Here to Be Heard: The Story of the Slits | Little White Lies

Here to Be Heard: The Sto­ry of the Slits

22 Mar 2018 / Released: 23 Mar 2018

A black and white image of a person singing into a microphone, with their head tilted back and hair blowing in the wind.
A black and white image of a person singing into a microphone, with their head tilted back and hair blowing in the wind.
4

Anticipation.

This one’s been a long time coming, so to speak.

3

Enjoyment.

The confused politics of (some) ’70s feminists has not aged well.

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In Retrospect.

Tribute finally paid to our nasty foremothers.

The world’s first all-girl punk rock­ers take the stage in this enter­tain­ing docu-profile.

In 1976, drum­mer Palo­ma Romero – bet­ter known as Pal­mo­live – had had enough of the racist, big­ot­ed shtick of then band­mate Sid Vicious. She peaced out of The Flow­ers of Romance, with gui­tarist Viv Alber­tine in tow, and set about form­ing the world’s first all-girl punk group. Only, The Slits’ incen­di­ary sto­ry has large­ly been redact­ed from pop culture’s chron­i­cles – so says New York University’s pro­fes­sor of punk and reg­gae, Vivien Gold­man, in this edi­fy­ing documentary.

Here to Be Heard sum­mons punk’s first fem­i­nist fire­crack­ers: Romero, Alber­tine, bassist Tes­sa Pol­litt and potent front­per­son Ari Up. This self- made soror­i­ty sought to claim space, choice and new ways of being women, in step with sec­ond-wave fem­i­nism. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the era’s news media were most­ly repulsed by the band’s per­ceived antics’, crit­i­cis­ing their rejec­tion of con­ser­v­a­tive, mid­dle-class, patri­ar­chal val­ues on the eve of Thatcher’s Britain.

With an archivist’s eye and adopt­ing a pro­gres­sive van­tage, direc­tor William E Bad­g­ley jig­saws The Slits’ lega­cy back togeth­er. Present-day Tes­sa leafs through her Slits scrap­book, chart­ing the band’s tra­jec­to­ry from open­ing for The Clash to jump­start­ing the riot grrrl’ epoch. Talk­ing head inter­views with the group’s key play­ers and notable punk his­to­ri­ans are can­did and care­free, as is the film’s over­all execution.

The DIY spir­it of punk is alive in the imper­fect pro­duc­tion val­ues, which are suit­ably endear­ing until the (remark­able) dia­logue is muf­fled by music and/​or poor record­ing con­di­tions. Nonethe­less, the film suc­ceeds in its explo­ration of sub­cul­ture, indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and col­lec­tive iden­ti­ty, from a fem­i­nist perspective.

To get this long-await­ed doc over the line, Bad­g­ley ran a Kick­starter cam­paign in 2015. He’d already been work­ing on the film for two years with exec­u­tive pro­duc­er Jen­nifer Sha­gawat, a pal of the band who ensured Here to Be Heard would reflect the last wish­es of the late Ari Up, who passed away in 2010.

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