A surprisingly difficult part of this was establishing what we talk about when we talk about post-punk. Roughly, the term refers to the wave of musical experimentation which took place in the wake of punk from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. It was informed conceptually by the art-school background and grounding in political and cultural theory of many of its members, and distinguished by musical, vocal and lyrical experimentation and by a frequently self-conscious and self-critical approach to the idea of being in a band and making music. All of which meant that it sounded, to varying degrees, original, arresting, and odd.

Post-punk’s disorderly, subversive and category-resistant nature has seen it marginalised in accounts of its era, although the past few years have produced a handful of useful retrospectives, as well as the early-2000s revival of post-punk musical techniques which, if you still can’t explain what it is, at least make it easier to explain what it sounds like.

For me, a large part of the significance of post-punk was that it seemed to involve an unprecedented amount of women as artists, fans, and critics. Its musical, political and aesthetic influence can be traced in many subsequent female-friendly movements, including twee, riot grrrl, grunge and electro. Some post-punk women – the Slits, the Raincoats, Lydia Lunch – have made a more enduring dent in popular consciousness than others, and some of them are more ‘hmm, interesting’ than ‘fuck yeah, hidden early-80s gem’, but all the artists featured below are worth a spin.

Extending the gains of punk’s emphasis on DIY culture, accessibility and amateurism, post-punk women were able to take their bands in experimental directions, producing lyrics which explored the female experience in startlingly innovative ways, and music which itself took on what Slits bassist Tessa Pollitt described, when I interviewed her for the book, as a ‘new, raw, and female’ form, a self-consciously radical sound dealing with rarely-expressed emotions like embarrassment, awkwardness and anxiety.

In terms of subject matter, post-punk’s ideological concern with the politicisation of the personal, and with identifying and promoting authenticity in the face of popular cultural stereotypes, lent itself to exploration from a feminine and feminist angle. This concern with authenticity was expressed in the songs themselves, which were produced, structured and presented in a way which set them apart from the glossy manufactured products of mainstream artists. It was expressed too in lyrics which demystified and deconstructed conventional femininity, love, sex and romance, and which analysed social and cultural pressures on women or the tensions of personal relationships in implicitly political ways.

There is far more to post-punk, and many more women within it, than I have space for here. The Young Lady’s Post-Punk Handbook provides a good starting-point to other women and bands in the movement, but here are ten from me to kick off:

1. ESG

ESG, from South Bronx, based their pioneering sound on a love of James Brown, Motown and disco. Spotted at a talent contest, they began to play New York’s cutting-edge clubs, where their sound dovetailed neatly, if unexpectedly, with that of the No Wave scene, and went on to share billing with PiL, Gang of Four and A Certain Ratio.

ESG’s blend of hip-hop and girl-group lyrical sensibility was sampled incessantly by acts from Miles Davis to Tricky and Public Enemy to Liars – although the lack of royalties received antagonized the band, who addressed the issue with typical panache in the 1993 single ‘Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills’.

2. Raincoats

The Raincoats attempted an unsweetened exploration of the social and sexual experience for women, mapping a landscape previously foreign to mainstream rock – a female-centred one of self-consciousness and self-doubt. Their debut’s self-effacing musical communalism has seen it described as the first ‘women’s rock’ album.

3. Slits

From the art-student squats of London’s Ladbroke Grove via Germany, Spain and English suburbia, the Slits made slippery and spacious dub-punk hymns to sex and shoplifting. ‘Love und Romance’ burlesques the banality of boy-meets-girl, ‘Spend, Spend, Spend’ analyses retail therapy as addiction, and ‘Typical Girls’ castigates conventional femininity as a profit-driven invention.

For more on the Slits I’d recommend Zoe Street Howe’s Typical Girls? The story of the Slits.

4. Bush Tetras

There’ve been whole essays written on this song as key to life in late-70s crisis-riddled New York, but Pat Place’s stabbing guitar and Cynthia Sley’s vocal darting between grouchy imperious disdain and incipient panic are more than enough to recommend it.

5. Lydia Lunch

The infernal anti-Blondie, or perhaps the sub-par Patti Smith. For Lunch, the extent of her musical ability ‘wasn’t the point. I developed my own style, which suited the primal urgency I needed to evacuate from my system’ (quoted in Simon Reynolds’ Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984).

Lunch’s performances were, according to contemporary music writer Roy Trakin (quoted here) ‘very influential in freeing people from the idea of technique as being somehow prerequisite to talent’.

