Viv Albertine on the “emancipating” feeling of discovering Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’
When The Slits emerged during the late 1970s, there were very few women involved in the punk scene. For Viv Albertine, guitar music always seemed so male, and it took her a while to realise that she had as many rights as men to pick up an instrument and start playing. Yet, with a lack of female rock role models, Albertine didn’t know where to start.
In her memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Albertine writes, “Every cell in my body was steeped in music, but it never occurred to me that I could be in a band, not in a million years – why would it? Who’d done it before me? There was no one I could identify with. No girls played electric guitar. Especially not ordinary girls like me.”
Finding classic rock guitar playing by the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin too overtly masculine, Albertine looked elsewhere for inspiration for a sign that women could play rock music, too. In 1975, while reading a copy of NME, she stumbled upon a profile piece on Patti Smith, a poetic singer based in New York set to release her first record, Horses.
Albertine was intrigued. She recalled the first time she saw the album cover, grainily printed inside the pages of the magazine, bewildered by the monochrome image of Smith taken by Robert Mapplethorpe. “I have never seen a girl who looks like this. She is my soul made visible, all the things I hide deep inside myself that can’t come out. She looks natural, confident, sexy, and an individual. I don’t want to dress like her or copy her style; she gives me the confidence to express myself in my own way.”
Horses, produced by The Velvet Underground’s John Cale, is a seminal recording from the New York punk era. Weaving Smith’s rich poetic lyrics with minimal instrumentals, the album takes inspiration from genres such as garage rock, reggae and avant-garde. Smith, with her unapologetic female voice, set the ball rolling for women to express themselves without restraint – music could be messy and boundless. For Albertine, hearing Horses for the first time was an “emancipating” experience.
“It hurls through stream of consciousness, careers into poetry and dissolves into sex,” Albertine shares. “The structure of the songs is unique to her, not copies of old song structures, they’re a mixture of improvisation, landscapes, grooves, verses and choruses. She’s a private person who dares to let go in front of everyone, puts herself out there and risks falling flat on her face. Up until now girls have been so controlled and restrained. Patti Smith is abandoned. Her record translates into sound, parts of myself that I could not access, could not verbalise, could not visualise, until this moment.”
Horses gave Albertine the courage to approach music fearlessly and, paired with her experience of watching the Sex Pistols perform, inspired her to become a musician. “Hearing Patti Smith be sexual, building to an orgasmic crescendo, whilst leading a band, is so exciting. It’s emancipating. If I can take a quarter or even an eighth of what she has and not give a shit about making a fool of myself, maybe I still can do something with my life.”