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Ari: “You know, that girl is only fourteen and
she seems so mature, she looks and talks about eighteen. Can you believe it? She
is fourteen!”
MsD: Yes, but Ari, look at you when you were fourteen!! You were in a band
called The Slits!
Ari: Yes, I know, but I wasn’t trying to be a grown-up. I didn’t do drugs, I
didn’t have sex, I was a virgin …. All these girls now, they are having sex,
they are so sophisticated, taking drugs, they have all this pressure on them to
be so mature. I never wanted to be mature. I wanted to have fun. I have always
been quite childish, I suppose …
MsD: Or child-like? In the sense of being open to things?
Ari: Yes, yes, I wanted to be open, and learning all the time. When I was
fourteen I was learning about music, I was focused on that. Everyone looked at
us and thought we must be into sex and drugs and rock’n’roll but it was really
quite a pure time. And the boys around us were friends, they never tried it with
me – I’m talking about The Clash and the Sex Pistols now - They never tried it
on with me.
MsD: One of the great things about the punk movement, was that you didn’t feel
the pressure, the fact that girls didn’t have to conform to a stereotypical
beauty standard. There were all shapes and sizes at the gigs. That was
incredibly liberating.
Ari: That was really important for Andy, us trying to do something at that time.
We wanted to be strong, for example, Andrea, you know Andy, was in Rip, Rig and
Panic - basically she had a really heavy experience with the Slits, because of
that same thing, of not feeling that pressure of becoming… Miss World or
whatever, relating to female issues without being all “feminine”. Andrea, tell
the story! |
Bournemouth 1978 |
AO: I grew up in Bury St Edmunds, and you can imagine what that was like. I was
basically the only black girl for 200 fucking miles, and I had my two friends
and we did our thing, running the gauntlet of “nigga nigga” every single day of
my life. And The Clash and The Slits came and played a gig in Bury St Edmunds,
and I was like fourteen and The Slits came on stage and played Typical Girls,
and I just lost my fucking mind! It gave me goosebumps, it was a real life
defining moment, we all went back to school singing “Typical Girls”, my friends
and I. It just gave me permission. It’s amazing to me that they then became my
family. Because they looked at them and they gave me permission to be who I was,
it gave me the power to be who I was, who I wanted to be. . I knew for the first
time that there was something “other”. That to me was like a real gift.
Ari: So then, they could call you nigga, but you didn’t relate to it anymore …
before you related to it. Now it wasn’t anything to do with being black anymore.
AO: They could say what they like, it had lost its power, I didn’t care what
they thought anymore. I didn’t feel like I wanted to make them stop. I thought
“you just don’t get it”.
Ari: You know, it happened to so many girls. I love hearing that story, I love
hearing it from my family. But I’ve met many girls, in America especially, many
American girls were very affected, deeply affected by The Slits at that time,
and who are now just as deeply affected by the missing of it; they miss a band
like The Slits. They come up to me:. “We miss a group like you, we need women
like you!” They’re desperate. Because they are bombarded with this Britney
Spears thing every single day, well not just Britney, I don’t want to take out
Britney.
MsD: I was going to ask, do you think it’s gone backwards in a way, with the
sexualisation of women in music?
Ari: In one way it has, but in another way, there are other outlets, there were
other crazy people who came out and were able to be women like no other way
before, and there are now girl groups playing, there are more outlets for women.
It’s there, it’s just the industry’s become so weird because of this techno-age,
computer age, so that now everything is so computerized, not that I’m actually
against the sound of some computer music because I’m a hip-hop fanatic myself,
and all that dance-hall music in Jamaica is created on computers now so I love
it, I’m into it, but it’s just the mentality .. for some reason that’s where
something went weird.
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