Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (28 page)

We want to use some holiday snaps for the front cover, taken on our trip across Europe with Nora last summer. We think we might even use the ones of us naked on the beach; I telephone Mum and ask her to look through them and post the ones we’ve selected to Ridge Farm. Mum calls me the next day and says something terrible has happened: whilst she was sorting through the pictures on the kitchen table, she knocked a cup of coffee over them and they’re ruined. Ari and Tessa go mad. They’re furious and I’m really embarrassed. It’s not like Mum to mess up something so important. I call her back and ask if any of the pictures can be salvaged at all and she says absolutely not, they’re ruined. So we decide to get a photographer to come to Ridge Farm to take a picture for the cover. We choose Pennie Smith to take the photographs, we’ve worked with her before and feel relaxed with her.

The night before the photo shoot, we discuss the kind of thing we might do; wild animals, warriors, woodland creatures – and then go off to bed. Except I stay up and bleach the hairs on my legs with Jolen Crème, I don’t want to look like a real animal.

In the morning we mess about on the lawn doing crouchy, crawly positions, playing off each other, putting makeup on like war paint. One of those shots ended up being the cover for the single, ‘Typical Girls’. Then we go to the woods that border the farm and run about, chasing each other and peeping through the trees (the back cover of
Cut
).

A friend of Dick’s turns up, he’s just been in Africa. An older hippy guy, we don’t mind him hanging about, he’s very relaxed. He’s watching the shoot and we’re smearing mud from the rose garden on each other’s arms and legs, mucking about and using our eye makeup and crayons to look a bit tribal. He gets what we’re trying to do, and says we remind him of a tribe he saw in Africa; we ask him what marks we should do, he suggests he shows us how to tie a loin cloth …
Yeah! Let’s cover ourselves in mud and wear loin cloths!
This is pretty late in the shoot, and we’ve been at Ridge Farm a couple of weeks so we’re all a bit stir-crazy. We strip off in the garden. We wouldn’t have done it if it had been a male photographer, but we feel safe with Pennie.

Someone gets an old sheet and tears it up. We dip the strips of fabric into the mud. I don’t want too much mud on my face, I still want to look nice. Tessa and Ari are much better about that, they’re not always worrying about looking pretty. They’re more in the moment.

We know we have to have a warrior stance, not try and be all seductive. We’re aware what we’re doing could be misconstrued, we want the photo to have the right attitude, not be prurient.

After the shoot we jump in the swimming pool to rinse off. Dennis is already in there, he’s horrified, can’t get out quick enough. Says he can’t be photographed with three naked white girls.

When we see the contact sheet we can’t find a shot where we all look right so I’m cut out of another shot and superimposed. The designer Neville Brody, who later becomes famous (for
The Face
), does the artwork.

Twenty years later, Mum confessed that she deliberately ruined the holiday pictures because she was appalled that we wanted to use naked shots of ourselves on the record cover.

55 SIMPLY WHAT’S HAPPENING

1979

I meet Gareth Sager, the guitarist from the Pop Group, at Glastonbury. He’s speckled with freckles, has healthy, ruddy cheeks and hair the colour and texture of pale English straw. His eyes are cornflower blue. I think of poppy fields and blue skies when I look at him. He’s the opposite to the pale-skinned, dark-haired, introspective guys I’ve met up until now. We run around in the mud, he laughs a lot and says surreal things. His mind darts all over the place, he’s bursting with enthusiasm and curiosity about music. I think he’s extraordinary. I want him. I think he might fancy Ari, they get along really well. I’m a bit older and more balanced than they are. Maybe he’s too clever or too wild for me.

Gareth lives in Bristol, so when I get back to London I start going into Dick O’Dell’s office every day – he’s managing us and the Pop Group – hoping Gareth will phone whilst I’m there, then we can have a quick chat. Gareth is the one in the Pop Group who does what I do in the Slits, all the organising. It’s funny, but every time I’m in the office, he does call. Is it too much to hope that he wants to talk to me too? After he’s spoken to Dick, he always says, ‘Is anyone else there?’ And Dick says, ‘Viv’s here, do you want to talk to her?’ And he says, ‘Yes.’

One day he tells me he’s coming to London and we arrange to meet up: I say he can stay at mine and Tessa’s place in Victoria if he wants. It doesn’t take long before Gareth and I are together. The first time he has to leave me and go back to Bristol he doesn’t seem too bothered. I’m upset at his lack of emotion, but after he’s gone, I go into the bathroom and he’s scrawled on the mirror with my lipstick, ‘Never can say goodbye.’ I think it’s beautiful.