6. LiLiPUT

Surrealistic in their Swiss-German and English lyrics, rudimentary in their technique, and the subject of a 40-seconds-long Yummy Fur song (Why don’t you listen to Liliput / Where punk rock starts and ends?), but great for all that.

7. The Bloods

New York’s finest queer anarcha-feminists. ‘Button Up’, their only single, is absurdly ahead of its time kink-funk.

8. Mo-dettes

Sharp-tongued and stylish Anglo-Swiss outfit. Had a complicated relationship with the partisan feminism of some of their contemporaries, but their arch, insouciant music was less ambivalent. ‘White Mice’ giddily champions female sexual agency, ‘Two Can Play’ dramatises relationships as struggles for autonomy and control, and ‘Foolish Girl’ catalogues the misadventures of a girl who renounces feminism for an unhappy marital ending.

9. Au Pairs

At the intersection of left, feminist, queer and antiracist politics, Birmingham boys and girls the Au Pairs made radical, slyly danceable music. A good introduction to them from the Kitchen Tapes’ Rupinder Parhar can be found here.

10. Linder Sterling

Muse to Buzzcocks and Morrissey, a visual and performance artist whose work critiqued cultural expectations of women and the commodification of the female body, an unequivocally militant feminist and occasionally a musician with the band Ludus. Ten post-punk points if your response in 2010 to Lady Gaga’s meat dress was to sniffily point out that Linder did it better at the Hacienda nearly thirty years ago.

For more on the background, careers, music and politics of these and other girl groups, and a look at the history of women in music from Ma Rainey to Pussy Riot – please consider buying the book!

Smith’s photographs of the Slits mudlarking in the grounds of their Surrey recording studio became a defining image of the band, notably through being used on the cover of their debut album Cut. This article looks briefly at the controversy generated by the images themselves, and how it relates to subsequent and current presentation of women in the UK music press.

Under the Cover

The space provided by punk for female as well as well as male self-expression and emancipation can be overstated – see Helen Reddington’s research on the persistence of entrenched chauvinist and sexist attitudes – but the Slits were unarguably, in the words of Caroline Coon, ‘driving a coach and various guitars straight through… the concept of The Family and female domesticity’. One of the first prominent bands to spring from the art-squats of punk west London, the Slits’ early music and performance was a squall of untrained, instinctive energy, and their casually confrontational appearance and behavior drew negative reactions ranging from media disapproval to violent hostility. Although tending to recoil from any overtly political espousal of feminism, the band bluntly advocated female independence and empowerment, encouraging girls to form bands and to define themselves by their actions rather than their relationships.

‘We’re just not interested in questions about Women’s Liberation… You either think chauvinism’s shit or you don’t. We think it’s shit… Girls shouldn’t hang around with people who give them aggro about what they want to do. If they do they’re idiots.’
– Slits guitarist Viv Albertine, June 1977

The image on the Cut cover fits into the Slits’ more general disruptions and subversions of accepted feminine tropes, including their punk-inspired adoption of fetish and bondage gear as deconstructed parts of an everyday wardrobe, and their plain-speaking on sex and sexuality. The band’s proto-Goth contemporary Siouxsie Sioux remarked that they ‘weren’t glamorous, they were very earthy’. The Slits’ aesthetic and behaviour onstage and off was repeatedly referenced in terms of wildness and ferocity, reinforcing their performance of an exoticised, ‘untamed’ sexuality, which on the album cover clashed with the band’s bucolic backdrop to create an arresting mash-up of English Rose and Amazon.

Covered in Controversy

Having in their earlier career declined several offers from labels intent on exploiting the novelty aspect of a girl band, and battled with industry men who expected female musicians to ‘kowtow or flutter your eyelids’, the band’s stated aim for the cover of their debut was to ‘show that women could be sexy without dressing in a prescribed way. Sexy, in a natural way, and naked, without being pornographic’. Their bassist Tessa Pollitt described the cover as ‘one of the most liberating things I have done’, claiming that the band were ‘celebrating the freedoms we were creating’. The cover divided opinion at the time of its release, dismissed by some as a cynically sexualized ploy, and ridiculed by others because of the group’s deviation from a conventionally desirable body shape (Smith’s photographs were taken at a point when the Slits had succumbed to the regular eating and sleeping hours of studio life, away from the chaotic amphetamine-fuelled living to which they’d grown accustomed, leaving them looking softer and more rounded than expected by those policing punk angularity – a particularly frustrating slant of attack given punk’s early attempts to transcend these kind of prescriptive aesthetics).

