Girls Will Be Girls The Culture Show

This programme contains strong language.

At the height of the punk explosion

of women redefined what it was to be a female artist and performer.

They forced their way on to a largely male-dominated music

scene and became part of a movement that radically changed the artistic

They came from the squats and suburbs of London

and inspired a generation of ordinary young women to believe

Along with Siouxsie Sioux, Chrissie Hynde, Poly Styrene, and

the Raincoats, the Slits were among punk?s most important figures and

Viv Albertine, their guitarist, has just brought out her brilliantly

titled memoir ?Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys,

It charts her life as part of this cultural revolution.

These were female musicians doing it on their own terms.

And in doing it their way, they set the

The great thing about punk was the fact that I was a girl was no

It was a 6 month window where you could sneak in and see

You never heard girls until then absolutely bursting with

We were trying to cause a bit of mayhem.

It was a call for arms for the girls - Amazonian punk women.

These women were breaking taboos, shaking up the establishment.

But did their revolution last longer than a three minute pop song?

Almost 40 years on now, the mainstream has absorbed the shock

of these outsiders, can the punk female rebellion still survive?

They say little girls should be seen and not heard.

But I say ?Oh Bondage! Up Yours!?

Honey and Jackie magazines are packed with girls with perfect

Charlie?s Angels flicks wearing flares, pinning posters of

Legs and Co sashay mumsily to the latest disco hit on Top of the Pops.

And lovely David Soul tops the charts.

The backpages of the NME sells ?I choked Linda Lovelace? T-Shirts

in reference to the famous porn star from ?Deep Throat?.

Despite the birth of feminism, for many young women,

Seventies Britain isn?t exactly the land of opportunity.

But some young women are looking for something more underground.

Something that they can make their own.

And it?s in small venues like this one all over the country

that they get to take centre stage for the very first time.

So it was here at the Harlesden Coliseum in London that the Slits,

the first all-girl punk band, played their debut gig on March 11 1977.

Their chaotic performance and in your face irreverence made

a huge impact on many of those who were in the audience that night.

What they sang and how they behaved, just spoke to me.

Palmolive is beating the crap out of the drums.

Tessa all in black. She looks amazing.

Ari, more than any of the female performers and maybe even the men

It was complete revelation to see them as they were so energetic.

It is pretty amazing, No woman had ever done this before.

The Slits were at the heart of a fledgling London punk scene

which emerged from the clubs and squats of West London.

These squats were crash pads and rehearsal rooms where

manifestos were thrashed out and punk bands were formed.

Punk was a howl of frustration, a visceral reaction to the tedious

British establishment and 1970s pop music's overblown pretensions.

And anyone could be involved. Initially attention fixed

on male bands but women soon elbowed their way to the forefront.

Not just as vocalists but as guitarists, bass-players,

Viv Albertine, who was also part of this closely knit punk fraternity,

Let's talk about the atmosphere around punk.

I didn?t know there was this way of being yourself on stage,

not caring about your accent, how poor you were where you came from

until I saw Johnny Rotten play. That was it.

He was as near a girl like me as a boy could be.

I got left ?200, the only money I had ever been left

in my life, by my grandmother and I thought, I'm going to buy a guitar.

Mick Jones was my boyfriend at the time, he said ?great?.

I literally couldn't play. I couldn?t hold down one bar chord.

And then about a week later I met Sid Vicious in the street and I

hadn?t met him before and said ?I?m going to make a band?.

He said, ?I?ll be in a band with you?.

You were practicing for quite a while with Sid?

We did spend the whole summer of ?76, the hottest on record,

in Joe Strummer?s basement trying to get a band together.

We got used to how it felt to rehearse and turn up every day

and then Sid decided I couldn?t play the guitar well enough to be

in a band anymore. Even though it was my band.

So you joined the Slits. Did you get a confidence

When you joined the Slits, it was an all-girl group?

I didn't like it being an all girl group.

Everyone at the time was against being labelled.

Cos we had been labelled all our lives.

We were just these useless, poor comprehensive school-educated kids.

I said to Chrissie Hynde, who was a friend of mine,

"Oh Chrissie, I don?t want to be in an all girl band, it?s tokenistic".

And Chrissie said to me, ?Oh shut up Viv, get on with it,

It was fun, we were all on the same sort of level.

I can?t believe how we found each other because even to this day I

have never met any other women like the other three Slits.

Ari and I especially could write together, which me and Sid couldn?t.

He was really crippling to work with.

He wanted to write songs about S M and concentration camps.

With the girls, I could write a song like Typical Girls and they all

understood exactly what I was on about and the pressures of what?s

She had an extraordinary mind very different.