Gareth is into free jazz and introduces me to music by Ornette Coleman, Dollar Brand, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis and Don Cherry. Even though he’s a really exciting and proficient musician, Gareth thinks tuning and timing are arbitrary restrictions – passion and ideas are much more important. His approach makes me excited about music again.

Recently there’s been no room for speeding up, slowing down, dropping a beat, turning the beat around, singing a bit out of tune; everyone’s desperately trying to be a good musician, quite the opposite of why we started a group in the first place. I find it difficult to keep time but what kind of human being can keep in metronomic time? It doesn’t seem natural to me.

I don’t understand why time-keeping is considered such an attribute in western music. African drummers don’t play one speed all the way through a piece of music, they speed up and slow down according to the mood, same with Indian music. It’s like being told to keep the same speed and rhythm all through sex.

The Slits are off to Europe – Brussels, Germany and Amsterdam – to play some gigs and a couple of TV shows. At a Bavarian rock-and-roll show in Munich, I meet an improviser called Steve Beresford who’s playing with the experimental band the Flying Lizards (they had a hit in 1979 with a cover of the Beatles song ‘Money’). What impresses me about Steve isn’t just his ability to play any instrument – piano, bass, trumpet, euphonium – or that he has a suitcase full of brightly coloured toy instruments which he also plays and takes great care of – but that like Gareth, he isn’t a music snob. Steve’s a classically trained musician and very accomplished. We hang out together in Germany and talk about TV shows, pop music and cartoon characters. Steve is my discovery.

Steve Beresford

When we get back to London, I go to see him play with a rotating group of musicians called Company at the ICA in the West End and again at the Musicians’ Collective in Camden. I also see other great improvisational players like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Misha Mengelberg, Lol Coxhill, Fred Frith, Han Bennink and John Zorn.

I’m so excited by their playing; they’re obviously all technically amazing players but they don’t rely on learned formats, patterns or scales and compositions. They push themselves to respond to the moment, to the other players in the room, to the room itself, they are completely in the moment. It is very demanding and rigorous music but can also be playful and light. I find their attitude liberating and wonder if I could do it. I try it with my new housemate, Trace Newton-Ingham, and my neighbour, Tom Bailey, from the Thompson Twins (who were a large experimental band before they had hits). We do some pretty wild stuff in Tom’s studio. It’s not really something I can bring to the Slits yet, but it’s a new musical path and it helps my confidence.

Knowing Steve Beresford helps me construct a mental framework with which to view myself musically, a context that validates my lack of ability. He’s very open and non-judgemental and also extremely intelligent, so I trust and respect his opinion. I lap up Steve’s views on jazz and improvisation: ‘Singing in tune is overrated,’ he says. He also tells me a little story about the great free-jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman. ‘Ornette Coleman was always a semitone sharp when he played,’ says Steve. ‘When a producer told him to play a semitone lower, Coleman tried it but said, “It doesn’t sound like me any more.”’ Now I can see a way forward despite my limitations. Even though this point of view is supposedly one of the main doctrines of ‘punk’, in reality all the bands except us and the Raincoats, and a few other people dotted around, can play to a high standard and want to be rock gods. Because Gareth and Steve are so talented and proficient, Ari respects them and I gradually start introducing some of the principles of free improvisation and experimentation into the Slits. Funk, jazz and disco are very uncool in the ‘punk’ scene, so it’s quite radical of the Pop Group to be playing those rhythms; Bristol has an enlightened music scene. The Pop Group are all good dancers too, we go down to the Dug Out (Bristol night club) and they dance wildly all night. I’ve never seen white boys do that before – either they headbang to heavy rock or throw themselves at each other at Sex Pistols gigs, a few can dance to reggae – but these Bristol boys really let go.

Flyer for some of the improvised Company shows I went to

Because of the Pop Group and Steve Beresford’s influence on our taste in music, when we plan our first headlining tour, we decide to mix up the musical genres on the bill and introduce our fans to the music we’re listening to. One of the records we love most is
Brown Rice
by the trumpeter Don Cherry, with its African and Arabic rhythms. The title track is long and meandering but full of energy, drive and menace. ‘Brown Rice’ is hypnotic and trancelike and the lyrics mix nursery rhymes with whispered voodoo-like chants. It’s trippy without being hippy.

We invite Don Cherry on our
Simply What’s Happening
tour and he says yes. We also fly the reggae singer and ‘toaster’ Prince Hammer and his band over from Jamaica (we’ve blown most of our advance on arranging this tour). We decide to rotate the line-up, with a different one of us headlining every night.