Even at 14, when she formed The Slits, Arianna Foster – aka Ari Up – was fearlessly spearheading punk music, writes SINEAD GLEESON
THE DEATH of Ari Up aka Arianna Foster at 48 is a huge shock for her fans, not least because her musical career spanned 34 years until her death last Wednesday. The firebrand singer of UK punk band The Slits was an uncompromising innovator. At just 14, after meeting her fellow bandmates at a Clash gig in 1976, she set up an all-girl band and spearheaded the punk movement.
None of the band members – Viv Albertine, Tessa Pollitt, Palmolive and Ari Up – initially, anyway – were accomplished musicians, revelling in the unstructured, avant-garde sound they created.
To others, they were discordant amateurs but, as with most things, the band’s response was defiantly two-fingered. In 1979, they released their debut album, Cut, memorable as much for its reggae-infused guitar as its iconic cover. On it, the girls were naked, save for loincloths and caked in mud, provoking the wrath of everyone from their record company to the women’s movement.
The band, with an ever-changing line-up (that for a spell in 1979 included Budgie, the drummer from Siouxsie and The Banshees), released an untitled demo album in 1980. It typified their chaotic sound and proved to a whole generation of women that being in a punk or rock band wasn’t the preserve of men.
On the other side of the Atlantic, their nearest equivalent, Joan Jett’s Runaways, were garnering the ire of crowds and the respect of a younger generation of women who wanted to play music. In 1981, The Slits released Return of the Giant Slits, before disbanding in 1982 when Ari Up was just 20. Married and pregnant with twins by then, she moved to live among tribes in Indonesia and then Belize.
After the Slits split, she was part of the musical collective the New Age Steppers, who counted Neneh Cherry as a member (the pair would later share a flat in New York). Her nomadic existence continued and she moved back and forth between New York and Jamaica. Foster also raised her twin sons Pablo and Pedro alone. In the mid-1990s, she gave birth to another boy, Wilton. His father died not long after he was born and Foster claims that this “really messed her up”.
In the last decade and a half, she continued to make music under her own name and as Baby Ari and Madussa. After she met Slits’ member Tessa Pollitt by chance in 2005, they decided to resurrect their old band. They toured and released an album, Trapped Animal. The new line-up featured Hollie Cook, daughter of Paul Cook, from The Sex Pistols; Ari’s mother, Nora, is the wife of Sex Pistols singer John Lydon.
According to Lydon’s website, where the news of her death broke, she died after a “serious illness”. When I interviewed her last May, Foster didn’t mention being ill and was euphoric about The Slits touring again. The interview started shakily – she was grumpy at being woken up – but by the end she was asking about my children and demanding I go to the band’s gig.
I’m sorry now I didn’t.
In the course of that interview, she recounted the death threats and physical assaults she endured in the 1970s because of The Slits. Even with the benefit of hindsight, she had no regrets.
“It was empowering, because we were all teenagers and we just went with our feelings. If it offended people – too bad – we were women who changed things for other women in music.”
