Bovell was an obvious choice. The Slits, especially Ari Up, were reggae fiends. “We used to find the blues parties just following the bass,” she says. “We would be streets away and listen for the vibrations. In those days, there were almost zero white people at sound system parties. But I got away with it because I was dancing the hell out of their blues parties. Back then the style of dancing was called ‘steppers’ and I was such a good stepper. I was also the only white girl with dreads. In fact I was the first person to have the ‘tree’—I had my locks up in a tree-type shape.” As Ari Up developed beyond the basic punk screech into plaintive, reedy singing, her Bavarian-meets-Jamaican accent made her sound a bit like a dreadlocked Nico, on spliff rather than smack.
Punk diehards sometimes claim that Dennis Bovell dulled the Slits’ edges, domesticated them. But the Slits were ambitious. They wanted to be pop stars. Island boss Chris Blackwell thought that they had potential in spades and he gave Bovell as much studio time as was required. “The Slits had so much input that it was more a case of sorting out what should go,” said Bovell. “They were just bulging with material and I had the task of sorting it out and saying ‘this goes here.’ It was like an enormous jigsaw puzzle all dumped in your lap.”
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’s songs do often sound like polyrhythmic cogs and spindles cobbled together to form slightly shaky but captivating contraptions. Albertine’s itchy-scratchy rhythm guitar darts between Pollitt’s sinuous basslines and Budgie’s clackety clockwork drums. According to Bovell, Albertine “was no Jimi Hendrixette. She’d do the occasional bit of single-note lead guitar, but mostly she was more like a female Steve Cropper from Booker T. and the MGs, doing all these great rhythm things. She was always very conscious of not wanting to play the guitar like a man, but actually trying to create a style of her own.”
The most delightful element in the Slits’ sound on
Cut
is the strange geometry of the clashing and overlapping vocals, as Albertine and Pollitt weave around Ari Up’s shrill, slightly sour warble. On the opener, “Instant Hit,” the girls form a roundelay of haphazard harmonies that the singer describes as “a kind of ‘Frère Jacques’ thing.” Albertine’s lyrics to “Instant Hit” depict an unhealthily thin boy who “don’t like himself very much/’cos he has set his self to self-destruct”—a barbed portrait that applied equally to Sid Vicious and Keith Levene, her junkie bandmates in Flowers of Romance. “So Tough,” a frenetic pisstake of macho posturing, gives way to the doleful skank of “Spend, Spend, Spend,” its sidling bass and brittle-nerved percussion perfectly complementing the lyric’s sketch of a shopaholic vainly trying to “satisfy this empty feeling” with impulse purchases. “Shoplifting” turns “Spend, Spend, Spend” inside out: The first song’s woman-as-consumerist dupe is transformed in the second’s petty-thief-as-feminist rebel. Frantic punk reggae, “Shoplifting” surges into adrenalized overdrive as Ari Up, caught red-handed, yells “do a runner.” The song climaxes with a shattering scream that mingles terror, glee, and relief at escaping the supermarket detective, a yowl that collapses into the giggled gasp, “I’ve pissed in my knickers!”
The fast songs on
Cut
are exhilarating—“Shoplifting,” “Love Und Romance” (a romance-as-brain-death parody), and the single “Typical Girls” (a diatribe against un-Slitty females who “don’t create, don’t rebel,” and whose heads are addled with women’s-magazine-induced anxieties about “spots, fat, unnatural smells”). The most emotionally haunting songs, though, are down-tempo and despondent in the mold of “Spend, Spend, Spend”: “FM,” “Ping Pong Affair,” and “Newtown.” The last takes its name from towns built from scratch after the Second World War, some encircling London and designed to absorb the capital’s population overflow, others built in the rural middle of nowhere. All of them, typically, started life as an architect’s and urban planner’s utopian vision before swiftly degenerating into characterless gridzones of anomie and despair. “Newtown” draws a disconcerting parallel between the normal citizens hooked on cultural tranquilizers like “televisiono” and “footballino” and the Slits’ own bohemian peers zonked on illegal narcotics. On the track, Albertine’s jittery scrape mimics the fleshcrawling ache of cold turkey. Withdrawal of an emotional kind inspired “Ping Pong Affair.” Ari Up measures out the empty postbreakup evenings with masturbation (“Same old thing yeah I know/Everybody does it”) and cigarettes.
