.

We thought nothing was gonna stop us.

- It's interesting, they signed to Island Records

'cause it's got a really interesting tradition

of picking up on things that are sort of left of center,

and no one else would touch that band.

And Chris saw their potential,

obviously this is a man that passionately loves music.

Grace Jones, Bob Marley, Burning Spear,

John Martyn, Roxy Music, Traffic, King Crimson,

I mean I ain't even touched it.

He knew not to fuck with an artist.

He let them do their own thing.

So best choice ever to be signed with Island

and we had complete creative control in this contract.

Also it led us on to being able to work

with the infamous Dub Maestro, Dennis Bovell,

how better does it get?

- They were being hailed as the female version

of the Sex Pistols.

Everyone was looking at them

to be the premiere punk female band.

So I leapt at the opportunity to help them get there.

And I instantly detected their love of reggae.

- Dennis was a hard taskmaster.

It had to be perfect, for Viv

and me specifically, it was kind of torture

but you just don't give up until it's perfect.

- We had a drummer, Budgie.

He was fantastic, really, really light touch.

Very open to Ari's suggestions,

not easy, got a 15-year-old girl

telling the drummer what to play,

Ari out of all of us was the most musically adept.

She really came into her own in the studio.

She was just firing, she was in her element,

she couldn't be trapped or trained.

She was too big for it all.

But music is so huge, it's like an ocean,

she could pour all her energy out into this ocean.

There was no fighting amongst us, no ego problems.

We all just wanted to serve the song and serve the album.

- When Cut came out you didn't really believe

it had happened, because it was such a lot

of upheaval and turmoil up to that point

that you never really believed that they could

actually end up committing to vinyl, and when they did,

it's this kind of historical document that's out there

to kind of see a different way to do things man,

you know what I mean?

Something that's off the scale, operating in its own space.

- I was pleasantly surprised and happy

when I read that out of a hundred albums

that the British music press considered

to have structured and shaped the punk scene,

that album came in at number two after the New York Dolls.

- And this sounds like me, in hindsight,

trying to make it all marry up politely,

but I do remember sitting on the grass

with Viv, Tessa, and Ari and I felt like

that to finish this album there was something

more intense gonna happen.

They were either gonna completely implode, explode,

kill each other, or it was gonna go into another world

and I think it would have been very much

a private world of three girls.

I suppose it did, the other way of looking at it

is what would have happened had I stayed?

That would have been a very different album sleeve.

Maybe.

And I wouldn't have, you know,

spent the next 25 years in Siouxsie and the Banshees.

But I don't think it was all continued on

into the sunset easily after Cut I mean.

- Viv Goldman took the picture in

to get a review for the album

and when they saw the cover they were like ew,

but they look so ugly and disgusting.

We don't want to review that,

we don't want to put that in our paper.

But the worst thing is the criticism that followed

is that people thought, oh, the Slits

aren't playing on that record.

No it must have been Dennis, it must have been Dennis.

- There was such hostility at that time

because they were an intrusion.

Women were supposed to know their place.

And their place was to be wearing clothes

that some other bloke dictated,

singing what some regular guy wanted them to sing

and, you know, just shutting up

and just popping out you know, on order.

Not determining themselves.

It's always said there is nothing new under the sun

and generally that is true

but the Slits really were something new.

The Slits came forward with something completely fresh.

Prior to the Slits, there was no self-determined group

of women sounding like the way they wanted to,

dressing the way they wanted to,

living their lives how they wanted to.

But the fights and the endless conflicts

that the Slits went through were part

of them being a harbinger of a new generation.

- By this time, the Slits had totally freed themselves

of any of the initial punk shackles.

They were this avant-garde, afro-jazz,

punk motherfucking group that no one else had touched.

- We started to branch out.

We were no more sort of just hanging out with rock bands

or whatever, we were finding our own way musically.

We'd met the Pop Group.

I started to go and see improvised music

with Steve Beresford and bit by bit we were trying

to put together a tour of England and we thought,

well we're not gonna just do a boring old tour,

we'd go out playing the same old songs every night.