She pissed on stage, not to be shocking, but because she

And she completely liberated me about my body.

I learnt a hell of a lot and we translated that back

As we very specifically made sure that our voices and backing vocals

Again, just like when you shout across a playground,

You do know there is massive controversy over the internet

Female punks were trailblazers, creating not just

their own space but their own kind of music, their own kind of being.

They took Malcolm McClaren's manifesto :"Be

Be everything that society hates " and created their own style

sometimes even their own cartoonish personas.

There was 19 year-old Siouxsie Sioux, the girl

from the London suburbs whose witch-like look inspired women.

And made men feel all sexy and submissive at the same time.

Siouxsie was a dominatrix with the three pretty boys

She had that whole Clockwork Orange thing going.

There was Poly Styrene with her band X-Ray Spex, sporting braces on her

teeth and challenging the idea that female performers should be passive

Poly Styrene had a major part to play, she was

particularly empowering to women that weren?t about looking girly.

Poly was a sort of anti-sex symbol - she had braces, she wore a bin bag.

It was so liberating for everyone around.

Hey, you can just look how you want to and the songs were

She sang like no woman had done before.

It was a kind of scream, really a scream of desperation.

It was all about not being a slave to your desires.

Most people associate bondage with sexual bondage.

They think it is perverted and think of whips and things like that.

And it is against that, saying ?Oh, bondage, up yours?.

And Gina Birch and Ana da Silva who were so inspired by the Slits? first

gig that they started their own band The Raincoats in November 1977.

Within a few weeks they were playing their first gig.

The Raincoats preferred ideas to proficiency and counted John Lydon

It was all about you putting your own ideas forth

wasn?t copying this guitar player doing this solo and lots

It was about you bringing what you had to the fore.

As well as American Chrissie Hynde, who had dropped out of art school

in Ohio and landed in London at the beginning of the punk scene.

When people talk about this subject, people forget Chrissie Hynde -

you have a woman doing what a woman has never done before, which is

When you play with Chrissie, you have to rock .

Just as tough as anything men could do.

Chrissie?s abilities didn?t go unnoticed by punk impresario

She found herself part of a small pool of musicians who went on to

He was always trying to nurture me and help me out,

which was fantastic because I was always looking up to Malcolm.

I was going to play guitar ? just as a boy in the background.

Vivienne came down and she was so impressed she went,

?Oh Chrissie, you can really squeeze a chord out of that?.

They never called me back and the next week there was a new

These female performers were standing centre stage and that

was very thrilling for young women up and down the country.

Also in from America, now renowned photographer

Sheila Rock was inspired by punk to pick up her camera and document

She was invited to intimate rehearsals and met the artists

Like the punks, she was learning her trade as she went along.

I just went round photographing what I thought was interesting.

I met Siouxsie, Billy Idol and Steve Severin ? the Bromley Contingent.

We?ve got a pic of Siouxsie Sioux performing in 1976, definitely

Well she had that dominatrix look about her.

It is interesting what she is wearing,

Did this kind of clothing get a lot of reaction from people?

I think the audience were as expressive in their clothing,

but because she was very handsome she was just very imposing.

But she brought something else to the scene, I think.

Not a ?50s sexy - it explores very underground roots

and dark deep things young people were wanting to explore.

But Siouxsie brought it out in the open, I think.

This band was called The Moors Murders and that is Chrissie Hynde.

This was Chrissie before she sang, she was writing for the NME.

She was the one that invited me to go down.

It was near London Bridge and it was just in one of the arches.

And I had no idea that she had such an amazing voice.

It is interesting that band as well as it is a mixture

I asked Jordan if we could photograph her.

I thought it would be really good to get this amazing Sex sign.

And I just walked across the street and as I turned around.

There was this guy wearing bell bottom flares who looks

And I thought this was one of those magic moments.

His body language is amazing in this.

She is relaxed and confrontational and he is simultaneously pervy

He is really angry, it is a very interesting reaction to

Female punks played around with notions of desire subverting male

sexual fantasies through what they wore. They refused to be submissive.

They hijacked the perverted. There was something glorious of all these

shapes and sizes of bodies strutting the 70s streets wrapped in rubber.

Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood?s shop ?Sex? on the Kings

Road experimented with the lexicon of pornography. They stocked fetish

wear, slogan T-shirts and the infamous bondage trousers.

I had a few of their things. When I went back to Cleveland, Ohio, I had

a little rubber skirt and a Scum Manifesto T-Shirt. I felt like the

dogs bollocks. I did look cool. Especially in a basement in a Ohio.

