The title of a brilliant new reissue collecting Vivien Goldman’s small contribution to recorded music says it all: not revolutionary, but Resolutionary. Over her five-decade career, the 61-year-old has been Bob Marley’s first UK publicist, an esteemed music journalist, French pirate radio DJ, reggae backing singer alongside Neneh Cherry and the Slits’ Ari Up, NYU’s visiting “punk professor,” Kid Creole’s biographer, and now the writer of a musical about his life, to name just the marquee gigs. For London-born Goldman, the enterprises are all intrinsically linked, her work rooted in making connections rather than drawing boundaries. “I don’t know whether it’s because I come from a very war-torn background, but that is really what drives me in all my endeavors,” she says, calling from an NYC tea shop for an appropriately freewheeling conversation. “I was a child of refugees.”
Bouncing between all the British inkies in the 1970s, Goldman became the UK’s reggae envoy, and reported on the ensuing racist violence and fascist uprising at home. She was among the first to draw the line between the Jamaican sound and punk, a relationship she saw emerging first-hand as a resident of west London neighborhood Ladbroke Grove: “Basic premise: Jamaican music is to punk music what r’n’b music was to 60s beat groups,” she wrote in Sounds, September 3, 1977. Four decades later, Goldman’s collection of reggae 45s and 12-inches was acquired by New York University’s Fales Library (also home to the Riot Grrrl and Downtown collections). Goldman now lives in Jackson Heights, NYC. Her old pals the Raincoats still live down the road from her old flat—the site of some of the original punky reggae parties—which, she says, is pointed out on rock’n’roll walking tours of the area. But at the time, she had no idea that their diverse community was making history. “It was work. It was artwork, working at art. It was a job. It was very creative. I thought these were the best people.”
Goldman thinks that “larger forces beyond [her] control” are making her reflect on the period. The offer to reissue Resolutionary this spring came from a small German indie label, Staubgold, and the record’s release coincided with the opening of “Cherchez la Femme,” the musical she co-wrote with August Darnell about his time leading disco punks Kid Creole and the Coconuts, which resulted from their meeting in 1981 for an NME profile. Last year, she wrote the liner notes for the reissued catalogue of Darnell’s ZE Records labelmate and post-punk contemporary Lizzy Mercier Descloux. The clash of projects reminded her, she says, that “it’s possible to do everything at once. It reminds me of the expansiveness of that time.”
It also caused her to reflect on how the development of modern cities has screwed over artists. “Gentrification and the one percent issue have dropped a bomb on so much non-virtual community and collaboration,” she says. “That is the struggle now, because I think people need that.” Goldman’s debut single, 1981’s brilliant “Launderette,” produced with John Lydon and Keith Levene, exposes the intimacy of the punk enclaves that formed her: a mystic, itchy dub pop song that interweaves domesticity and aggression when a guy she met by the washing machines proves as hard to ditch as a stubborn stain.
Warm as Goldman is about the time now, it being the post-punk era, her music was defiantly unromantic. In comparison to opener “Launderette,” Rock Against Racism favorite “Private Armies” and “P.A. Dub” are darker, exposing the masculine violence rife in London at the time. “If you can’t get a hard-on, get a gun,” she mocks on the former. Two years earlier, she’d sung with the Flying Lizards on “Her Story” and “The Window,” where a boyfriend “twice my size” is throwing things at her flat, demanding to be let in. Writing in Melody Maker in 1980, Jon Savage dismissed it as “a woman’s song,” but for Goldman, it was a spin on the activity she saw in the streets of west London. “Street violence is emblematic of a broader level of violence, which has now assumed even more forms,” she says.
Rounding out Resolutionary are three tracks she recorded as half of Chantage, a duo she formed with Afro-French singer Eve Blouin while living in Paris. Goldman is careful to note the delicacy of issues surrounding cultural appropriation, but raises concerns about establishing barriers between music from different backgrounds. “Living here in America, there’s lots of discussion about appropriation,” she says, mentioning that she feels her own music is shaped by immigration. “Some people don’t understand that when you become the product of a multicultural society, you feel part of it all. You can have your own thing, but you do feel connected in a DNA way to it. I felt a part of dub. Dub was a part of me. That was Jamaica’s gift to the world, and it’s how it welded communities. I’m very into seeing if music can help bring about change in society. I still have hopes for that, even today, when music has arguably diminished in its significance among the youth.”
Goldman these days; photo by Janette Beckman
Goldman’s debut musical, about the life of ZE Records’ King Creole, recently had a short acclaimed run in NYC. She described it as a “screwball romp,” which is also a fitting way of describing the enjoyably wide-ranging conversation I had with Goldman, broken up into digestible chunks below:
She fell into the scene by accident
“I came from a lovely place—[vast London park] Hampstead Heath was my playground. I was very privileged. So how did I wind up from the veil of health going to West London? I guess people go where the energy is, don't they? Everybody seemed to wind up there. I was invited to share a flat by a couple of friends of mine from University. The [Notting Hill] carnival was having some of the first ever carnivals outside. I didn't really know much about reggae. I just knew that I liked it from having been a student at Warwick University. The Wailers were one of the things we would listen to. Then I found myself listening to Miles Davis’ On The Corner, we would listen to all sorts of things. It was a combination of getting that job at Island and loving the music and living in Ladbroke Grove. It was all synchronicity.