If this tour is gonna be paid for by us

and it's gonna cost us money,

why not make it like an amazing learning experience for us.

We'll get two other bands, Don Cherry and a Reggae band,

Prince Hammer, and the three of us will rotate.

And no one had done that before

and no one had mixed those genres before.

- Ready, go!

- On the first day, Don Cherry turns up

with this 14-year-old girl with dyed bright red hair

and cool clothes and that was it.

A friendship made for life there.

So lovely for Ari to have someone around her own age

for the first time and they were inseparable.

- I just remember being kind of

almost unable to speak I was so shy.

I've never actually heard anything that sounds like this.

Even though I felt very green and very young

and very awkward in the beginning, felt at home.

I think that a lot of the crowd in a lot of the places

didn't really know what had hit them.

- It caused conflict.

I mean, on the tour, we encountered people

spitting at Don Cherry.

Throwing things at Creation Rebel.

- We arrived in Newcastle and there were like skinheads

or some kind of racists outside the hotel.

- It was an absolutely mad tour, you know.

That basically, if you look at it,

was setting the stage for the whole Punky Reggae Party

having people from, who shouldn't even perhaps

be on the same stage together being on the same stage.

- The whole thing was kind of like, I guess,

like kind of a dream come true.

- I think if the Slits made an album

that had been giving the public

what they thought they wanted

which had been like the tempo of Shoplifting or whatever,

they could have been a massive energy guitar band

but the Slits didn't want that.

There's a Jamaican saying each one to each one

and then you pass on some good spirit.

That's how music's supposed to be,

and where the Slits were aiming was really special.

- They listened to lots of different types of music

and they managed to filter that into something

that made sense for them.

Their artistic direction was diverse

and I think people sort of found it hard enough

to take the fact that this was a women-led punk band.

- We were having a hard time in the band.

We weren't being taken seriously,

Island had chucked us off their label

for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

We delivered a great album,

they just weren't interested anymore.

Got a few new A&R guys and didn't want us.

When I started working with the Slits,

they were already not all female.

They had already had Budgie,

and then later Bruce and Steve Beresford

After Paloma was gone

it was really the three of them

and I was there with them

but I let them make those decisions,

do you know what I mean?

It was their thing, you know.

- It didn't mean anything to me.

I mean they're boys, they're girls,

you know, so what, so what?

We'd already decided anyway,

there was no boundary between male and female.

He was the best person for the job

and he's a really nice guy.

He had an androgyny to himself at that time

that enabled him to really relate to females.

When Palmolive left,

sort of qualitatively it felt a bit different

because it was no longer all females,

but at the same time, the men they brought in

were like what you might call new age, not uptight.

The non-sexist man.

So I think, in a way, they lost something

by not being that unique or very rare all-girl thing

but they gained something by being more tribal

and showing that it's rubbish to say

that we regard men as the enemy.

We are just a new sort of tribe, striving for an equality

that's almost unknown in the regular world.

- I think we wandered around as a tribe

because we traveled around as a troupe.

It was self sufficient, it funded itself,

it was a sort of a collective endeavor.

A collective of people cooperating

with each other to make something marvelous.

- Bruce Smith, the drummer, went between

the two bands: The Slits and The Pop Group.

The Pop Group were important in turning all of us

on to free jazz and that free jazz approach to life.

Where, you know, you're trying to find a emotional truth

through not fitting into the cell blocks

of 4/4 rhythms and bars.

- By '81, when everyone suddenly

was about earning money and dressing in designer clothes

and buying a house and getting a mortgage,

that '76, '77 scene, sort of looking back on it

felt a bit naive and aggressive and old fashioned

and out of place and no-one respected it.

- The Clash reached commercial success,

and the Sex Pistols' demise as we all know

what happened to poor Sid.

Anything bright and powerful is gonna burn out quickly.

You just keep on developing.

I mean who wants to be stuck under the label of punk?

It was dead by then, to me.

The more commercial side of things got squeaky clean

and it was all, the '80s generation was all me, me, me.