I didn?t find it intimidating going into Sex. I wanted a specific kind

of dog collar, she went, "I?ll make you one." and getting some vinyl

trousers from Sex, which was a big deal for me, but they were great and

turned out to be very practical coz you just wiped the spit off.

Jordan the shop assistant was a living advertisement the power of

Sex. She wore rubber clothes, a beehive style and theatrical makeup.

first class for her own protection. British Rail even put Jordan in a

British Rail knew the trouble that I was going through. At Seaford which

is the big terminal where I live they said one day to me they would

let me travel first class with my second class ticket every day from

Lewis to Seaford because they knew the trouble I was having. So they

I used to love PVC and what they used to call in my era 'wet look'. I

used to wear a little mac and gloves that matched. It was wonderful.

And what was it about Sex that attracted you?

I think I was doing a similar thing on my own to what Malcolm and

Vivienne were actually aiming for. We were on a parallel course in a

way, and I felt very very at home there.

I saw myself as a walking work of art. Later on, when I went through

the geometric make-up, that was all to do with Mondrian and People of

A few people that we?ve spoken to have said when they went in to Sex,

they were quite intimated. Why do you think that was?

For Vivienne used to grill people. "Why do you want to buy this?"

What happened if someone gave the wrong answer?

Sometimes, yes. People were passionate about what they made,

what they wore it. Didn?t want twits going out there wearing it for the

Would you say that punk was one of the first pop cultures where women

could appear threatening in that way?

I would say probably yes. It was a time of sexual equality, but also,

women were quite liberated as well. And men and women could look and if

you like outdo each other when they went out. Like sharing each other?s

make-up. It was a great, great thing really.

There is always a kind of ideal woman?s shape that we are given. And

women and other punk women, like yourself, didn?t care. There is

something very refreshing about seeing women in all sorts of shapes,

wrapped in rubber, in ripped T-Shirts walking down the street.

There?s something really beautiful in that.

It didn?t matter what size you were. How tall you were. It was really how

Punk also had its own sexual codes. Despite the rubber clothes and the

provocative way of dressing, it was mostly asexual.

Sex wasn?t really a feature in the punk thing. I never really

got?Some people were getting their end away. You weren?t dressing to

attract the opposite sex. You were dressing to tell everyone to go and

lock themselves basically. It was a real up yours mentality.

As a guy, if you had any intentions, other than intellectual or musical

ones, these girls they would sooner cut short because the women just had

this attitude that kind of knocked that out of the arena. You didn?t

mess with these women. They weren?t girly girls. They would stand eye

to eye with you and give as good as they got.

Nevertheless for many punk women, the streets became a battleground.

Nevertheless for many punk women, Punk invited confrontation and punk

women, in their rubber stockings and DMs, often confused middle-aged men,

who didn?t know if they were coming or going.

Oh, man, did The Slits get hassle. They were physically attacked on the

streets literally. You gotta understand that they deeply freaked

people out on the psychological level. I mean, on the White Riot

Tour we had to bribe the coach driver Norman to allow them on the

bus, not because they did anything to him, but he just couldn?t

compute, you know, women weren?t supposed to be like this.

There were guys just cruising the street, old fashioned, macho guys

who were the norm then, just thinking that how you looked you

were a prostitute. I got spat at and attacked many times and Ari got

stabbed. It was just part of everyday life.

The Slits? appearance sparked controversy whatever they were

wearing or not wearing. But unlike many other female artists at the

time, they remained firmly in control of their image. As they

showed when they appeared topless on the cover of their debut album

'Cut'. And here they are looking fantastic. Bare breasted defiantly

outstaring the camera gaze. This was an amazingly audacious thing to do,

few female artists if any had posed topless on their album covers. It

caused a big controversy. Rough Trade had a massive argument amongst

the staff whether they should stock this album at all. And supposedly

one man tried to sue Island Records for crashing his

Rolls Royce, when he saw the three Slits bare breasted on a big

That just evolved that day. We had a female photographer, Penny Smith,

we just got a bit over relaxed towards the end of the day and we

just started slopped mud onto us and all that sort of thing. But we were

very sure that we had to choose a photo where the look was right,

where we looked confrontational and there was no come hither look or

earthy, its definitely making a statement because they?re naked, but

it is, sort of, not sexy, it?s not objectified.

For every image that went out of us, every word that went out about us,

we fought and fought and fought. It had to be right because we were

redefining how women, girls, were being seen in the media.

The Slits cover of 'Cut' marked the height of punk?s exuberance. By the

early 1980s, many of the first generation of punk women left the

industry as post-punk shifted to new-wave pop.

