Punk pioneer Viv Albertine coming to Waterstones

Guitarist with pioneering punk band The Slits (and before that, founder of The Flowers of Romance with Sid Vicious), Viv Albertine received widespread acclaim for her 2014 memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. She talks to Lyndsey Fineran about her new book, To Throw Away Unopened, which she will be introducing at a Bristol Festival of Ideas event next month.

You rather brilliantly opened your first book with the line: ‘anyone who writes an autobiography is either a twat or broke. I’m a bit of both’. What did you take from your experience of writing Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys and what made you want to return to personal writing with this book?

The response from readers to my first book gave me confidence in my ability to communicate. It was the first time that something I’ve created has resonated fairly widely. Also, once I saw my story laid out end to end and sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard, I realised that all the mistakes I’d made and all the different things I’d tried throughout my life weren’t flaky, they all added up to a perfectly valid life. I didn’t intend to write another book as I was wiped out by the first one, particularly by the honesty, but I needed some structure in my life and sitting down for four hours every day to write meant that something, somewhere, needed me.

Your first book fitted more neatly into the conventional music memoir category. To Throw Away Unopened is a more experimental work. How would you describe it to a prospective reader and how did the writing process differ for it?

This book is a kind of detective story. What makes a person the way they are? So much of who you are, including all your flaws, comes from your family, your upbringing and your environment. Almost nothing is self generated. I realised that if I had the same genes and upbringing as a murderer, I’d be a murderer. In the book I explore all the little crimes that go on within a family and try to arrive  at an explanation as to why they were committed. No one in the book is nice, but I hope they are all understandable by the end.

You’ve worked in a variety of mediums in your career: music, obviously, but also film making, sculpture and others. What is it that excites you about writing? Does it offer you something that music can’t?

I love the solitariness of writing. You don’t have to rely on anyone else. I love that you can write a book without money. I love that because it takes so long, you can pour intimacies into it and forget that anyone is ever going to read what you’ve written. (This becomes a terrible thing when you have to hand the book to the publisher though). And I love the long form of a book, that you have so much time to explore and convey your ideas. The limitations in writing a three minute rhyming song are a great discipline – and I am just as disciplined in book writing as I was in song writing – but the short format doesn’t do it for me anymore.

Who are you reading at the moment?  Were there any writers you particularly looked to for inspiration with this book? 

I think women’s writing is incredibly exciting at the moment. In both form and content. I have a thread of quotes by women I was reading and influenced by running through the book, from my mother and my best friend to Maggie Nelson and Warsan Shire. At the moment I am reading Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – I was 13 when the Biafran war started and was so unaware of the background to it. Nowadays young people are so much more informed due to the internet. I’ve just finished Nine Island by Jane Alison which I also loved.

You mentioned that you wanted your first book to reach and inspire teenage girls, as opposed to just middle-aged rock fans looking for tales of the London punk scene. Who would you love to reach with this book?

I had no intention of my first book inspiring young women, that was the biggest shock to me when people started saying the book was inspiring. I was thinking it was more of a cautionary tale! I just wanted to speak honestly to everyone but especially girls, to say things and talk about experiences I’d had with honesty, so that people could use the information in whichever way they pleased. This book also talks about things that people are often not honest about: family, siblings, death – the more honest we all are about that sort of stuff, the less alone we’ll feel.

Viv Albertine will be discussing her new memoir, To Throw Away Unopened, at Waterstones Bristol Galleries on April 16 at 7pm. Full information available at www.ideasfestival.co.uk/events/viv-albertine/

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Photo credit: Carolina Ambida