- After Island, who dropped us for god knows why,

we recorded our next tracks, went to CBS and they signed us.

Return of the Giant Slits.

When the Return record came out,

the media didn't know what to do with this record.

You have world music in there, you have jungle beats,

very adventurous, very experimental,

and still very listenable.

- Return of the Giant Slits

probably is the record responsible

for bringing world music into new music.

It doesn't have any boundaries at all any more.

They found a way to destroy rock and roll.

It died the moment it was released

and that's the big tragedy basically about The Slits.

- Slits Split.

The Slits have apparently broken up

some five years after their formation

as Britain's original all-girl punk group.

Lead singer Ari Up has already left the country

for an indeterminate stay in Jamaica.

The future of the other two Slits remains uncertain.

The split comes shortly after an extended UK tour

by the group, to coincide with the release

of their debut album and single on CBS Records.

When approached by NME, Viv Albertine confirmed

that the threesome had no definite plans

to work together again and that they had

formally abandoned The Slits as a working unit.

Definitely the end of an era, as far as I'm concerned.

We started to feel like

we were sort of battling uphill in a way.

We always were but you know

this is three or four years in now.

Not being taken seriously and then we can feel it shifting,

they're finding something else more interesting.

All girls or girls in a band,

that's not interesting any more.

We were never that, but they just thought we were a fad.

I'd sort of moved home, I started dressing in brown clothes,

I'd dyed my hair back to brown from blonde.

I was just very, very hurt,

like I'd split up from a huge family.

- Then Ari had her twins and became a mother

and we all just went our separate ways.

- It was the end of that phase of the bold adventure,

where four wild women set to take on the world of pop music.

Did they win?

It's a funny thing, at the time

it didn't seem like they did

because they were so firmly stomped from history, you know?

The herstory was erased.

Hidden from history, but it always happens.

It happens all the time.

After The Slits split up,

I had totally lost interest in music

and that's where, unfortunately, I fell into the

terrible path of heroin.

Naughty me.

We had to go our separate ways

and go on our separate journeys.

You had the security of a group before

and that was your identity and then you had

to find your own personal identity.

And I had a child myself and the day I gave birth

to my daughter was the happiest day of my life ever.

I had started a family with Dave, my husband,

and we had two kids.

I had no answers for them and that took me

to the experience of understanding that there is a god

but we don't understand him as much

as some people think we do understand him.

I think he's misunderstood.

He is a revolutionary.

A lot of the things that I long for,

I have found in the person of Jesus.

I think the fact that we did

what we wanted to do was a positive thing.

That we weren't afraid to fail

or not be able to play our instrument.

We wanted to do it so then we did it.

So that whole thing I can apply in the classroom

when I teach little kids.

I can say you can do it, you wanna do it, you can do it.

Okay, so who wants to do the Agent zero zero seven?

Me!

So, to me, the message

is love people, really give yourself.

Thank you, Mrs. Paloma.

I've come to a place

that I feel very liberated in the sense

that I can have connection with a group.

But I also feel, you need to keep your person,

who you are, and be true to yourself.

Because in the end of the day you live your life.

Something quite strange happened.

I went to my daughter's dead father's gravestone.

I was just feeling a bit lost and I just spoke to him

and said, I need some guidance at the moment.

I just don't know which direction I'm going in.

I hadn't seen Ari for at least 15 years.

Occasionally Ari would send me cassettes she'd made

off the radio from America or Jamaica.

She was there at my daughter's birth

and I didn't see a lot of her after that.

She just suddenly came back into my life

like a hurricane, you know?

It was just so exciting.

And then she just asked me,

hey let's get The Slits back together.

We contacted Viv but she wasn't interested

and was quite against the fact of a reformation.

Kind of made me feel a bit anxious,

because I wanted to get the approval, obviously.

But Ari just said, look we're gonna do it anyway.

And then she found two guitarists

on the same day in Ladbrook Grove.

Then we had to audition for a drummer.

Anybody ever heard of the Slits?

I wanna do it so that we're really

gonna end up shoplifting something from Selfridge's.

We did our first gig

at a store in London, called Selfridge's.

