Hard to believe, but there’s never been a documentary film about the Slits, the radically unconventional, female-centric, first-wave British punk group… until now. Bellingham-based filmmaker William E. Badgley, in conjunction with producer Starcleaner Records‘ Jennifer Shagawat, is putting the finishing touches on Here to Be Heard: The Story of the Slits, which is slated to premiere in September, probably in London, if all goes according to plan. This is the follow-up to Badgley’s debut movie, Kill All Redneck Pricks: A Documentary Film About a Band Called KARP. To help Badgley cover licensing costs and other expenses, he’s launched a Kickstarter, which has 23 days left to raise $30,000. After the jump, I interview Badgley about how he came to helm this important project, his take on the music and personalities of one of the most important forces in punk, and how they took on reggae and world-music influences in their first and second incarnations.
The Stranger: What was your main motivation for taking on this project? Had you been a big Slits fan before beginning it?
Badgley: They stayed at my house in 2006 in Portland when they were on that tour. Jennifer Shagawat, who is my film partner, was their tour manager at that time. We’d been old friends. We’d lived together and gone on tours together. I met Ari Up a few times after that. Ari was encouraging Jennifer to film everything, “We’re running out of time! We have to film now!” Ari wanted Jennifer to make this movie, not just about the Slits, but she had this wider concern about the strength of women in music. She felt that this wasn’t getting the attention that they should be. The Slits reforming was partially about righting this wrong about how she felt Slits 1 had gone down. Slits had been in the same living room among all these bands and individuals that went on to stardom, feeling that they’d been written out of a history that they were literally standing there for and were big contributors to. The Slits 2 reformation was centered around that for Tessa [Pollitt] and Ari. What they didn’t know was that Ari was dying.
Ari was so high-octane that they were not surprised by the sort of force that she put on. She put that on everything. It’s this eerie thing of hindsight when reading Ari’s e-mails, where Jennifer said those pressure-related threats were real.
Jennifer is not a filmmaker. But she filmed the band, in addition to tour managing, driving, booking shows. The Slits are known as the unmanageable band. I think they had 13 managers from the early period and a slew of others for the late period. They all feel very personally about their relationship with the Slits. They had such an intense effect on all the people they were around, because they were so intense. Collecting a lot of footage was the main of it.
When Ari passed, it was this big shocker. It’s very much a part of the film toward the end. It sort of comes out of nowhere and all of a sudden she’s gone. What it means for the film, Jennifer was really flattened by the experience. Tess, of course, even more so, talking about her lifelong friend and collaborator. Tess is known as “the shy one.” What I really think works about the title, Here to Be Heard, initially the knee-jerk reaction, rightly so, is to assume that this is a reference to Ari. It came from one of Ari’s interviews, she’s very vocal, she’s the vocalist. By the end of the film, because Tess is sort of the “last man standing,” if it works, you’re going to think that this is about the quiet one. And then that becomes the voice of every person.
After a very intense grieving and rebuilding, Tess decided to call Jennifer and say, “What’s the deal with this film?” Jennifer was like, “I don’t know.” I’d been a longtime friend of Jennifer’s and I’d met the band. I’d just finished an exhibition tour of my first film, Kill All Redneck Pricks. It was self-produced, self-financed, self-exhibited. We showed over 70 times in 10 countries and three languages. It was a good time period for me. I was actually working on another film down in LA that never went all the way. It was Get Amongst It for I Heart Comix about their dance night called Check Yr Ponytail.
When Jennifer asked if I wanted to do this Slits movie, it scared me badly because it involved major labels, archival from a very famous time period, which means it was going to be expensive. You can spend x amount of years of your life that you completely give to this thing that could be held up for reasons beyond your control—financial, legal, blah blah blah. So I was really hesitant. I may have said no around that period. One morning I woke up—maybe I’d been dreaming about it—and thought, “This is an amazing story!” It’s ridiculous that no one’s done this. I called her back that morning and told her I’ll do it. We’ll figure it out along the way. That’s what we’ve done. We’ve been working on it a little less than two years. It’s pretty much all filmed with the exception of one or two interviews. We started post quite a while ago. We have all the sentences pulled for the film. It’s 50 minutes non-consecutive edited. A lot of that’s scored by Seattle musician Ben von Wildenhaus. He does all the stuff I work on: commercials, short docs.
