Punk’s not dead on the small screen: a limited series about Viv Albertine is in the works. Deadline reports that Elizabeth Karlsen and Stephen Woolley’s Number 9 Films and Rachael Horovitz’s West Fourth Films joined forces to acquire rights to The Slits’ guitarist’s memoirs, 2014’s “Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.” and 2018’s “To Throw Away Unopened.”
The books, which the producers landed the rights for in a “competitive situation,” recall how Albertine “was a founding member of all-girl punk band The Slits in the late 1970s, becoming a close friend of both Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of The Clash. In 1976, she helped form The Flowers of Romance with Sid Vicious and Susie Sioux,” the source details.
The Slits disbanded in 1982. Afterwards, Albertine studied filmmaking and worked as a freelance director for the BBC, among other companies. She “also collaborated with Joanna Hogg, composing the soundtrack for ‘Archipelago,’ and starring in ‘Exhibition,'” Deadline notes.
“I’m so happy that Rachael, Elizabeth, and Stephen are bringing my books to the screen,” said Albertine. “Right from the start they were sensitive to the extremely personal nature of the work and I knew the books were in the hands of producers with integrity. Their vision is perfectly in tune with the work, they understand the subject and the times, I can’t wait for the project to get started and to see all the characters in my story come to life.”
Karlsen and Wooley added, “What an exciting and exhilarating prospect to re-explore a time when music, fashion, political ideologies, and sexuality were turned on their heads. So beautifully evoked alongside personal insights and frank reflections of an extraordinary woman’s life in Albertine’s two incredible memoirs.”
Albertine, who is now considered a feminist punk icon, didn’t initially dream of making music herself. “Sadly, it was my goal to become a girlfriend or a wife of a musician. I honestly couldn’t conceive of any other way of being amongst creative, musical people — men, if I didn’t know women could be part of that group,” she’s explained. “So, you know, it’s sad looking back. But I’m just so glad that I, with other people, formed something that was then later called punk, where there was a door for young women.”
Though she played a part in opening that door, Albertine has no illusions about what it’s like for women and other marginalized people today. “I’m still angry at so much – class, gender, society, the way we are constantly mentally coerced into behaving a certain way without us even knowing it. I feel so oppressed by the weight of it all that I just want to blow a hole in it all,” Albertine told the Guardian in 2018. “Some people will say that I’m bitter and twisted, but so what? I’m 63 and I’ve been an outsider as far back as junior school. When you’ve fought and fought to keep positive and to keep creative even though there was not a space to be creative, well, you show me any human who is not angry after 60 years of that.”