One, two, three, four.

And The New York Dolls were playing

the night before and the Buzzcocks were headlining.

- Pressure was absolutely huge.

People were queuing up round the block

because the Slits hadn't been seen for so long.

Not just the reputation of the Slits as was then

but the whole reputation of The Slits before

was on the line.

- I was just so nervous,

I was literally shaking before I got on stage.

Because I hadn't been playing for years.

- I don't think The Slits ever got the credit they deserved.

They were a very influential band

and influenced a lot of people to this day still

and that's why I think she wanted to get back together

just to show people they could still do it.

- Ari needed to do it, it was her baby

that she needed to revive it.

She just wanted to get back making music

with The Slits and finishing that chapter.

- We did various other London shows

then we did a major American tour.

- It was so fun, it was just one of the happiest moments.

It was like seven women and we're all squeezed together

in a tiny van, traveling all over America

with suitcases, merchandise.

- There was always something, like,

really funny about everything that we were doing.

It was like, we're on a mission, you know?

- And I think the band really started growing together

because we were so confined and I suppose for me,

for Adele, for Dr. No, it was the first real tour ever.

- Our friend Jen, who was our tour manager,

documented it on film.

Jen was doing like four jobs:

driving, filming, collecting the money.

- It was really special for me

just to be with women like that, it had been a long time

since I had just been around a lot of women.

So a lot of conversations took place

that didn't happen with other bands.

- The age differences in the audience was interesting

because you had young teenage girls

and I think this is really what made Ari and Tessa

so happy and proud, because they realized

that The Slits are living on.

- I think she felt like The Slits

didn't really get to finish what they started

and so she wasn't looking back trying to recreate anything,

she was just trying to continue and move forward.

- She lit up a stage, when she got on the stage,

she had the entire audience in the palm of her hand.

- She just radiates energy like the sun.

I mean basically she had the same

amount of energy as our sun.

- Sing about my legs again!

And you left her feeling that you

could conquer the world.

All the barriers came down.

She was like some kind of mad drug.

- It's just a regular night in Atlanta.

What can I say, it's Atlanta!

Are you recording?

Yeah

- Are you ready to go? - Yeah.

- Are you ready? - Yeah.

- You got my butt? - Yeah.

- Okay, here we go.

This is how The Slits need to pee when we're on the road.

Are we ready? - Yeah

- Set, go. - Yeah.

I loved being in the room with Ari

because chaos ensued and that excites me.

I get along well with people like that

because they push me to work really hard

and they remind me to fight for everything I wanna do and be

so I loved being around her because I love the chaos.

- You know Ari was a very complicated person

except for one thing, she always spoke her mind completely.

- You know that song, there's a Slits song

that we have on Return of the Giant Slits.

That underrated, fantastic, brilliant,

mythological, legendary album that no one knows.

Anyway, they need to know,

there's a song called Difficult Fun on it.

- I think for Ari it wasn't about being liked at all,

it was about being honest.

And so, she gave you what she thought you needed.

And you had to take it or leave it.

You look absolutely fantastic.

You're back in your field, man.

This is what you're born to do.

You're born to perform.

The Slits, born to perform.

Taurus and Capricorn.

- Ari's and Tessa's relationship is really interesting

because Tessa was really grounded and down-to-earth

and definitely a feeling person.

She was kind of humble and didn't want to pester anyone

and maybe too humble also, you know.

She would always say, oh, I can't play bass.

And, oh, I'm just rubbish, but what was wonderful

is Ari was the one always saying,

Tessa, what are you talking about?

You are an amazing bass player.

And she would encourage her on stage

and say, this is Tessa, the bass player.

Listen to the bassline, and made her play it alone

and so, in some ways, Ari picking Tessa up,

making her more confident and then also

Tessa being a moderator to Ari almost,

because she would be the one telling her shut up.

She would be brave like that and just put her right

and so they were kind of helping each other.

- It was Ari's initial plan to make a film.

She's felt our story had still not been told.

- I filmed everything.

We were making a movie.

Ready, go!