We got the archival deal set up. Don Letts, who is a huge player in this story and in punk in general, was one of the major people who introduced reggae into the British punk scene. He was the first DJ at the first punk club, Roxy. They didn’t have any punk records. They get this punk club and there are punk bands, but it’s so early on that there are no punk records. He said, “What do you want me to play?” and they said we don’t care. The scene was like 200 people at the time, which is crazy to think about it now. Letts’s dad was of Jamaican descent and ran a sound system, so he brought down a bunch of reggae records and it really worked. Those two scenes gelled. He was the “manager” of the Slits when they went on the 1977 White Riot Tour with the Clash. That really rocketed the Slits into a position of being able to do a lot of stuff. They went from a handful of shows opening for the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Buzzcocks, Siouxsie & the Banshees, to playing in front of a thousand people. Don got them started on what was going to be a very intense musical journey. He was one of the only people at that time who had a film camera. So he was shooting everything. Just about every piece of footage you see of the Sex Pistols and the early Clash was shot by Don. We knew it was important that Don come on board. But because I come from a very grassroots, punk-rock background and from the Karp doc, which was great in terms of expenses, because everyone who donated stuff to it was just really excited that anyone wanted to see it. The people who shot footage in 1977, that’s what they do for a living now, doling out that archive.
I shot Here to Be Heard in a sort of fly-on-the-wall way. The way it opens and ends is shooting the girls in their life now. I did that for two reasons. One, I did it to protect myself in terms of preparing for a situation in which the archival was not going to happen, so we didn’t lose the whole film. And I also shot it like that because it was what we wanted to do. We wanted to tell a story about these women’s whole lives. It’s insulting to me when you see movies where they [just focus on] the past. It’s a danger when you’re talking about any youth-culture stuff—not talking about what the whole life means. My film starts when they’re anywhere from 15 to 19 to now, late 50s, early 60s.
We shot it like that and we interviewed Don early on and he said, “I’ll give you an interview, but I want to make my own Slits documentary.” I wasn’t going to debate it, because he was saying yes. Every sixth sentence, he said, “Oh! I didn’t want to tell you that! I wanted to save that for my film.” We kept flying around and interviewing all these people who don’t ever want to be interviewed again. Finally, I showed Don—who made The Punk Rock Movie and many other films—some scenes and I got the best compliment I’ve ever gotten from a filmmaker. He was chain-smoking joints and watching the scenes, and he turns to me and goes, “You’re a real filmmaker, man.” I said, “Thank you! I’m trying really hard.” I was worried he and Tess weren’t going to like Ben’s score because it was so weird. But they both loved it. Everyone’s gone goo goo over that score. Finally, Don said, “I’m going to roll into this with you guys.” He gave us a great deal on the archival. Christine Robertson, their late manager from the early period, has been amazing. She also contributed a bunch of footage, so we’re way past that fear of not having the material. So now we have a lot of footage overall, which is really nice.
We’re cruising into our final months. We’ve got some premieres lined up for early September. After that I want to take it on tour, like I did with the Karp doc. I do all those myself, on foot. The last one was three months long. I’d like to do this one a bit longer. There’s no Seattle date yet. We’re going to premiere it in London. I got a call from an entity there. That gives me a real start date. I’m probably going to do Europe or the UK first. We did a week run at Grand Illusion last time, and that was really nice. We’ll probably call them back. We have one in LA. The nice thing about film tours is they’re so much more liquid than music tours. There’s no personnel and no equipment. I enjoy them so much more. Maybe it’s my age, too: I’m almost 40.
I’ll probably do the UK, hit the West Coast, and maybe go to mainland Europe after that. I want to hit Scandinavia really hard this time. Australia, Japan, United States, and that’ll probably be it. Unless we can figure out South America.
What do you think has been the Slits’ most crucial contribution to music?