“The music was at a high and we had a fantastic social life. There were all these clubs [shebeens]. Everybody was broke but you'd pay a quid or 50p to get in. Of course, they happened because British black culture couldn't get a stronghold in the straight world, so people made their own. And that was similar to the punk spirit. Like my old friend and cohort Don Letts always points out, when he was playing that music at the Roxy—well, guess what? They were the good records. There weren't many punk records. They weren't danceable to in quite the same way, although you could pogo. You created a different atmosphere with the two sounds. There was a critical mass of more reggae records at that time to play in clubs than punk records at the start.”
She was Bob Marley’s first British publicist
“I did that when he was unknown and it was a struggle, but I was on fire about Bob Marley. Really, I was very cheeky. In those days, you could get a human and bend their ear. That way, even if the top editor would turn me down, I would go to the fucking publisher. I had no fear because I was a kid. I was a punk. I was just out of university. Before that I’d had a writing job on a magazine called Cassettes and Cartridges. I was fired because the initial editor there was like, ‘Oh, great, here's a young graduate who wants to write.’ I used to just sit there and write the whole magazine, although I was credited at first as secretary. Then I think I got them to credit me as staff writer. Then they brought a new guy in and he was like, “Hang on, where's my tea?" So he fired me. Then I got a job at Island Records.”
Making her own music was also an accident
“I was invited into making music because I'd been writing about music. Making music was a family thing for me—I was always singing around the house because my father had been a musician. Then people would hear me, and in that sort of freewheeling atmosphere of the times, the fourth wall that was holding women back from participating more in music became suddenly more opaque and fluid. People were able to pass through it more easily. To me, it had come more naturally to be a writer than to be a musician, because maybe that's what I thought people like me did. I had never thought of joining a band or anything. Suddenly, all these girls who I became friends with were in bands and it made it all seem much more possible. Since I had the inclination and some talent in that direction anyway, it was very, very normal for me to do it. So when people asked me to do it, I just went and did it. I had also been singing a lot of backup on reggae records. It was all very flexible and fluid. Take the Flying Lizards, which I now tend to see as the nerds of new wave because everybody was quite serious and some of us became professors.
“There were lots of ancillary activity, like the 49 Americans [a supergroup featuring Vivian, the Slits’ Viv Albertine, now-Wire writer David Toop, and more]. There was a lot of jamming, a lot of exchange. We’d come out of a London musicians’ collective, and improvisation was very dear to us, and spontaneity and working with others. In that way, It made it a lot easier for me to segue into actually doing music in a professional way, as professional as we were at that time. One of the Wailers had previously taken me in the studio, but that whole project never happened. Then the next person to invite me in was David Cunningham and the Flying Lizards, and [musical improv legend] Steve Beresford in particular. We did some recording at Berry Street, but we seemed to do a lot in this communal place in Brixton called the Meat Packing Factory, and that was an amazing exchange of early ’80s culture. The avant-garde group This Heat were there, and a very important Xerox artist who we all adored, who did the first Flying Lizards [recordings] with me, called Laurie-Rae Chamberlain. We loved him. He became sort of a missing person, swallowed by the streets. He's a very poignant figure for us. We all hope he re-emerges because he was kind of a genius with his Xerox art.”
She stole Public Image Ltd’s studio time to record her debut single
“‘Launderette’ was recorded partly at the Manor with PiL while they were recording Flowers of Romance. They'd be off communing with the muse because they took it very seriously. I'd be trying to sneak in there getting my little single done, much to the chagrin of the producers. Then we had a whole other session at Berry Street with all the people [the Raincoats’ Vicky Aspinall, Steve Beresford]. It's actually really hard for me to recall either session. The only thing is I forgot to bring a camera. I left it on the hall table. I got in a cab and was like, ‘Oh my god, I'm halfway to East London.’”
She and her fellow British feminist punks drew much inspiration from jazz and Afrofuturism
“We all loved Ornette Coleman and his harmolodic concept, which is non-hierarchical. I remember going with the Slits to see Sun Ra at a tiny theater on the Lower East Side in New York when they were over here. The majesty that he managed to evoke—there was an equality in the sound that was very uplifting. A sort of democratic ideal. That was what set a certain generation of female musicians apart—striving for a different sound. I remember that was one of the debates that we always used to have. ‘If a lot of women got to make music, would it sound any different?’ Some are just sort of brilliant within a formula and bringing a female sensibility and texture to it. But others were more experimental. That was a strand that may have been forgotten in the mixture of what punk even came out of. It came out more in post-punk, but people really were into [jazz trumpeter] Don Cherry. People like that were regarded as totems and inspirations, mentors for everybody.”