And Ari was directing it, so it was chaos and mayhem.

- No, wait on me!

Ari was obsessed with filming everything.

- Look at The Slits.

Slits!

The desert.

- I don't know if she knew the clock was ticking.

In retrospect, I think she did.

Because she would say things like,

I don't have this much time

and was screaming at us to film everything.

- Oh god, I'm alone in New Mexico.

- Ari Up was very dramatic, so if Ari says she's sick

I don't know what that means.

I don't know if it's really serious or if it isn't.

- I've only got $20!

Oh my.

- I recall distinctly when she was pushing me

to do something with this footage we were shooting

she said, I don't have a lot of time and laughed.

And I laughed too and said, yeah, me neither.

She said it a few times on the road:

I don't have that kind of time.

I now think it was because she knew.

- It was difficult because people lived

in different countries but we'd somehow

communicate back together and did various

little tours like European tours.

Went back to America and finally recorded our album,

Trapped Animal, in Los Angeles.

So as we were there, we just recorded the album,

let's do the video.

- Ari and Tessa always wanted

the young new recruits to really be an equal part.

And so they wanted everybody to contribute.

- I wrote one of my first proper songs

and recorded it with The Slits.

I was kind of really shy about stuff like that.

And the thing that was always really cool about Ari,

was that she didn't ever really make things a very big deal.

Like she was always so casual, like, oh, you know,

and you can play keyboards now.

And I was all like, uh, I don't think I can!

And she was like, ah just play it.

She gave me so much confidence, more than anything

she just made things seem really doable.

Ari has always got songs busting out of her.

She's just so full of energy and got so many ideas.

She forced me to write a melody to the lyric I'd written.

Something came out of my mouth and I was like,

wow, I can write a melody if I really push myself.

It was just easy, it was just really fun.

We just used the environment we were in

and I think it's hilarious, I love it.

- The very last tour was in 2010

and they were set up nice and correct,

with proper promoters, and the nice sort of surroundings

and that was really good.

- By that point, we were in the swing of things,

we'd been together for a few years,

we'd done the album, played a lot.

I had some really good shows, actually, on that tour.

- It was really, really, wonderful in that way,

but in terms of the group dynamic it was actually the worst.

- The final tour we did, which was a tour of Europe,

I'm not sure if she's ill or she's not ill.

I just find her acting very strangely on the tour.

She seems to need to rest a lot more.

- Adele had left the band.

We didn't have Nadya at that point.

There was a lot of different tension

going on when we did that one.

Ari was sick and we didn't really know.

We did know but we didn't really know.

She seemed a bit changed.

She's furious every morning.

She's one minute having a go at the tour manager,

then having a go at Anna the drummer,

then having a go at me and we're like fuck you,

well fuck you, well fuck you.

- Ari was famous for having fits with people

and thinking they were evil and telling them to go away

but she would always protect her family and her own group.

But on this tour she was like totally

turning against Tessa, for example.

She was obviously struggling with something

and I remember after this tour

I thought this is the last tour for me.

- I speak to Hollie and Anna and just think,

I'm just feeling they wanna get on with their own thing,

I'm just saying, look if you need to do your own music

just go ahead and do it, don't worry.

- It felt really, really sad when it was over.

It felt so sad that I didn't want

to do it anymore, unfortunately.

Oh god, getting emotional.

I knew I was gonna get emotional, fuck sake.

Oof.

Yeah.

We decided to talk to Ari.

We knew that we kinda had to just stop, for a while anyway.

- And I think that we decided that Tessa

was gonna be the messenger, the happy messenger.

- We all come back and I invite Ari over to my flat

because we've discussed just saying to Ari

we need a break, something's just not right.

And I tell her this and she's up, she's traumatized,

she's distraught and she leaves

and we don't speak to each other again.

So I was in touch with Nora

because I started to become extremely worried,

and I was panicking and I was crying on the bus.

Suddenly in shock, realizing, oh my god I think Ari's dying.

And then I spoke to Nora and she said

I think you better come over,

she's been told she's got two weeks to live.

