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MsD: That’s one reason why the Selfridges thing is so ironic [Future punk
promotion where the Slits played their first gig] We wouldn’t have been allowed
through the door …
Ari: We were thrown out, I think at the time, from Selfridges! That’s why I
could tell everybody to raid the place try and steal as much as stuff as they
could with the song “Shoplifting”, the anthem of the Slits, in Selfridges, it
fitted very well in that place. “Do a runner!” I think if we didn’t have that
song I might have said we wouldn’t play there. Because we wouldn’t have anything
to counteract all that … The sound was shit, by the way, and that was the first
time we played together as a band. |
Rainbow 1979
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MsD: Well it was fun to watch, in that small place. You’re getting some acclaim
and there is a buzz about your gigs at the moment, and there is interest in your
early work. Does this go any way to making up for being underappreciated in the
past?
Ari: Well, we’ll see! Now it’s good that most interviews are interesting now,
most of the people taking an interest in us now, coming to see us and interview
us are intelligent people, many of them artists in their own field, and they
appreciate us for what we did and are trying to do, its not like the old time
wankers who used to be the press who would ask us the most ridiculous questions.
Slits people anywhere are all artistic people in their own way, so when they
interview us, they are artistic writers, they write in an artistic way, not just
mindless press, so it’s always interesting the conversations we get.
[Ari introduces Holly, the second vocalist]: She’s an example of a new
generation of Slits girl, and look, she’s only 20. See there are people here now
who are really looking for other options from the mainstream, it’s not hopeless!
AO: It’s worrying!
Ari: OK, it’s worrying but not hopeless!
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MsD: Why is the current tour so stop-start? Is it a question of other people
letting you down, or does it stem from problems within the band?
Ari: Oh, it’s not the band, but we have problems with organizing anything,
getting things done, like you wouldn’t believe. It’s the same shit we had in the
early days, people not taking us seriously, messing us around. We have no
management now, no record deal other than this one EP. Only Paul at Mute Records
is the one doing anything, and we have some support at XFM and one or two
others.
<< Lyceum 1978 |
We want to play, we want to go all over, to the West Coast of America – in San
Francisco there are a lot of Slits people, a lot of English people and New York
people have moved there, on the West Coast, and now there are a lot of young
girls, making their own Slits t-shirts – we’ve got to get there, we want to get
to these people all over … but we’re having such a hard time, it’s like 1977
never left for us, the obstacles, the way we’re getting the gigs, there’s that
patronizing thing going on, still something lurking, this feeling of “let’s wait
and see”, this skepticism; what’s to be so skeptical about us, compared to every
other shitty group, every other shitty group is out there now doing something, a
bunch of old men, or the silly new teenage ones, they’re all doing something
that’s been done already, nothing really new, what is the big deal about us? I
don’t get it. We should immediately have people lining up for a record deal, we
should have people lining up saying “come on tour”, we should have press like
crazy saying front page, “The Slits are here”, what the fuck is going on?
MsD. Well, that was sort of my question to you.
Ari: We need to have The Slits’ unfinished mission accomplished, there has been
this whole legend coming out of us it’s now become mythology, which is good, you
know, it’s coming around, because the Riot Girrl movement helped that in the
1990s, you know the American girls, helped bring that about. So that’s good, but
in another way we’re written out of history and it’s following us around. Today,
someone said, oh, Japan would love you, and yeh, Japan is ready, they would love
us, they love me, I’ve been there as Ari Up already, but it is unbelievably hard
to get over there. We can’t get anywhere, it seems. It’s crazy.
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MsD: Ari, I have to get in some of these questions I have written down. Going
back to the old Slits again, there’s been a lot of discussion about the contrast
between The Slits on the Peel sessions, which were hard and raw and dirty, and
The Slits on Cut, which was smoother and more polished. Some people think there
are two different Slits, and the first where you had Palmolive were more “real”;
the Cut album was more “sanitized”. Do you think that’s just a natural
evolution, that you just got better, or how much was it down to the different
personnel, and the producer?
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Rainbow 1978
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Ari: I don’t think we got better, we just got different. Well, there was this
kind of false mythology that came maybe out of John Peel, thanks to John Peel
for telling everyone we couldn’t play. It’s bullshit, I listen back and I think
we played brilliantly, personally, if you don’t mind me saying so! I think it’s
brilliant, I love it and we wanna do some of them, we’re working on doing those
songs again, we’re working on “Let’s do the split and I shit on it” again. It
sounds like a cartoon now, a Japanese punk cartoon. You know how some of these
Japanese cartoons have these punk rock melodies, its so bizarre …
AO: and the Japanese have that thing where they copy everything so perfectly, in
the most minute detail …
Ari: Exactly. Now when we do a John Peel session song we sound like a Japanese
cartoon. [Ari does her impression of a Japanese punk band. At full volume.]
AO: Art imitating life imitating art!
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Bournemouth 1978 |
MsD: Some people prefer that early stuff, because they think it’s more real and
more raw, and that Cut was sanitised.
Ari: It’s not more real, it’s different real. We were just as real doing our
stuff there, actually. We got bored with that style, and no-one at the time
wanted a proper record deal with us, so tough shit, they missed it.
AO: And you have to move on, as an artist, people get so stuck. You have to
change otherwise you would go crazy.
Ari: Exactly. There are people who do the same thing all the time – like the
Buzzcocks, - I love the Buzzcocks to death, they’re my favourite punk group
actually, but they’ve stuck to that same thing. You’ve got a good question, a
lot of bands stayed doing the same thing –…but to me that wasn’t punk, punk to
me was the freedom of doing whatever the fuck you wanted, and not following a
pattern. We needed to change. I don’t think a male band would have got the same
criticism, actually, it was just another way …
AO: I think Cut is quite a raw album, anyway.
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MsD: I think it’s very raw.
Ari: Yeah, it’s not like a sell-out, commercial record, not like we went and
made some massively over-produced album. But that is a good point, because that
is how we got cut out of the link in a way, so many people were saying “oh,
that’s not punk!”. And that’s affected the history, that is a very good question
actually. Because they had a very fixed idea of what punk should sound like,
that raw sound ...
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