Punk Stories: Four Memoirs of Rebel Women in Music

When rocker and poet Patti Smith was a teenager, she loved paging through used copies of Vogue, eager for glimpses of the world beyond her working-class home and family in south Jersey. A black-and-white photo of wispy, white-haired Edie Sedgwick, one of the magazine’s “Youthquakers of 1965,” doing an arabesque on the back of a leather rhinoceros captured Smith’s imagination. She wanted to be that girl— self-possessed and connected to the moment. Smith moved to New York in 1969; she chronicles her years as an artist struggling to find a place in the downtown avant-garde scene in her 2010 National Book Award– winning memoir, Just Kids. Smith frequented some of Sedgwick’s old haunts, even living at the Chelsea Hotel, and in 1975 achieved critical acclaim with Horses, her debut album, which was a revolutionary marriage of music and poetry. The cover photography by Robert Mapplethorpe captures Smith’s androgynous beauty. Her jaggedly chopped hair, white button-down shirt, and black jeans and jacket became an early template for punk-rock fashion. Smith’s iconic look and uncompromising art inspired young women who also rejected being “good girls” for the rigors and rewards of making music on their own terms. Just Kids also whetted readers’ appetites for stories of New York and London during the 1970s punk revolution and the 1980s postpunk aftermath, as told by women musicians who were at the center of the action.

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Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys
Viv Albertine. Thomas Dunne Books, 2014, 421 pp., $27.99 (hardcover).

The title of Viv Albertine’s 2014 memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, announces the primary preoccupations of her female punk-rock cohort. These interests, with varying degrees of alcohol and drug use, figure prominently in the stories of women in the scene. The women assume all the rock-star privileges of men—who can blame them?—before becoming wives and mothers in their later years. Albertine, the lead guitarist and songwriter for the seminal band the Slits, begins her story with the in-your-face pronouncement that she “can’t be bothered” to masturbate. A pretty girl, when her hormones kicked in at age thirteen, she started messing around with bad boys and never stopped.

Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1954, she grew up in North London. The family struggled financially, and, as Albertine put it, “I lived in a dump.” Listening to the Beatles on her record player provided escape and drowned out her parents’ fighting. In a moment of vulnerability, she told her father, “I want to be a pop singer when I grow up,” to which he replied, “You’re not chic enough.” There were few female role models: “It was inconceivable that a girl could cross over into male territory and be in a band,” Albertine writes. Instead she attended art school, a rite of passage for many punk and pop musicians.

While a barmaid at Dingwalls in Camden Market, Albertine fell in love with the spirited chaos of the punk bands that played there. She met Kokomo drummer Jody Linscott, who told her that musical skill was not a requirement for membership; Jody had joined a band before she could play. Patti Smith’s Horses was another revelation: “Up until now, girls had been so controlled and restrained. Patti Smith [was] abandon.” And Johnny Rotten, whose voice was neither trained nor tuneful, had an absolute sense of self-possession on stage that she admired. What Albertine thought were barriers—class, accent, lack of musical education—Rotten turned into virtues...