But then when we get there, Nora said,

Ari appreciates you've come,

she's really sorry she can't see you,

she's on a really personal journey.

And so we just all go like in total shock.

We don't know what to do.

We just all sit on this bench outside.

Just like shaking and just not being able to speak.

I think she must have known how ill she was

and that she was maybe pushing us away

to protect our feelings.

And I think she was terrified herself.

I think she was scared.

I saw that look of fear in her eyes

that I'd never seen before.

And then I get this phone call

like 2:30 in the morning telling me the bad news.

Because Ari had this thing

that she just wanted to help people,

she just wanted to get the best out of you.

She could just see the potential in you

and she got really disappointed

if she felt you were messing that up

or throwing away what you could be fantastic at.

She came back into my life with such a force

and made me believe in myself again,

that I had some kind of treasure that's really precious.

It's like I feel like I've lost my right arm in a way.

It's kind of eased off in the last year a bit

but the first two years I just fell apart really.

I feel so much stronger and happy

to be in this period of my life.

So much more clear-headed and I just don't care anymore

about the bollocks in life, you know.

I feel like I'm learning to let go.

When I look back at the Slits,

I feel like I'm glad that I did what I did.

It couldn't have been any other way really,

because who I was and who they were.

So my punk experience has helped me

to not just play the party line.

To be able to say wait a minute.

Just because they say okay, now you have to believe this,

you can never put that down.

You are who you are and if you have doubts that's healthy,

and if you don't understand something that's good,

go for it, study it.

Follow what you think is true.

Be careful also in groups.

Whether it's a church or is a government

or is professional group, don't lose yourself in the group.

I recommend to be free.

Freedom comes from inside,

not from a certain look or anything exterior.

Be it religion or being in punk.

In either way, freedom comes from your own heart.

After the Slits decided to split,

I went from having an identity

to absolutely nothing overnight.

No one was interested in me.

It was just blank eyes.

The loneliness of the long distance, author.

And I fell right back to being an invisible woman again,

and that was very sobering.

It's given me all the drive that I've got

now I've come back and I'm making music again,

and writing, et cetera.

I'm still as angry and fueled,

and I'm still that girl who was in the Slits

but now I'm the woman who was in the Slits.

The Slits were that, all us four girls were that person.

We were those people.

We were those rebels.

And we still are.

We still are.

I can't tell you how restricted life was

for young women in the 1970's.

It was horrible, it was like when you were born, right.

And you come out of the womb and you're screaming

and you're flinging your arms and legs around and it's life.

As you grow up as a girl, your arms get folded in,

your legs get folded in.

This happens.

So you're constantly trying to find a place

where you can go, where you can be noisy.

Where you can fling your arms and legs around,

where you can wear what you want, where you can not care.

What the Slits did was to completely untie

all of those things.

Where you say what you want, you express yourself,

you make such a lot of noise

that people have got to listen to you.

The Slits were two girls, too tough.

They wouldn't allow anybody to stop them

trying to make the music they wanted to make

and make the statements they wanted to make.

If the Slits had not come along

there would be no Madonna.

Without the Slits these things would never have broken down.

The riot girl movement happened in the '90s.

They weren't afraid to be rough or loud,

they were inheriting something from the Slits.

That's one of the charms of the Slits,

it's all about discovering who you could be

if you unshackled yourself.

That's not to say that they found it easy

and they just steamed in.

It was hard and they went through

a huge amount of very depressing experiences

but the fact is they got through it

and they fought through it.

It's not a struggle that goes away.

The struggle always continues.

You have to go into it saying, it's not like

I don't wanna be popular and sell records

but there's a sense in which I'm not here to be liked.

Don't believe when somebody says

that you can't do something because that's not true.

If you have a passion go for it.

That's the only thing that makes a better world.

Don't be afraid of what you believe in.

If you believe in something

you have to stand up for your convictions and be counted.

If you have something that you really,

really want to communicate, and a sound

that you hear, insist on it.

And don't expect to be popular but just stick to it.

It will give meaning to your life.

Ari never really left that front line

no matter how much they fought against her.