Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys is a 2014 memoir by former Slits guitarist and punk icon Viv Albertine. The first half of the book narrates her childhood in London through to the break-up of the Slits in 1981; the second half follows Albertine through marriage, motherhood, cancer, and a second creative life as a musician and performer. The memoir was selected as a 2014 Book of the Year by the Sunday Times, Mojo, Rough Trade, and NME. It was shortlisted for the National Book Award.

Albertine opens her memoir in punk style: “Anyone who writes an autobiography is either a t--- or broke. I’m a bit of both,” she writes, seguing into the topic of masturbation (“Never did it. Never wanted to”), which crescendos with a fantasy she enjoyed, while pregnant, of being ravaged by wild dogs. She miscarried. “That’ll teach me.”

From this self-consciously shocking opening, Albertine returns, like a conventional memoirist, to her childhood on a north London council estate. The dominant presence in her childhood home is her father, whom she describes as a “cross between Fred Flintstone and a French version of Stanley Kowalski.” He was violently abusive and no one intervened to shield Albertine and her sister from his attacks. Later, he would weep maudlin tears, plead for forgiveness, and make jokes about his behavior. Albertine and her sister, terrified of him, laughed along, pretending to be okay. Albertine notes that she still can’t listen to the fifties music she heard in that house: it makes her nauseous. When she was eleven, her father abandoned the family altogether.



Albertine’s earliest musical influences were the Beatles and the Kinks. Falling in with a local group of would-be musicians, she takes LSD for the first time and runs away to Amsterdam, where she lives in a squat. The friend she traveled with is lured away to work as a drug mule in Turkey.

Back in London, studying art, Albertine finds herself at the heart of the nascent punk scene. After seeing the Sex Pistols, she decides to buy a guitar with her boyfriend, Mick Jones of the Clash. Albertine commends Jones’s support and kindness: where other boys were sneering at girls who wanted to play music, Jones helps her to select a single-cutaway sunburst 1969 Les Paul Junior: “It’s simple and classy. It’s a serious guitar. Mick has taken me seriously.”

All the same, Albertine dumps Mick for Johnny Thunders, who gives her heroin for the first time. It feels like “Lucozade” in her veins. She joins a band lead by Syd Vicious (whom she describes as “shy”) only to be kicked out over her heroin use. Her entire arm goes black and stays black for months.



Reunited with Jones, Albertine becomes pregnant and decides to abort: “How many of you boys have killed anyone? I have. I’ve killed a baby. It doesn’t get much worse than that.”

Albertine makes it clear that the punk scene was far from liberatory for women. Paul Weller calls her “crumpet,” Joe Strummer tries to sleep with her. She does sleep with Johnny Rotten, and it is unpleasant. Sex is a nihilistic affair: “We’re the children of the first wave of divorced parents from the 1950s, we’ve seen the domestic dream break down. It was impossible to live up to. We grew up during the ‘peace and love’ of the 1960s, only to discover that there are wars everywhere and love and romance is a con.”

Meanwhile, Albertine has been practicing her guitar (and her neighbors have been begging her to stop practising). She begins to dream of a girl-band: “I want boys to come and see us play and think I want to be part of that. Not They’re pretty or I want to fuck them but I want to be in that gang, in that band.”



She joins the Slits in 1978. They are immediately notorious. Their singer, Ari Up, is just fifteen, too young even to enter most of the venues at which the band plays. Albertine focuses on the creative experience of being in the band: the pleasure they take as young musicians in molding their diverse influences into a unique sound while carving out a subversive femininity that refuses to be sexy or submissive.

When the Slits break up in 1982, Albertine attempts to create a conventional life, working for the BBC and for a while as an aerobics instructor. She eventually opts for domesticity, marrying and moving to the suburbs. During harrowing rounds of IVF, she regrets her earlier abortion. Six weeks after her daughter is finally born, Albertine is diagnosed with cervical cancer. As her marriage begins to break down, she realizes that the feminist gains of the punk era have, at least for her, proven largely symbolic: “It’s just like the fifties. If you are a full-time mother without a private income, you’re a chattel, a dependent.”

As a single mother, Albertine begins to rediscover her creativity. Her first album is released to critical acclaim. Albertine quotes from a review written by musician Carrie Brownstein: “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…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 mother, particularly one’s own…Because after a certain point, we’re supposed to feel settled, or at the very least resigned.”



The book’s final pages underline the redemptive power of creativity as a means of retaining identity and integrity in the face of oppression.