The Slits
Somebody’s Miracle
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The Slits, UK punk’s first visible all-girl band, for example, are mentioned as forebears or “punk’s grandmothers” in every girl-punk history. While that certainly counts for something, their legacy as it’s commonly understood and recited abnegates the sense that they may have had any true talent. The established “facts” are these: They could not play. On their first tour, opening for the Clash, Mick Jones had to tune their guitars for them. They were a visceral, caustic, and calamitous band–fantastic in spite of their riotous defects, claimed a 1979 NME review. They were primitive rank amateurs who did not give a fuck. It’s implied that if they did in fact care, they would’ve become good in the technical, virtuosic sense. But since they didn’t, it must be that their songs were not of their own careful design.
The liner notes for the recently released Live at the Gibus Club (Sanctuary) do little to dispel the prevailing mythology. “They were breaking new ground without really trying,” writes their road manager, Don Letts (later of Big Audio Dynamite). Then, chiseling a cheerful patriarchal platitude into the band’s headstone, he adds that the band created great music “through sheer emotion and desire.” Live is culled from a five-night stand in Paris in 1978, shortly before the Slits recorded Cut, and features their original lineup, with drummer Palmolive (later of the Raincoats). It’s rather shocking. For all the descriptions that make them sound like jungle cats on an episode of Wild Kingdom, for all the talk of their emotional, visceral, and nontechnical playing–they sure do sound like a band. Like a band that had been together for three years, composed of people who’d been playing instruments for about that long. They sound like what they were: a skronky minimalist funk quartet masquerading as a punk band.
This attempt at having it both ways misfired big time: critics lambasted the 36-year-old single mom for both acting like her 25-year-old self and not sounding like her 25-year-old self. The way scenesters and critics alike clucked their tongues about her miniskirt poses and songs about fucking you’d think she’d included a bukkake DVD as a bonus disc.
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