This is the theme of my film. Whenever you make a film about somebody or something—I run a small documentary film school, and I tell my students this—you have to look for a thread, a sub-layer, the focus inside the focus. You have to say, what is it about this band that’s organizing everything under that umbrella? For Karp, the friendship of those guys was a major player in that story. That’s the thread we followed. For this one, it’s interesting because there’s so many of them. The most unifying one is the unwillingness to be contained. First, inside of a gender. It’s hard to wrap our heads around it now, but other than the Runaways, you had Suzi Quatro, these people who were dotting the landscape. But there was no punk band composed entirely of females. That’s the first hurdle. The Slits weren’t even going to entertain the idea that they weren’t going to be allowed to do that. A lot of that was drawn form the ethos of punk. Viv Albertine says in the movie of Johnny Rotten that he was so pale, so androgynous, so limp, that it was easy to forget that he was a man. It’s sort of like this backhanded compliment. The ethos was so prevalent that anyone can do this. That meant a lot in the face of what was going on, these bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and these bands that were so proficient that they were untouchable. No kids were saying “I could do that.” or a lot less of them, anyway. So when they saw Johnny Rotten onstage—it’s in one of the trailers we’re about to release—it was like whoosh, bang bang bang, everything coming together in my head at the same time. Sid Vicious actually plays a role as well. He was in a band with the Slits’ drummer, Palmolive, who was dating Joe Strummer. They were called the Flowers of Romance. Sid was hitting on her and she wasn’t interested. He was trying to act macho and was probably feeling insecure that she wasn’t going for it. He said, “I hate blacks.” She said, “I hate people who hate blacks.” She said, “Fuck this. Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to deal with this at all? We should have a band that’s all girls.” When they went to practice, they could just worry about songs.
The Slits were a punk band at first, but they won’t stay there, either. Where the Clash do dub or reggae, the Slits start to infuse it into their whole thing. It comes back to gender again. Jamaican culture is, how can I put this… about being incredibly open-minded about gender roles. At least at that time, they had a pretty set-in-stone way of dealing with gender roles. When they encountered Bob Marley in 1977, he came to London and saw what was going on and named a song “Punky Reggae Party.” He put the Slits in the that song, but—and there’s no way to corroborate this—when he found out they were women, he dropped them from the song. Nobody really knows why. The Slits continued to deal with this throughout their career.
But they didn’t stay there, either. Cut was a huge turning point for them in turns of popularity. It’s one of the 20 most important punk records of all time. Then they went into Return of the Giant Slits, which kept going into world music, farther out. They got Don Cherry’s daughter Neneh to join the band. They got Bruce Smith from the Pop Group. They completely followed the language of the tribe. They just kept going. In 1979, ’80, ’81, the whole world is saying no. Let’s bottle the explosion from ’75, make pop music, and make a shitload of money. They were never gonna do that. You see this inverse relationship between the way the world was going in the early ’80s and what they were doing, and it just destroyed the whole thing. The way the Slits talk about the ’80s is the way you’d talk about your most mortal enemy. They thought that decade ruined everything.
I was born in 1976. I grew up during riot grrrl in Olympia. I believe them, because that history was completely erased for me. I knew about the Sex Pistols and the Clash and riot grrrl, but it was like nothing had ever happened before riot grrrl. The explanation was that the ’80s were so “terrible” that it erased all the progress that had been made in the mid to late ’70s by them. A lot of fashion that they created that they did not get credit for, which went all over television and infused into pop culture. It’s too important of a story…
Early on, Don said, “I would never do Slits 2.” One of his reasons to come on board with this project was that I felt it was really important to cover Slits 2 in the movie. We so we go from 1975 to 2010, which of course is quite a long time. The reason [Slits 2 is] important is because that’s when you see the band become a tribe. It becomes a movement in that time period: You have two original members, you have a bunch of young people, Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols’ daughter Hollie, who now has her own great career, is in it. You start to span all these ages, cultural elements, different countries, and things are starting to be described as “Slits-y.” They break out from the classic band sense, as defined by these people and you’re either in this band or a fan of it. Slits 2 really blurs that line. I interviewed Adrian Sherwood. He never settled, but he’s also a successful businessman. He said, you didn’t want them to, but you couldn’t help but think when we were doing these crazy tours in ’79 with reggae bands and jazz bands and making punk crowds mad by listening to them. Man, if the Slits dropped it down to the shit they were playing in ’77 and just rocked it as women playing these punk songs, they would’ve been enormous. But they wouldn’t do that. It’s one of those things that fucked ’em over at the time. But it’s the exact reason why we’re talking about them today.