Dub-inflected and desolate,
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’s slow songs impart a spooky impression of atomized individuals numbing their pain with pop culture’s illusions, romance junkies and glamorholics adrift in a haze of cheap dreams. Underneath it all you can sense the Slits’ yearning for a simpler and more natural life.
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’s famous cover photograph of the group as mud-smeared Amazons combines
nostalgie de la boue
with she-warrior defiance to jab the casual record shop browser right in the eye. Naked but for loincloths and war paint, the three Slits stand proudly bare breasted, outstaring the camera’s gaze. Behind them you can see the wall of a picturesque cottage, brambles and roses clambering up the side as if to underline the “we’re no delicate English roses and this is no come-hither look” stance. The cottage was Ridge Farm, the studio where Bovell produced
Cut
. Says Ari Up, “We got so into the countryside when we were doing the album, to the point of rolling around in the earth. So we decided to cover ourselves in mud and show that women could be sexy without dressing in a prescribed way. Sexy in a natural way, and naked without being pornographic.”
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’s cover echoes the photo of the Mud People of Papua New Guinea on the front of
Y
. Like the Slits, the Pop Group pined for a lost wholeness that they imagined existed before civilization’s debilitating effects. On “She Is Beyond Good and Evil,” Stewart had declared, “Western values mean nothing to her.” A tape of African drumming preceded the Pop Group’s arrival onstage during their 1979 Animal Instincts Tour and they appealed to their fans via a
Melody Maker
interview to bring drums and whistles to the shows and transform them into tribal ceremonies. In another feature, Gareth Sager argued that Western civilizations, being “based on cities,” were sick because they were cut off from natural cycles, unlike African tribes where repression simply didn’t exist. He proposed abolishing school and spending the money to help people deindoctrinate themselves. The song “Words Disobey Me” even hinted that language itself might be the enemy, that underneath all the layers of conditioning lay a pure, inarticulate speech of the heart. “Speak the unspoken/First words of a child…We don’t need words/Throw them away,” beseeched Stewart.
The Slits shared the Pop Group’s idealization of noble savagery and pure instinct, a cult of innocence and intuition that sometimes took on an anti-intellectual tinge. The two groups got “so close we were like one tribe,” says Ari Up. Bruce Smith replaced Budgie as the Slits’ drummer and played both sets when the two groups did a joint tour of Europe. There was even tribal endogamy. Sager went out with Albertine, Sean Oliver (the last of Pop Group’s several bassists) fathered a child with Pollitt, and Bruce Smith dated and eventually married Neneh Cherry, a friend of Ari Up’s who had joined the Slits as a stage dancer and backing vocalist. Full merger as a single tribe was formally anointed in 1980 when the groups founded Y, their own indie label, administered by Pop Group manager Dick O’Dell. By that point the Slits had parted company with Island, while the Pop Group severed their links with Radar after learning to their horror about the parent company WEA’s own links to the Kinney conglomerate, which was involved in arms dealing.
The Pop Group’s mounting revulsion for corporate capitalism and corresponding desire for “purity” in a corrupt world inspired the single “We Are All Prostitutes,” the band’s first post-Radar release. Musically, it’s their most powerful recording. The lyrics, though, abandoned
Y
’s imagistic delirium for a histrionic rant against consumerism, “the most barbaric of all religions.” Stewart warned, “our children shall rise up against us.” The Pop Group seemed to be changing from lusty poet-warriors to puritanical doomsayers. In interviews of the time, Sager declared that it was frivolous to be “talking about music” when they—the Pop Group, but implicitly all postpunk bands—could and should be discussing “external things,” such as politics, current affairs, famine, war. “I don’t see the point in entertaining just now, it’s pure escapism,” he told
NME
. “Rock and roll is taking your mind off reality.”
The Pop Group weren’t alone. Many postpunk musicians were fighting back with protest songs and benefit gigs galore. Rock Against Racism became the template for a host of issue-based compaigns, including Rock Against Sexism, Rock Against Thatcher, and Scrap the SUS, a campaign against nineteenth-century antivagrancy laws that enabled police to harass black youth at will on the grounds of “suspicious behavior.” The Pop Group did benefits for Scrap the SUS and Cambodia, amongst many other causes. “We gave away virtually all our money from concerts through doing so many benefits,” says Stewart. At one point, the Pop Group had to do a benefit for
themselves
because they’d gone into debt!
Still, something about the Pop Group’s stridency started to rub their former supporters the wrong way. The backlash came in March 1980, triggered by a split single that paired the Slits’ “In the Beginning There Was Rhythm” with the Pop Group’s “Where There’s a Will.”