Music writer Vivien Goldman embraced the Cut cover as a defiant reclamation of the female body, and Pauline Black, who went on to form 2-Tone band the Selecter, saw it as ‘so joyous, innocent and natural that it just seemed like a celebration of womanhood rather than any cheap titillation’. It still has the power to spark disagreement: Roni Sarig in The Secret History Of Rock waxes lyrical that the cover ‘confounded notions of sexuality and civility and positioned the group as modern primitive feminist rebels – girls not afraid to be natural, sexual and formidable’, while the author of the Punk77 website makes the counter-claim that the image in fact undermines Sarig’s idea ‘that they were one of the first all female bands to avoid being ‘marketed as sex objects’… They had their tits out. For instance I was 16 when this album came out… I and many others didn’t see it as anything but three nudes on a cover!’

Bad Cover Versions

As for the women-in-the-music-press discussion, so far so same-old. Cazz Blase’s recent article on the UK music press maintained that it is marketed, sold and created primarily by and for men. The NME, which in 2009 appointed Krissi Murison as its first female editor, is actually not too bad as far as the balance of genders among its staff goes – although the relative positions women occupy, and how this translates to coverage and presentation of female musicians, are different debates. In 2010, Aoife Barry gave an overview of the underrepresentation of female musicians on the covers of music magazines, emphasizing the egregiousness of Q in particular:

Why not count how many women you can see on the covers of Q magazine this year (two solo covers: Cheryl Cole and Lady Gaga – and two group shots: Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen together in a group shot; and Lady Gaga again in a group shot). The reason I mention Q is that the response to ‘there aren’t enough women on the covers of music magazines’ is often ‘but that’s because it reflects the amount of women working in music’. This is not true – particularly in the case of Q, which covers mainstream rock, indie and pop music. In fact, the female musicians it covers are usually from the pop arena. And you cannot argue that the pop realm is oestrogen-free.

While, as Barry admits, ‘there may not be a great conspiracy to keep women off the covers of music magazines and give them minimal coverage on the inside pages’, it is frequently the case that when women are featured, so is a latent or overt sexualizing of them which does not affect their male counterparts to the same degree.

One has to factor in, of course, the degree to which coverage of bands will depend upon commercial trends in rock and indie; the musical greywash which occurred under late Britpop saw a sidelining of female artists which appeared to reach its dull conclusion in the post-Libertines profusion of almost invariably male ‘landfill indie’ groups. This connection is made explicit in Q’s concern with catering for a target demographic supposedly ‘inspired by the rock’n’roll swagger of Liam, Noel, Blur and the whole Britpop scene’, a remit which perhaps explains last October’s gobsmackingly retrograde Kasabian cover while doing little to excuse it.

Covering Up?

Smith’s shot of the Slits in all their unphotoshopped glory differs from Q‘s cover in several obvious respects – its subjects muddy rather than glossy, wearing unselfconscious grins rather than careful high-maintenance pouts, and, crucially, having shaped the image via their own concept and direction rather than following a top-down marketing or editorial strategy. It’s true that the NME has never been an impregnable bastion of women’s liberation – even on that Slits cover, there’s the dubious strapline referring to them as the paper’s ‘Page One girls’ – and I’m sure that just as many readers saw the cover as wank material as chin-strokingly believed it to be ‘confounding notions of sexuality and civility’. A happy few may even have done both. But the upfront disheveled self-confidence the Slits display is still striking and even looks quaint in an era where the last comparable Empowered and Liberated woman on an NME cover was, who, Beth Ditto? Whose appearance, and the ensuing debates on whether it constituted ’empowerment’ or ‘objectification’, proved that non-standard naked women were still controversial in 2007.

Cazz Blaze, citing the music press’ recession-induced drift towards conservatism, characterized by an increasing reliance on sponsorship and advertising, predicts little room for improvement in opportunities for women to express their emancipation rather than their objectification. Her characterization of online music publications like The Quietus as more conscientious about women as artists, readers, and writers, is an interesting point. It ties in with the idea of the internet as a space where female engagement with music can be expressed and explored without being dismissed as exclusively sex-centred or derided as juvenile inanity, and where female musicians themselves can harness the internet’s capacity for unregulated self-expression and audience interaction, frequently in ways which circumvent or combat industry and media-led imperatives on how women are meant to appear.

