Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (27 page)

Dennis relents and has his picture taken with us. Ridge Farm, 1979

54 CUT

1979

We work on the tracks that are going on our precious first album for a month in the rehearsal studio, then pack our bags and head off to the countryside to record.

Ridge Farm is a big old country house. The whole set-up is run by a talkative, charismatic guy called Frank Andrews. I’m more interested in his wife though, she fascinates me; she’s pretty, petite, pale blonde and has a strong personality, the opposite of her looks – but the thing that really intrigues me is that she’s on some sort of fast where she doesn’t eat anything and only drinks her own piss. She looks perfectly OK on this diet. Maybe a little pale, and her skin is so translucent you can practically see her skull, but apart from that, nothing out of the ordinary. She says she’s going to do it right up until after Christmas. I try and imagine her serving Christmas lunch to Frank and their little girl and then sitting down to join them with her cup of piss.

We all eat on site. The meals are cooked by a girl called Denise Roudette, huge heaps of food, vegetarian shepherd’s pie, lasagne, fresh vegetables: I’ve never eaten so much or so healthily before. Denise is one of the sweetest, calmest, smartest girls I’ve ever met, she does a lot towards making the atmosphere at Ridge Farm harmonious. She’s also a bass player and Ian Dury’s girlfriend. Lucky him.

The recording studio is in a barn near the house. It’s not what I imagined a barn would look like, it looks more like a country church inside. There are very high ceilings with wooden beams and wooden posts. The control room is up in the roof, the engineers look down on the studio through a plate-glass window. We all crowd around the mixing desk in the control room, pushing and shoving each other behind Dennis and Mike Dunne, the engineer, giving our opinions enthusiastically about the atmosphere of the songs, the sound of the guitar, the bass and the backing vocals.

The excruciating bit comes when we have to actually play. Up until now we’ve only recorded the Peel Session and ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’; both those times we played live as a whole band. Now we’re laying down the instruments separately and it’s a completely different experience. First Budgie and Tessa do the backing track. Dennis keeps stopping them and making Tessa play her bass part over and over again to get the timing right. Every single second has to be in time. Every beat spot on. He’s right of course, but she hasn’t been playing that long, it takes years to get that sort of precision – still Dennis will accept nothing less than perfection. I go quiet as I stand behind him, looking down at Tessa in the studio. I know it’s my turn next and I’m beginning to dread it. When the first backing track is finished, I descend the curved wooden staircase into the studio – feels like I’m entering a Roman arena, going to face the lions – with a knot of anxiety in my chest. Some of the songs I get right quite quickly but others, like ‘Newtown’, make me want to kill myself.

I stand alone in the darkened studio. Everyone else is up on high in the control room. Dennis’s disembodied voice comes booming through my headphones, with Ari excitedly shouting instructions in the background. I try with all my might to concentrate and get the part right. I get a few bars into the song but the tape stops abruptly. ‘You went out of time on the beginning of the intro, I’ll drop you in,’ says Dennis. I count the bars until I have to come in and start playing just before, so I’m up to speed when I’m dropped into the track. I’m completely focused on the task, absolutely determined to get it right this time. Phew, did it. The tape stops. ‘You were a fraction early. Try again.’ I can’t believe it, seemed all right to me. I try again. On and on it goes. We spend half an hour on the first few bars of the song. I want to cry but hold it in. I honestly don’t know what to do differently. I’ve lost all my self-confidence, all sense of judgement. I keep playing and replaying the part, not knowing what on earth to do to make it better. They play the tape for about the twentieth time, I flip. I thrash at my guitar furiously, not caring about timing, chords or tuning, I just smash my hand over the open strings, the tape keeps playing, I run out of steam and stop. I wait for them to tell me off for losing my cool. ‘That was brilliant! Don’t stop! Do it again!’ And that’s how the guitar part for ‘Newtown’ comes about.

Ari and Dennis bounce off each other well. I think Dennis recognises Ari as someone who loves and lives for music, like him. All of us are very willing to learn and there’s no ego, no arguments regarding the songs, normally we argue a lot, but at Ridge Farm we are as one. We just want the record to be great, the song comes first.

