You didn't think Punk rock was negative at the time did you? No it was definitely exciting at the time. Just imagine if you've never played any instrument how are you going to go and perform a gig you know. It was just like we wrote songs, made some music and dressed up up crazy. It was just the type of girl I was. I was very receptive to all those things. There were not a lot of women doing this so you must have stood out and caused a reaction? Right totally. We went out in the street and everybody would turn around and would look intimidated and we would love that. 80% was visual provocation to begin with and the attitude which was a visual thing too. Some people thought it was put on.. but we actually had fights on the stage. We didn’t care. We had real fights. It was not like we were pretending to fight. So we didn’t do it on purpose but the media loved that and that was great and it was almost like what the crowd wanted.

 Origins of the Slits

We went to a Patti Smith gig and I saw Ari and she was acting crazy. I had been kicked out of the Flowers Of Romance which Sid eventually got rid of everyone and then split the band. So then I was thinking.. I still want to have a group so I will form my own one and I decided I wanted to do a girls group. So I asked Ari because I had seen her yelling at her mom and just being like a brat. She was 15 at the time. I had a certain like of what a front person should be like e.g. very little inhibitions and she definitely had very little inhibitions and so that’s why I picked her. We had another girl Suzi Gutzy to begin with on the bass and another girl Kate Korus on guitar.

The name…

We were like any group trying to pick a name …it was Kate's idea and it sounded provocative and we thought it sounded great. We hated your normal working person, had contempt for the authorities and status quo and contempt for the hippies. We were like the generation afterwards. We weren’t into love and peace. As one of my songs says 'if you want peace and flowers I’m gonna give you knife and chains.'  

You and Ari were obviously two feisty characters. Was this the seed of later problems?

 Yes it was.

The band changes  We kicked Suzi out because she was just really out of it all the time and she wasn’t making it to practice. She was drunk all the time and it was not working so it was a very short time that she was with us. She was living at my squat at one point though I can’t remember how I met her to be honest.  I didn’t know her for a long time. Kate I knew before. There was a connection with her boyfriend and the 101ers so that’s how Kate came in. We played live with Kate at the beginning. That was something I don’t feel good about. We kicked her out and that was wrong. We just said the image wasn’t right but it was the whole look and who’s right and not right. So we got Vivien and Tessa to make the final line up.

Song writing

To begin with I can say I was one of the main writers. We had 8 songs that we did for a long time and about 4 of them at least were mine. No 1 Enemy, New Town (people who are working all the time to the clock and watching TV, materialistic...I hate that system and I’m not part of it), Shop Lifting and FM. Tess wrote Vaseline. Ari had written two, one of which was Slime, and Vivienne had written Typical Girls and Love & Romance.

The first few songs I wrote you can tell like No 1 Enemy is a typical punk rock attitude coming from the heart. I was part of it and it was how I felt and the same with the others. Then Adventures Close to Home a later song is like looking at my own life and saying I’m searching for something like Don Quixote dream of fighting dragons. These are very different attitudes now. Now I’m looking at myself and asking what am I looking for.  

We were together 2 years but that first 6 months was like an explosion. I was very involved almost like management, like arranging for gigs and then Ari’s mum helped along with that but I was like very involved with it at the beginning. Closer to the end I was very discouraged by our relationship in the groups getting a little tired of the clashing and  I was also questioning the whole thing too.