Despite the internet’s progressive potential for allowing female artists control over their own presentation, the reception of and reaction to that presentation remains beyond their control. After punk, and after riot grrl, the jury is still out on the political uses of the naked female form, and on their degree of effectiveness. Do images like those of Ditto and the Slits deconstruct and demystify the female body? How constructively do they inform debates on body image and female sexuality? In the eyes of observers male and female, are they validating alternative ways of being attractive, or are they merely putting forward an alternative cut of meat?

And, of course, should we be concerned at all with how a musician looks as opposed to how she – or he – sounds?

******

Sexuality in Rock’n’roll is one more area weighed down heavily by its history and language. While none could or should deny the aspects of sexual interest and thrill inherent in live music, the performance space is problematically male-dominated.
– Ian Penman, NME, 1979

I really wish that I’d been born a boy; it’s easy then ’cause you don’t have to keep trying to be one all the time.
– Gaye Advert, 1977

Women in bands, when under the media spotlight, often find themselves swindled out of due credit by virtue of their gender. If they’re not being accused of clinging to the coattails of their backing boys to disguise their own lack of musical ability, they’re being judged on their aesthetic appeal to the exclusion of anything more relevant. It’s disappointing to observe how ubiquitously this principle applies. Even in the midst of punk, as girls picked up guitars, bass, and drumsticks, taking the stage alongside boys as more than cooing vocalists or backing dancers, they attracted that lethal combination of critical suspicion and prurient interest.

I love punk partly for the number and variety of women it involved and the freedom of expression it offered them. I loved X-Ray Spex – a Somali-British teenage feminist demagogue whose vocal screech swooped like a bird of prey over twisting vistas of saxophone. I loved The Slits and their slippery, shuddering dub-punk hymns to the tedium of sex and the joys of shoplifting. And most of all, I loved Gaye Black, bassist for The Adverts and widely regarded as punk’s first female star.

Despite their intelligent, era-defining songs like Bored Teenagers and The Great British Mistake, you have to dig through several layers of punk sediment before the Adverts come to light. They were one of the first punk bands to gain commercial success, and how much of this achievement was down to Gaye is open to depressing debate. A groundbreaking example of the Babe on Bass, her experience prefigured the problems faced by lone women in bands from Blondie to Paramore: scepticism towards their musical ability tied to a disproportionate focus on their looks.

She could have the impact of five Runaways, Patti Smith’s armpit, and Blondie’s split ends on Britain’s vacant female scene.
– Jane Suck, Sounds, 1977

Gaye’s elevation to national sweetheart began as a generic punk fairytale. In 1976, she and her partner TV Smith made an escape in time-honoured fashion from their Devonshire coastal town to London, where they swiftly formed a band. The Adverts became a fixture at pioneering punk venue the Roxy before being snatched up for a tour with the Damned and a contract with Stiff Records.

A devotee of Iggy Pop and the Stranglers’ bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel, Gaye made her musical presence a vital part of the Adverts’ brand of thuggishly intrepid punk. Their breakthrough single Gary Gilmore’s Eyes hinges on her instrument’s ascending throb. Most Adverts songs are played as though they’re throwing punches, TV Smith’s vocals advancing in one-two jabs while Gaye’s bass lines bob and weave. On stage, she was a static and self-contained sounding-board for Smith’s livewire showmanship.

image by Flickr user ariel awesome

But her visual presence hit equally hard: she caught your eye, you caught your breath. Her iconic look – battered black leather and a kohl-rimmed thousand-yard stare – drew on Suzie Quattro and Joan Jett’s effortless rocker fundamentalism rather than the try-hard iconoclasm of Jordan or Siouxsie. Gaye was punk’s terrifyingly blank, stark, dead-eyed minimalism made flesh, the girl nihilist next door.

For Greil Marcus, both Gaye and the Slits were punk’s ‘pretty people who made themselves ugly’ – although clearly not ugly enough. As the reminiscences of her admirers on tribute websites and YouTube comments testify, Gaye was punk’s first female pin-up. Her press and TV appearances stirred hearts and hormones across late-70s Britain, pulling the plug on her wish to be one of the boys.