NME
’s Ian Penman mockingly dissed them as “Bristol Baezes,” evoking sanctimonious sixties folkie Joan Baez. The second Pop Group album,
For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?
got panned as self-righteous soapbox agitprop. The music was still fiery, and actually more focused than
Y
, but it was hard to stomach the crude finger-pointing of songs like “Blind Faith.” The band seemed to proceed methodically through a checklist of issues—“Justice” dealt with police brutality, “How Much Longer” with Nixon and Kissinger’s war crimes—and the self-flagellating guilt trip vibe was off-putting. “There Are No Spectators” chided the politically disengaged and passive, declaring, “There is no neutral/No one is innocent.” The album was relentlessly pinned to the specifics, from the sleeve with its collage of news clippings about outrages such as East Timor to songs such as “Feed The Hungry,” all blurted statistics and denunciation. Hectoring and lecturing,
For How Much Longer
was as unpoetic as a fringe leftist pamphlet.
For the Pop Group, and above all Mark Stewart—always the intellectual engine of the band, its autodidact bookworm—the shift to plainspeaking and speaking out was simply the righteous response to the urgencies of the era. Thatcher had surged to power in May 1979, carried by a massive political swing to the right. “It was a fiery time, you felt something was about to kick off,” says Stewart of 1980’s apocalyptic atmosphere. “See, I never felt that politics was this dreary thing. When we were ranting, it was all from the heart. It came out in a mad rush.” Stewart had absorbed the music of the Last Poets, black Muslim radicals sometimes credited with inventing rap, who’d lashed “white devils” and Negro counterrevolutionaries alike on early seventies albums like
This Is Madness
and
Chastisement
. He’d also been hanging with Linton Kwesi Johnson and organizations like Race Today and the Radical Alliance of Black Poets and Players. Linton Kwesi Johnson didn’t exactly mince words: His antifascist anthem “Fite Dem Back” vowed “We gonna smash their brains in/’Cos they ain’t got nuffink in ’em.” Johnson wasn’t actually a Rasta (indeed he upset many Jamaicans when he mocked Rastafarianism as an ostrich religion), but his patois-thick voice and baleful cadences gave the words, which look simplistic on the printed page, a power and authority that Stewart aspired to.
For many white British bohemians, though, it was precisely roots reggae’s mystical millenarianism—Rasta’s imagery of “armagideon,” “crisus time,” retribution and redemption—that resonated with their own sense of internal exile. “We did feel like we were on the front line of Babylon,” recalls Vivien Goldman. “Rasta provided this mesh of the political, the spiritual, and the apocalyptic, and it helped you define your enemies.” There was friction, naturally, between trendy liberalism and Rasta’s Old Testament morals and sexual chauvinism, but the sheer inspirational force of the music swept reservations aside. “With the roots worldview, the logic was often questionable, but the feeling of spiritual uplift was undeniable,” says Stewart. “Going to sound systems with black mates, they were like huge evangelical meetings, and you didn’t get that kind of energy with rock gigs. That kind of yearning for a better world, that questioning of the system—it just made my hairs stand up on end.”
As Stewart felt the pull of reggae, admiring the way it could shout down Babylon without lapsing into sloganeering, the other members of the Pop Group were being tugged in the opposite direction. They wanted to explore their free-jazz side more deeply. “It wasn’t that I disagreed with the things Mark said,” recalls Bruce Smith. “I was just concerned about it getting so dogmatic. It was like Mark saw the music as just a vehicle, a platform for messages.” Stewart, in turn, found it increasingly “difficult to sing on the abstract stuff.”
Stewart was also becoming increasingly involved in organized protest during 1980, spending three months working in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s offices helping to coordinate a massive antinuclear rally to be held in Trafalgar Square. After almost withering away in the early seventies, CND’s membership resurged as cold war fears intensified in the wake of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. NATO’s December 1979 decision to install American-controlled cruise missiles in the U.K. convinced many Britons that their country was degenerating into little more than a U.S. launching pad. The Trafalgar Square rally in October 1980 was the last time the Pop Group performed together. “We did a version of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem,’ because I’d wanted to do a rallying cry for all the different age groups there,” recalls Stewart. “That song is a real socialist anthem, but visionary and idealistic too, Blake being this real prophet.” After this high point—playing to 250,000 people—the Pop Group fell apart. “An organic disintegration,” says Stewart. “There was no ill will.”