Cut is largely recognized as a classic album, but even more people need to know about it. It’s still not on the level of Never Mind the Bollocks or London Calling as far as the canon and popular consciousness are concerned.
Exactly. And this was a big concern to Ari. Symbolically you could say, for a female musician in the mid ’70s—and sadly you could also argue this today—is this situation of trying to weed themselves out from all these dudes. But for Ari, it’s not symbolic; it’s literal. Her mom was a German show promoter and heiress of the German newspaper Der Spiegel. She worked with Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Jon Anderson of Yes. Before punk even happened, Ari grew up with these guys in her house. Nora Forster had an apartment in London and this army of dislocated children, including Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer, ended up in her flat. She ended up marrying Lydon. Ari was the little girl who’d come downstairs to do a twirl and then be sent back up to bed.
In a way, it’s her birthright to be a rock star. She grew up among so many rock stars. It felt natural for her to be that herself. She didn’t entertain the idea for a second that she wasn’t going to be allowed to do it because she was female. But it was a double-edged sword. They got a lot of press that made some things easy for them. They were also treated pretty badly. People told them they were ugly. They’re not ugly; they’re gorgeous. There’s a moment when I was filming Tess and she looks at her scrapbook—we filmed the whole interview around that scrapbook—and she says, “Oh, we were actually quite pretty. We weren’t as ugly as everyone said.” You walk around with all this programmed bullshit from when you were a kid and then one day you realize it’s not true. This woman in her late 50s was always told that because of her hair and clothes she was ugly, so in the back of her brain she sort of believed it. If you look at a picture of the Slits from 1978, half the woman you see in Seattle now look like that. They started something that’s become the main culture.
We appear to be in a boom time for music-oriented documentaries. What steps do you take to distinguish your films from the countless others in the field?
Absolutely. This is gonna sound sort of dumb, but you’ve gotta make a really good movie. For me, it’s about story. The Karp film is a good example of that. There are a ton of production things in that movie that when I watch it now I wonder why I [made those decisions]. But those things don’t matter. No one ever talks to me about that. That film won it on story and on heart. You have to bring out that emotional, elemental thing—that’s your job. If you just sit back and drily vomit up information about a subject in an unemotional flabby narrative, you’ve robbed everyone of 90 minutes of their life in a 12-second-timespan culture. They will hate you forever.
On the other side of that, if you do your absolute best, take them to that emotional center, you’re going to wake up with them in the morning. That’s a really good feeling. That’s the important thing, to strive each day to hit that emotional center, to find all the emotional arcs that exist in the subject matter. I don’t make films that are interview/archive/interview/archive, until you get seasick. That’s what you normally see. The Slits film, you’re going to see many scenes of the women in their current lives, shot in mixed framing, so it can be cut to itself. It’s almost looking like a fiction film at times. It was seeing them as just living and hearing this voice over that drives the narrative. In the trailer, the way it opens and closes are good expressions of how we’re trying to do things differently. The middle of that trailer is what you’d see normally. I want to go way farther out of the box in the future. I don’t have anything definite planned yet.
What happens if you don’t meet your fundraising goal? Is the film still going to happen?
Oh, yeah. It just goes from being hard to being harder.
$30,000 is a pretty substantial sum…
You think so? Usually they’re like triple that. The Melvins documentary just got $90,000. The L7 one went over $100,000. Punk Singer did $90 something. This is just to cover licensing.
If the Kickstarter doesn’t work, it doesn’t change what I have in front of me to do. It just makes it harder to do it. I’m going to do it either way; I have no choice. To make these films, you have to be a little insane. It’s a terrifically difficult thing to do. Assuming you are nuts, you just continue to be nuts. You just drive it through the wall.
