MsD: Do you feel underappreciated? Do you feel history has been rewritten to downgrade your contribution?

It’s really bad what went on in history, with The Slits. We were cut out of history in many ways. So there is that missing link right there, we should call our album “The Missing Link”. There is that missing link happening with women in punk, with women in music, with women just being the way we were; there is no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame of women’s stuff, it is not taken seriously. So because that’s missing, and also, the reggae music thing, we were really into reggae, into world music, African jazz, everything coming in from other cultures. Very culturally open, as much as we were sexually open, not really into the sex thing, I’m not talking about sex in the sense of fucking ..

Lyceum 1978

MsD: Sexuality, natural sexuality.

Ari: Yes, exactly, natural sexuality. Same thing with culture, we were very into every culture, very multi-cultured. And when that link is severed - is that the right word? It’s like something has been severed. Cut. Yes, it really is like someone is bleeding to death. When this thing went down with the punk thing and The Slits and in the same way the whole reggae thing got lost and turned into something else and the world only knows Bob Marley now, don’t ask me why, he is not the only reggae artist that’s ever existed. Something went wrong, the whole world is suffering from this, bleeding to death from this severed vein. Somehow, because we were cut out of history in so many ways, that’s why girls are now … and I warned people in the eighties, you know, and people wouldn’t listen, they wouldn’t have it, many of the girls who loved the Slits went on to be Madonna obsessed. I warned people in the eighties, “you’re going to have something coming out of Madonna you’re not going to enjoy”, and nobody listened. And all these girls like Britney have Madonna as this God, women only aspire to be like this .. .and that’s what’s missing in the link now, they think being like Madonna is being sexually free, sexually rebellious and expressing themselves. But they’re not sexually free. They need to live in Jamaica for a while! Then they would learn about the true feeling of sexual freedom and sexual rebellion.

AO: It’s female sexuality through the eyes of men. It’s a male version of women’s sexuality.

MsD: Madonna seems to me very uptight, like she always has to be in control, she can never relax. She’s paid a high price for that success. It doesn’t look much like fun.

AO: Yes, there is something sad there.

Ari: She is a very big business woman but she’s also a thief, I know she rips off people all the time, music, in many ways, not only just in music but in image and ideas, and money also.. But that’s straying from the point. The point is, no-one saw it coming. People now see it more. The Slits people see it now, they can tell the real women from the women that kind of twisted it, that idea of sexual freedom and expression. I think that’s generally what’s happening. It’s not all Madonna, there are hip hop people on the same tip, of being a male-dominated idea of how a woman should be.

MsD: Like J-Lo and L’il Kim?

Ari: I mean, I love the outfits J-Lo wore, I myself in Jamaica wear all shit that’s see-thru, naked Lil-Kim style. And we wore crazy shit before Lil Kim, but we got it because of a revolution and she got it by being a pornography girl.

MsD: That brings us to the cover of Cut. You got a lot of stick for that cover, and yet it is such an enduring, iconic image. Do you regret it, or are you proud of it? Ari: A lot of people have a problem with the Cut album cover. A lot of feminine rights people felt offended because it set back women again because the body is there, bla bla. But it’s not pornography, it’s the opposite, being natural with your body, showing the nature side of your body.

MsD: Again, natural sexuality, owning your own sexuality.

Ari: Exactly. That’s the opposite of pornography , why do people have such a problem understanding sexuality? Why is it Americans specifically have such a problem seeing the difference between pornography and normal sexuality? They can’t see it, that’s why they’re obsessing about it. I don’t know why Europe feeds into it, they’ve never been taboo, German women in the summer used to lie around naked in the grass and no-one looked at them. I don’t see the necessity of why they’re buying into this American thing.

AO: The Spice Girls really depressed me … they were co-opting something really powerful – for me it was totally lifted from The Slits. They took something powerful and empowering for young girls, that had turned me into a young woman, but a powerful one, and inverted it, they made it about titillation, about wanting men to fancy you. “Girl Power”! It’s not powerful to have your arse hanging out ...

Ari: Well, I do that too sometimes! ..

MsD: But it’s on your own terms.

Ari: Yeh, I do it for my own enjoyment, and I do it in order to be able to do something, like music, maybe? These girls were put together and auditioned and put together and created, they weren’t a real girl band, they are puppets put together.

AO: For Cut?

Ari: Well Cut didn’t exist yet, but yeh, the album.

MsD: The Bangles!

Ari: Yeh, basically, but anyway, that was of course out of the question, so … anyway, I ran into him 20 years later in a hotel in Jamaica, and he was talking about all the new generation of daughters, his and everyone else’s daughters, how they all grew up wanting to be like in a girl band like The Slits, and suddenly he goes on about the Spice Girls! “Don’t you think the Spice Girls are the new updated version of The Slits?” I’m like: “Are you taking the piss?”. He was dead serious! He was serious, and he insisted they were the new rebellious girls, taking on our mantle and that we should be happy about the Spice Girls taking it on. I was so shocked, I just stared at him like I wasn’t hearing right and I just sat like this (mouth agape) and had no witty comments, nothing to say, and let him blather on, thinking he knows what he’s talking about, then he says, “Do you know what? That Cut album cover, you should never have had that cover, that was shit, that ruined it for you, that ruined your career! You should never have been in mud naked there on the cover. It was really trashy, you should never have done it.”

AO: It’s a fucking iconic image! Sorry, that image is so emblazoned on people’s minds.

MsD: It is so recognisable.

AO: Even people not into The Slits know that cover.

Ari: Well, it just proved all along he was a sneaky, sly dog from the get-go, and a leopard don’t change his spots.

AO: Obviously he’s been sitting on it for 20 years!

Ari: He was bitterly raving on, because he has a problem with John as well.

MsD. Well, you could have been Sporty Slit, I guess you missed your chance.

Ari: Huh, in the Adidas, yeh. The irony was, even back in The Slits days I don’t know we survived, so many people working against us, we were already up against the whole fucking entire world, never mind that even within our inside circle we had enemies, like that working against us. But what it did was make us survive. And what did make us survive was that we had such a support system around us.