‘Instant Hit’ is a new song; I can’t believe it’s turned out so well and is now the opening song on the record. I had a few lyrics about Keith Levene – the title refers to his smack habit – and we put them to music in the studio as a round or canon, which we remembered doing at school. Dennis thought it was a great idea. I love that he never dismisses an idea as childish. Keith’s actual voice is on the end of the track, we taped a phone call where me and him have a bit of an argument: he says ‘Thanks a lot’ in a sarcastic voice. Dennis added the South American flute, it brought the whole song together, made it really light and ethereal. (
In 2013 this track was sampled and used on the single ‘Consumerism’ by Ms Lauryn Hill
.)

‘So Tough’ is the first song Ari and I worked on together in the Daventry Street squat. The words came out of that late-night telephone conversation I had with John Rotten about Sid. I used to phone John sometimes when he was staying at his mum’s flat in Finsbury Park. He never answered the phone himself, a friend or brother screened his calls. John had just come back from Amsterdam, so when the bloke who answered the phone asked, ‘Who’s calling?’ I made up the name ‘Tulip’. He said, ‘Hang on,’ and went off to tell John that Tulip was on the phone. A minute later John answered, so I don’t know what the point of the screening was. Anyway we chatted for about half an hour about Sid, wondering why he was spiralling down, out of control, what he wanted from life; when I put the phone down I wrote ‘So Tough’, using a lot of the words and expressions from the call. I already had the guitar riff so I tried to make it fit the words. When I played the riff to Sid, he said, ‘Why don’t you repeat the first part of the riff, do it twice?’ It was a great idea and I liked that he contributed to the song about himself.

I wrote ‘Spend Spend Spend’, inspired by the pools winner Viv Nicholson. It’s what she said when she won. It was the headline in all the papers the next day. She was the first winner to say she was just going to blow the lot, not ‘I’m going to buy a house for myself and one for my mum and dad,’ and all that safe stuff. I thought she was great and of course it resonated that she had the same name as me and I thought she was pretty. As the song evolved it turned into more of a comment on needing to own things to make yourself feel happy or complete, which I have a tendency towards, and the line about ‘walking down the street looking in the windows’ is something I’ve done since I was a child.

Palmolive wrote the words to ‘Shoplifting’, I just added the ‘Do a runner’ chorus. It’s fun to record; we speed it up and Ari gets so excited when she does her part that she pisses herself when she screams. She laughs her head off and you can hear her on the track saying, ‘I pissed in my knickers!’

‘FM’ is another Palmolive lyric. She’s fantastic with words, and it’s even more extraordinary when you think she hadn’t been speaking English that long when she wrote it. Palmolive wrote the lyrics to ‘Newtown’ too. The song was originally called ‘Drugtown’, but I changed it to ‘Newtown’, thinking about all the new towns that are springing up around the edges of London, like Milton Keynes and Crawley. The young people growing up there are so bored, they take loads of drugs and drive around really fast or beat each other up at football matches, then they get up and commute to their dull jobs on Monday morning. Palmolive made up these great words like ‘televisina’ and ‘footballina’ as drug names, I think only a foreigner could do that. I’m too self-conscious about the language. I added the rap in the middle. We completely change the arrangement in the studio. After Tessa’s deep, solid bass, my painful guitar part and Ari’s extraordinary vocal performance the song is transformed – haunting, menacing, druggy and violent. We don’t want to crowd the track with a load more instruments but something is missing. We sit at the mixing desk throwing ideas around but nothing excites us. In the end Dennis says, ‘Let me try something.’ ‘What? What?’ we want to know. But he won’t say. Not sure he knows himself.

He goes down into the pit, turns the lights down low – it’s quite theatrical – we all peer through the glass watching him search the studio for props. He lays a couple of things he’s found on a table – a glass, a spoon, a box of matches – then says, ‘Roll the tape.’

Dennis moves his body with the rhythm of the song, focusing on the table, completely in the zone: first he picks up the box of matches and, using it as a percussion instrument, gives it a shake, just one shake – he could have used maracas or any other proper percussion instrument, there are plenty lying around the studio but he chooses the box of matches – then he taps the glass with the spoon, drops the spoon into the glass, shakes the matchbox, taps the glass, drops the spoon, lights the match … bit by bit he builds a percussion track. He’s so inventive he doesn’t need any instruments at all to make music. We stand in a row in the control booth watching Dennis make magic. Nobody moves, nobody speaks, we don’t want to break the spell. One take and that is it: ‘Newtown’ is finished.

