The Slits - Cut

Each month we take a look at a classic track or album and discuss it from a music production perspective. This month we discuss The Slits' 1979 debut, Cut. The album wasn't a huge commercial success, peaking at number 30 on the UK chart, but has been cited as an influence by everyone from Massive Attack to Sleater-Kinney and Nirvana.

The Slits were the first all-female punk band; this in itself made them important, and ensured that they didn't sound quite like anyone else. In Jon Savage's classic punk text, England's Dreaming, he wrote that 'no women had ever made these noises before. For The Slits, the result was a maelstrom of over-amped guitar and sheet metal drumming and, amid the chaos, musicians creating their own order.'

Unlike most of the first wave of UK punk bands, The Slits didn't sign to a label straight away in 1977. Guitarist Viv Albertine explains why: 'Mainly we didn't sign because we knew we didn't sound like we did in our heads. That and the record companies wanted to market us and package us up as sexy punk girls. There really weren't any other all girl bands at the time. We had to wait till someone took us for who we were.'

They eventually signed to Island in 1978. Unusually, the label gave them complete creative control over their output; from the music to the artwork to the choice of which tracks to release as singles. This creative freedom was given full reign in the studio. The producer for the sessions was Dennis 'Blackbeard' Bovell whose history of producing reggae would come in useful when The Slits wanted to incorporate dub elements into their debut album. 

Bovell proved to be an excellent fit for the sessions – never standing in the way of the band's creativity, but stepping in to add his own musicianship and knowhow when needed. In an interview with The Guardian, Albertine remembers 'Dennis corralled us into shape and tidied up all the ends, but without trampling on creativity. It was so rare for a man in the 1970s to put himself inside the heads and hearts of four crazy young women.'

She relates that although the sessions were sometimes a struggle for such inexperienced musicians, but that this could lead to some interesting results! 'Dennis… and Ari [Forster, singer] were very strict. I'd only been playing for 18 months and was with these control freaks. I often went to bed in tears, wondering what humiliation waited for me the next day, what weaknesses would be revealed in my playing. When I was playing Newtown, they kept saying: "You're not getting it." By the end, I was so furious I just thrashed at the guitar and made strange noises. Over the intercom came: "That was fantastic!"'