Renowned photographer and author Ali Smith was the bass player in NY Punkabilly rebels Speedball Baby in a previous life, a band who snagged an MCA recording contract and looked to be destined for the stars, or the moon at least. Sadly, that wasn’t to be, but with a string of incendiary performances across the US behind them, several European tours under their belt, and a Dutch record label that picked up the (Speed)ball when MCA dropped it, there is certainly a story to tell about Speedball Baby. And tell that story Ali did, in fine fashion in her book ‘The Ballad of Speedball Baby: A Memoir’. In our review of that, we felt it stood out from the crowd of rock memoirs as it cast aside the predictable cliches that usually clutter up these things, and instead told us about what it was like to BE Ali Smith, both in Speedball Baby and navigating through her early life. “We could all be Ali” we said, by which we meant we could all identify with her. Getting that feeling out of a rock memoir demonstrates a special writing skill indeed. Fortuitously, a couple of years back Ali relocated from her native New York, and the sinking ship that is the United States these days, to the more stable rubber dingey of Norwich, UK (my closest town) where OUTSIDELEFT caught up with her...
OUTSIDELEFT: Let’s start by talking about the book and how
it felt to me that rather than you just bigging yourself up as so many do, it was much more about
you observing both yourself and others along the way. Do you feel now, looking back, that you almost think of yourself then as a separate person, and view your
experiences more as an external observer would?
ALI SMITH: I think in some ways, yes. I was always an observer. I
was always taking photos. I was always writing in journals. I think I was just
trying to make sense of the madness around me that started at a very young age.
I also had the freedom of not being a celebrity. Because, you know, celebrity
memoirs have a formula, which is “I did this and then I did this”. Some stand
out, but mostly it's just “I did this. I did this, I am this person”. I'm
really weary of the overblown ego. There are very few people I want to listen
to who don't have some form of humility or self-reflection or an awareness that
it really doesn’t matter. All the self-aggrandizing wears very thin. You are
freed from that when you're, as one editor called me, “nobody”! Once I got over
my ego being blown, I saw the freedom in it, which is you just have to talk
about humanity and tell a story, and it doesn't actually have to tick any of the
boxes of the celebrity memoir. Then it's
all about human experience, and we've all got that.
OL: One thing that was very clear was that, unlike many rock memoirs, it
doesn't name drop all over the place - “I met David Bowie here, I hung out with
Iggy Pop there” and so on. You talked more about your personal feelings and
experiences and your life, and the band was just a part of that, which maybe saved
you from some of that as well. When I said in my review “we could all be Ali”,
I felt that the way it was written meant I could identify with you and live
your experience far more effectively than through a series of name-dropping
anecdotes.
ALI SMITH: I loved that line so much because it
immediately gave it sort of a tangible sense of having been something more
meaningful than just going on about myself, which sometimes feels icky, you
know? That it had a useful purpose, telling the story of the human
condition. I did think once in a while, should I be name dropping more? Is that
what people want, to give it context and depth? Touring with the Lemonheads,
and having that silly experience with Evan Dando, was meaningful, but I was taking a perverse pleasure in not name dropping.
After a while, I was like, 'well, just say who was there, don't be a jerk about
it'. There were always incredibly interesting people around, though. There were
so many people that came through Matt’s studio in New York in his apartment. Everybody
that was making music in New York in those days were coming through there.
OL: I was struck by the book cover as well. I don't know if this
was your idea or the publisher's idea to do this, but it looks to me more like a Chick
Lit novel. It doesn't look like a rock book sleeve, which are normally just a
collage of people brandishing guitars or up on stage with the lights on them
and all that kind of stuff…
ALI SMITH: Well, that was my art, and they did a lovely
job with the design using it. They came up with the spot varnish printed scotch tape, which I loved, because it was very in keeping with the book being
like a journal. When you said “Chick Lit”, I was like, 'Oh, I had not thought of
that', because I was thinking pink and green and strong colours, like the
posters we used to make for all the punk shows, but you're right, and that adds
a really interesting layer to it that I appreciated, because I did some work as
an art director, and I did shoot a lot of book covers as well. In that
publishing world, I was in that teen market, and it was always using strong
colours. It's like all of these things came together, I guess. You
know, I just like pink and green too. It's a good thing! The fact that it's not got a picture of me with a guitar on the
front really doesn’t matter. I don't mean to be lofty about it, but how you get to
express yourself is almost beside the point. The point is, you're expressing
yourself. My bass guitar didn't define, and doesn't define, me, or how I tried
to walk in the world and make sense of it, or input into it something that was
meaningful. It still doesn't. It's just
an aspect, you know, and that's true for all of us. How we get to the thing we
want to say is a sidebar. I think you know what I mean.
