In 1975, Viv Albertine was obsessed with music but it never occurred to her she could be in a band as she couldn't play an instrument and she'd never seen a girl play electric guitar.

A year later, she was the guitarist in the hugely influential all-girl band the Slits, who fearlessly took on the male-dominated music scene and became part of a movement that changed music.

A raw, thrilling story of life on the frontiers and a candid account of Viv's life post-punk - taking in a career in film, the pain of IVF, illness and divorce and the triumph of making music again - Clothes Music Boys is a remarkable memoir.

“Reading it I got this mega sense of the need to throw yourself at things, at problems, at things you disagree with even if you haven’t formulated what it is about it that you would change. There is this brilliant bit where she says that when she dies they should put ‘she was scared but she went anyway’ on her grave. The clever and sensitive way that she thought through all of the stuff that happened in punk in the 70s and 80s, that completely counters the macho way the story of punk gets told, how The Slits were trying to change and push things in such an immediate way - makes you want to get out and do stuff.”
— Sophie Chapman

This title is also available as a book, ebook and audiobook from Barking & Dagenham Libraries