I wasn’t made to feel as conscious of the fact that I was female [at the Roxy], as I was by the rock press.
– Gaye in Vacant: A Diary Of The Punk Years, Nils & Ray Stevenson

In a 2001 interview with the website Punk77, Gaye recalled that “the media would concentrate on irrelevant things like clothes or be extra critical of my playing in the same way that some men are prejudiced against women drivers”. The hackneyed trope of whether girls can play seems especially incongruous in punk, a musical movement studded with gleeful and defiant amateurism. Nevertheless, Gaye’s playing was picked on as “plodding” and her mute ‘fixed sultriness’ unfavourably compared with the vocal talent of other punk women. This latter criticism betrays, among other things, a peculiar disapproval of girls in non-singing positions, as though there were a correct set of requirements for band composition, with musical preoccupation on the part of female members an intrinsically suspicious transgression of their allotted role.

1978 single cover, uploaded to an extensive gallery of punk singles cover art by Flickr user Affendaddy

Dismissal of Gaye’s musical credentials went hand-in-hand with an insistence on her value as eye-candy. According to the NME, their bassist’s ‘superb squeakers’ were the best thing about the Adverts and the only conceivable cause of any mainstream notice they might attract. Stiff Records instantly latched onto Gaye’s looks as a marketing tool, giving the Adverts’ debut single a cover bearing a close-up of her face – all eyes and lips, the band’s name an afterthought. This was a stunt pulled without the band’s prior knowledge, which Gaye avenged by refusing to appear in other band photographs for the single.

As the Adverts gained more media attention, Gaye’s image began to dominate the band’s press. Again, the novelty of her status as sole female in a role other than singer seemed to confer as much fascination as her looks. She complained of fending off photographers’ requests for her “to pose with my jacket undone” and sudden “leching” from men she’d considered her friends. After ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ hit the Top 20 and the band appeared on Top of the Pops, the national response to Gaye was extraordinary. The Sun described her, bafflingly, as ‘one of the saucy girl singers who have taken over pop’, and the Daily Express swooned that she possessed:

…[the same] fragile beauty that made the world and Mick Jagger fall in love with Marianne Faithful. Gaye is beautiful, she is as dark as Marianne was fair, with black hair and Castillian white skin…

This presentation of Gaye, and its explicit comparison to pliant and angelic pre-punk darling Faithfull, attempted to explain her as a continuation of the past, rather than a messy break with it. As revolutionary a moment as punk was, it operated within a reactionary framework in which its icons were objectified and misunderstood.

The Adverts disbanded in 1979, their split hastened by Gaye’s discomfort with, and other band members’ resentment of, the puddles of critical drool collecting at her feet. Gaye’s enduring reputation as prototypical punkette pin-up tends to overshadow what she actually did – which was, in her own words, “[try] to get a good sound and play right. I’m not one of Pan’s People.” She had the misfortune to attempt this within a context in which women on stage, regardless of their reasons for and intentions in being there, were automatically sexualised, examined and evaluated in a manner wholly absent from attitudes towards their male counterparts. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

*
[Thanks to tvsmith.com and Punk77 for several of the above quotes.]

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Then one day while rifling through my parents’ (excellent, though I hated to admit it) record collection I pulled out a sleeve that looked like a B Movie soundtrack. There was an exploding volcano, a pterosaur and three women dressed as bedouin from hell. It was Return of the Giant Slits.

When I put the record on it was like nothing I’d heard before. It was as if The Slits had stolen their beats from the gaps in other peoples’ songs. The rhythms seemed alien but I felt something click into place – next time I had the bus fare to get to Truro I found and bought the magnificent Cut and fell in love. Here was something truly radical, with the chaos and creative destruction that I loved in punk but with irony and humour and WOMEN.

Ari Up onstage at Alexandra Palace in 1981

The Slits were true musical innovators, drawing as much from reggae and dub as from the punk scene. They were funny, aggressive, embarrassing, chaotic, and sexual without trying to be sexy. From the name of the band onwards they played with gender and with ideas of what women were and were meant to be.

The Slits’ lead vocalist Ari Up (aka InnoDBnna Forster) died yesterday aged 48. She was only 14 when she formed The Slits with drummer Palmolive (anyone else feel kinda old? Are you even allowed to form a punk band after you’re 20?) and was still gigging this year. Her music means a lot to me and to many others, and the importance of The Slits for women in punk and, well, most alternative music really is difficult to convey. They cracked the mould.

Rest in peace, Ari.

• Watch The Slits play Typical Girls on the bandstand in what I think is Regent’s Park
• Listen to the whole of their debut album Cut online for free (with ads sadly, but less annoying ones than Spotify)

(Post title is from In The Beginning)