OL: I do, and I think they've done a great job on the book
design. You were the only girl in the
band though, and I know there have been plenty of bands with girls in them, and
it shouldn’t make a difference, but it still does. Did you ever feel like you
were like a girl in a boy's world?
ALI SMITH: The boys in my band were surprisingly on
board with who I was. I only say surprisingly because it's not a given. You
know, even in the underground scene there was plenty of sexism and misogyny and
aggression. Matt, the guitarist, had a real awareness of feminism and gender
politics. We are all still brainwashed and shaped by the world around us, but
our connection was very beyond that usual dynamic. Nobody
could figure out why we weren't going out. Nobody could figure out what our
actual connection was. Every one of our partners had to hang around while the
two of us were giggling and hugging in a corner and making art, so we had a
very inexplicable connection, which I think is super beautiful and transcends
all that boring, normal gender-based stuff. Ron, the singer, for all his
insanity has a heart and soul that bleeds for the world. So, he was never going to
look at me as an outsider. For Christ's sake, he was always an outsider! We had
an antagonistic, bad child/scolding mother vibe a lot of the time, but also a love, a mutual regard, so we never had to engage in any of that bullshit. I didn't feel different, except that I was surrounded by men all the time. I
wasn't a shrinking wallflower, but to walk in that world, it gets exhausting
and isolating to constantly being ‘Hey, I didn't like that joke’. It was
the 90s, and unless you were fronting Bikini Kill or whatever, having to be the
person that was constantly saying, 'fuck you, get out of the way, girls to the
front!' takes a lot of energy all of the time. Whether that was girls leaping on
me when I came out of the bathroom stall and hugging me and thanking me for
being there, or boys trying to flip the power dynamic on me when I got off the
stage so that they could flirt, but also not feel inferior, that stuff wears on
you! That stuff added up after a long time, but not in the band where I was just
doing the work, doing the music. We all fight in our own way, you know.
OL: One of the things in the book was the fact that
in the smaller towns, particularly around Europe, but also in the US as well,
you had girls coming up to you and thanking you for being there, because it
showed them what was possible.
ALI SMITH: The book starts with an incident on our first
night on tour, and it's a harrowing experience that could really only be
experienced by a woman on tour. I would never say that that's a reason a woman
shouldn't be on tour. I would just say people need to understand that this is a
visceral threat to be navigated all the time, because you're constantly putting
yourself purposely right on the edge. The edge of safety, the edge of
known, the edge of unknown, the edge of danger and excitement. There are big payoffs, but there are a lot of lurking predators out
there. When I was younger, it was quite shocking that they existed in the
underground music scene too, because I thought, you know, those were the
squares, and the rest of us were enlightened, and we were all finding each
other and clinging together in this world full of injustice. We were going to rattle the bars of the prison about it. Yet it turns out some of them
had gotten through those bars with me and were just laying in
wait. I didn't recognise that when I was younger. My impression of what we were
doing was a bit more idealistic.
OL: There are also still plenty of bands around where the girls end up
stripping off more of their clothes than the boys, or wearing very skimpy
outfits. They will say “It's because I'm empowered. How dare you tell me how I
can dress!” and all that kind of stuff. But to a certain extent, I still feel
it's because there's an expectation out there that they need to be sexy to be to be
on stage, and they feel compelled to be lusted after in a way that doesn’t usually apply
to men.
