The first time ever I saw your face was in 1978. There you were stood on stage with your band The Slits, playing support to The Clash. The December evening air had crackled with raw energy and excitement, power and disruption, filth and fury. The headliners opened with Safe European Home. Earlier a drunken student had attempted to shove his hand up Ari Up’s skirt and his subsequent kicking at the hands of security proved that tonight Newcastle Polytechnic was anything but. Violence later spilled out from the student union and into the surrounding streets of the Toon. These were scary, threatening, dangerous yet exhilarating, vibrant times. The Slits’ febrile music fed into those feelings of disorder and nihilistic abandon, the scratching incessancy of your guitar its apparently nagging leitmotif.
The second time I saw you was in 2010. Brought to the Butlins holiday camp in Minehead at the request of Matt Groening you again had that Stratocaster strapped around your neck. Though still quite beautiful you looked older beyond what had been the mere passing of years. There was a pain and vulnerability etched into your face, a face that also spoke of loneliness and exhaustion. But from somewhere deep inside of yourself on that Sunday afternoon in Reds you mustered sufficient inspiration and hope to affirm that through your music and self-belief all of that younger reckless bravery you had held so dear back then in Newcastle had thankfully not deserted you. Despite a quarter century away from music in the interim, age had clearly not withered your talent.
And the third time was in November of last year, when I saw you right there on the front cover of your debut solo album. With the Stratocaster presumably tucked safely inside, you are pictured running down an unnamed road with a guitar case in your hand. The militia man and barb wired wall behind you suggest that you could be in a warzone and you may well be fleeing from danger. The look on your face displays neither relief nor terror. It is the eleven songs on the album which reveal so much more about the places where you have been and those to where you are now heading. They are songs which speak of an escape from one world and a reawakening in another, and the pain it causes and the courage it takes in trying to do so. Against this background of mixed and contrasting emotions, the thought of sexual liberation and the freedom of expression appear to remain as constants.
Viv Albertine’s story is cautionary, elegiac and optimistic. After years in some sort of quiet domestic wilderness she is back, harnessing her open and honest reflections on life, love and liberty to the clipped coruscation of her guitar and some of the most famous bass guitar runs this side of a Hofner. Like much of Viv Albertine’s life itself The Vermilion Border occasionally suffers from a faltering inconsistency, but when her breathy vocals coalesce perfectly with the shimmering insistence of her stronger melodies, as they most surely do on Little Girl In A Box and The Madness Of Clouds, they begin to assume a strange, disturbing hypnotic beauty which marks this record out as a bold and confident expression of faith in the human condition to not only survive but also to reinvent itself.
Rating: 
