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55: THE SLITS
Typical Girls/I Heard It Through The Grapevine
(Island, 1979)

MANY people seem to remember the punk phenomenon as a largely blokeish affair - and in its sorry latter stages they probably had a point as the whole scene collapsed under a reductive welter of witless, phlegm-flecked violence from Johnny-come-latelies who behaved as dismayingly as the tabloids told them to.

However, in the first instance the punk explosion also provided the impetus and the platform for an entirely new wave of female artists perhaps best exemplified by The Slits.

They were sussed, irreverent, in no way predisposed to subservience nor bound by gender stereotyping. They used their sexuality on their own terms, and possessed a playfully edgy but genuinely anarchic air which even some fellow punks found intimidating.

By the time their visionary debut album Cut was released in 1979 they had lost original drummer Palmolive and had drafted in the redoubtable Budgie (aka Pete Clarke), later to join Siouxsie & The Banshees but already one of the most inspired and original drummers of his generation.

The band's sound had morphed from the rough, unruly spikiness of yore into a sleek, spare and striking hybrid of dubby spaciousness and dreamily pertinent lyrics. As a result, Cut still sounds fresh and inimitable to this day, a seemingly contradictory blend of an unravelled stream of consciousness and an infinitesimal focus.

The wilful and exemplary Typical Girls was released as a single and got as far as number 60 before its alien textures, loping tempo changes and confrontational perspicacity rendered it just too rich a meal for further chart contention.

A pity. Such maverick inventiveness doesn't come along very often, and it is all too often the lot of the true one-offs to be marginalised and undervalued.

However, the influence of The Slits has proved to be insiduously enduring. The reformation of the band by original members Ari Up and Tessa Pollitt in 2006 was greeted with rapture by a surprising number of hardcore fans and an even more surprising influx of arrivistes.

Justice, of a sort.

7:39am Friday 8th February 2008

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