Artists like Ana da Silva, Gina Birch and Viv Albertine made a

I think anyone who has been confronted and in aggressive

situations for six to seven years non-stop, having to fight and argue

all the time your point of view, whether it is with Rastas or A and R

man, old boyfriends, new boyfriends, friends who thought that you had

changed too much. People in that street, people spitting at you.

Seven years of that, I was exhausted.

Punk, like all youth movements, was of its generation. Its story has

become cultural folklore, so familiar that we forget the shock of

its primary revolutionary drive. We can?t believe it was such a

threat. It?s been a long time since British rock music has had the whiff

Punk attitudes are mainstream now. Even Middle England distrusts the

police and politicians. We?re all anti-establishment these days.

So did punk women win? After all, it?s no longer shocking to see a

woman on stage. But as the mainstream has absorbed these

outsiders, the revolution has become commodified. Fetish gear is on sale

in the high street, bovver boots are a commercial concern, a sneer in

fishnets is a way to make money. When everyone?s selling punk

attitude, can it mean anything at all?

Now people want the goods. Now people want to be on the cover of a

fashion magazine. My policy is if Lemmy wouldn?t do it, don?t ask me

If you are a young woman now, dressed in fetish gear, you just

think that is sexy, or I am trying to please my man, trying to get

attention in the music industry. When we were dressing in fetish

gear, it was a political statement. It had never been seen before

outside of sleazy bedrooms or magazines.

Still, the impact of that brief revolutionary period continues to

reverberate. You can see punk in the pioneering artists who came later,

rewriting the musical rules and doing what they want.

You can see it in the Riot Grrls, who explicitly brought punk and

feminism together. And its hiding in Lily Allen?s cheeky lyrics and

bursting out of Pussy Riot protests against Putin. Punk even lives on in

emerging bands such as Skinny Girl Diet, the excellently named young

If you want to say something that?s provocative, if you want to look

different, if you want to say something different about sex and

gender, then punk is a pretty good place to start.

And punk really isn?t dead. It keeps on evolving. Just as the original

wild girls of punk themselves, who continue to break new ground.

Although kids and life may have taken them away for a time in the

last couple of years, tired of being cut off from music, many of the

original women have started to write, play and record again.

Gina Birch and Ana da Silva are working on their own material and

making a documentary about the band. As well as releasing a solo album

and writing her memoir. Viv Albertine has made her acting debut

in the film 'Exhibition'. And Chrissie Hynde is currently touring

the UK with her first solo album, 'Stockholm'.

Anyone can start when they?re young and they?re beautiful and they have

their youthful exuberance and they don?t have anything else to do, they

don?t have to get through the real part of life, which is having a

family, paying the bills, getting on with it.

To me, life is like challenge, challenge, challenge. Stretch,

stretch, stretch. I did have a period where I couldn?t do it. I

didn?t have the energy. I was ill. I had my daughter, it all went from

me. But it is back now, and that is what I am after.

I find that when we?re on stage, that we are kind of ageless or

something like that. We have our songs and we go and perform them.

If I can see Yoko Ono perform when she?s 82, 83, 84 and think 20 more

years! 30 more years, you know, it?s perhaps the time of the older woman.

These are grown women, performing and creating as they please. Not

just playing the old hits, but writing new songs, about how they

see the world, as older women, ex-wives, mothers, artists, humans.

And just by doing that, they are breaking some of society?s age and

gender phobias. That?s pretty punk to me.

# Home sweet home # Home sweet home

# I've peeled the potatoes # There's not much left to do

# Lovely lemon drizzle cake # Heat the fondue

# Tastive quiche with a nice, crispy top

# 100 grams of biscuits in a fancy box.

# Never try to rule another person's life

# You will only lose your lovely fragrant wife

# And don't let a guy go changing who he is

# You are not a God and it is not your biz

# Home sweet home, home sweet home # There's such a thing as lust

# There's such a thing as friends # But romantic love was made up way

back when # In another century things were not

so great # Same thing with marriage, it's an

unnatural state # I chose being an artist over being

a wife # Now I'm going to lead a lovely

life, life, life # Wife, wife, wife

# Life, life, life # Wife, wife, wife

# I hate my beautiful, clean, white, pristine, minimal

# Home sweet home # Home sweet home

# Home sweet home # Mummy, mummy

# Baking, rubbing, chopping, baking, running, shop, chop, clean, bake...

# When Barbara and I

started the Review, we were seeking to examine

the workings and the truthfulness

of establishments. Albatross?

There it is. The albatross. The albatross is going to need

a hair-styling. A thrilling tale of double agents

and a man on the run.