Ari and I go through the lyrics of ‘Ping Pong Affair’ together, and I explain the emotions behind the words. We discuss that when she sings ‘life’s better without you’, she doesn’t mean it; she has to convey the underlying meaning of regret, not the actual meaning of defiance. The song is about me and Mick Jones. I rushed out of his flat in Ladbroke Grove one night in a fury, forgetting I didn’t have enough money to get a taxi, and got a bit scared trying to get home. A couple of days later, looking at the pile of comics and records he’d left at my place, I started to miss him. Later when I was in the newsagent’s in Shepherd’s Bush looking at the magazines, I heard that beautiful soft voice behind me and knew I was still in love with him.

‘Love und Romance’ is a pastiche of a love song and all the expectations and traps of being in a relationship. Mick hates this one. During the recording of this track, our new manager Dick O’Dell visits Ridge Farm, bringing with him Bruce Smith, the drummer of the Pop Group (who he also manages). We all click with Bruce immediately. He has a friendly open demeanour and when we hear him play, we’re knocked out. We know Budgie isn’t into being in the Slits full-time, and Bruce says he’d love to play with us. We get Bruce to mumble on this track as if he were the boyfriend. I snog him before he goes home. Don’t know what’s the matter with me, I can’t resist a kiss.

When I was writing ‘Typical Girls’ I sat cross-legged on the single bed – the same pale blue wooden one I’d had since childhood – in my tiny little bedroom, bored out of my brains in my mum’s council flat in Highgate. After I moved out, my younger sister got the big bedroom, so when I moved back I was stuck in the box room. The flat was freezing, the only warm room was the tiny steamed-up kitchen. The living room was never heated, so none of us ever went in it. It was too cold to sit and watch TV so I never watched it. All the windowsills were rotting from damp and condensation. I wheeled the Calor gas heater into my bedroom; it took up most of the floor, I had to make a bit of space for it by kicking all my clothes into a pile. There was a big F scratched into the cream enamel paint on top of the heater where my boyfriend, Nic Boatman, started to write the word ‘Fuck’ before my mum caught him and went mad. I stared out of the window. Nothing was happening. Nothing for it, I’d have to write a song. I flicked through my lyric book and picked out snatches of words that suited my mood. I got distracted and started looking through a pile of books on the windowsill – they were sitting on top of a folded tea towel so they didn’t get too damp. One was a sociology book called
Typical Girls
. It sparked off a train of thought and I went back to sit on the bed and write a list of all the traits a typical girl was supposed to have:
gets upset too quickly, emotional, can’t control herself, worries about spots and fat and natural smells
…

I took the song – in my head as I can’t write music – to rehearsal. I made sure I played the riff lots of times before I went to sleep so I wouldn’t forget it. I learnt to do this the hard way; so often I’ve been sure the music is lodged in my brain, but can’t remember it when I wake up the next morning.

Ari got ‘Typical Girls’ immediately; that I was taking the piss out of all the expectations and clichés, and she didn’t change the timing of the guitar riff even though it’s a bit odd, not 4/4. (When Mick heard the song he tried to persuade me to put it into 4/4 time. I didn’t know what he was on about. I didn’t know about time signatures, that this was in a strange time signature; it was just how the guitar riff came out. He said we’d have a hit with it if we changed it but we ignored his advice. We didn’t have a hit.) Mick wrote ‘Train in Vain’ about me after we broke up the last time. When we were going out, he used to get the tube train from his gran’s flat in Royal Oak to my squat in Shepherd’s Bush. If we’d had an argument I wouldn’t let him in, I’d leave him pining on the doorstep. There’s a response to ‘Typical Girls’ in ‘Train in Vain’. I say, ‘Typical girls stand by their man’ (quoting the Tammy Wynette song), and Mick replies, ‘You didn’t stand by me.’

‘Adventures Close to Home’, what a great title. Palmolive wrote this song just before she left the band. She said we could only use it on the record if Tessa sang it, she didn’t want Ari to sing it. Tessa said she’d do it, which was very brave of her, she’d never sung before. Ari didn’t mind not singing it at all, she didn’t take it personally and leapt at the idea of playing the bass instead; she wrote a great bass line that weaves through the song like it’s having an adventure of its own.