ALI SMITH: “Interesting that you say that. There really is a fine, sometimes indistinguishable, line between a woman saying, ‘fuck you. I will do absolutely what I want. I will stand here naked if it makes you uncomfortable’, which she has every right to do, and the industry that takes advantage of that for its own end. Sexism is still controlling the game that we’re trying to undo. I wasn't a woman who felt stripping, for example, was empowering. I felt stripping was sad and playing into a man's version of how a woman should serve his needs. I never had a problem with the women themselves who were deciding to do it, but disagreed with what that was doing for us collectively. I know many of us were trying to break the old system down with a fucking sledgehammer, and I get that the hammer looks different to different people. I know the ways trauma informed some of the things I did and the part of stripping or sexualizing yourself that’s shaped by trauma makes me sad. But for me the word “shame” should never enter into it no matter what a woman decides to do on stage or off. I just want women (and men - or at least the good ones ) to feel empowered and truly happy. But the music industry itself is predatory, and the idea that it is now egalitarian because of things like Spotify - which are just predatory in a different way - is nonsense.
OL: Talking of the predatory aspects of the music biz, your own experience with a major record company, MCA (who it seems couldn't even spell your band's name right!) was that they just
hoovered Speedball Baby up along with a lot of other bands, hoping for the best, and
shotgun blasted you and everybody else out at the world. They then dropped you when you didn't become the next Nirvana.
Fortunately, that Dutch label picked up the album, which helped you to get European tours and a following over here.
Otherwise, it may all been over a lot sooner I guess?
ALI SMITH: Matt, the guitarist, had previously been in a band
called Madder Rose, and they had been quite big in the 90s, sort of like an MTV
darling. They deserved it, but he'd already had smoke blown up his ass, so he’d
already seen the arc of the fever and the blush of new love from the record
company, and he decided that it wasn't enough. He switched over to doing
what his passion was, which was Speedball Baby. That partly informed the
idea that we never thought this was the be all and end all. What we could get
from it would be nice, definitely, and I'm happy it happened, but it wasn't
going to end us, because we just always thought it was maybe a strange idea in
the first place. I think we would have kept going. I don't know what that would
have looked like, but the fact that Europe opened up to us at a time where you
didn't have cell phones, you didn't have constant news connection, it was like
a whole other planet opening up to us.
OL: That was a clearly very intense experience. It's a great one
for any band to go through, but then you have to come back home again. What did
that feel like? Was it an anti-climax to have to come back to the States after
that?
ALI SMITH: It was definitely anticlimactic, especially when
I would be sitting at a job thinking, well, this is boring, but the tours came
more frequently for a period of time. We would know we were going away again in
a couple of months and there was this anticipatory feeling, which was kind of
exciting. For a period of time there, when we came back to New York, there
were lots of cool things happening too, like playing that leather bar in the
meat packing district with James Chance. Those were really well attended, full
of energy, shows. We were always recording. Lots of people were coming through
the recording studio, playing on our albums. We were playing on their albums. It was sort of 24/7, so it never really was 'we're on, we're off, we're on, we're off', you
know. There was always an energy around
it and I think that kept us going. I would be asleep at Matt’s
house and he’d wake me up at two in the morning because he's got a sound in his
head, and I'm trying to match it on the drums, and then we're going to record it.
That was an exciting, intense period of time. There was a lot of creative
energy around in New York at that time.
OL: I was actually in New York myself around that time, so I went
to places like The Cooler and The Knitting Factory, though
I never actually caught you play, I'm afraid.
ALI SMITH: The Cooler is where the sound man literally
leapt on the stage mid song and started choking Ron, our singer. Ron liked to
lay waste to equipment. He just couldn't help but do it. I think he'd broken a
mic stand and taken another one and then sort of wrenched that one apart, and
it was all chaos. We just kept playing, and all of a sudden, through the crowd,
launches the sound man who latches onto his neck and literally starts choking
him! And we just kept playing. It was really funny at the time. Poor guy, I'm
sorry about his equipment! I think that was also the show where Martin the
drummer had broken his leg, so we wheeled him on in a wheelchair, and he played
bass and I played drums, and then when we wheeled him off. The wheel caught the
keyboard of the next band, and everything went over! And we're like, "good night!" That was quite a night at The Cooler.
OL: Didn't you get
frustrated sometimes when you thought Ron's gonna fuck it all up for you? He's gonna get you thrown out of some place. He's gonna get you sacked off MCA.
He's gonna ruin it for you because he just can't control himself, or control his
habit?
ALI SMITH: There's a story in the book about MCA taking us
to a celebratory meal at the Odeon, which was a very fancy restaurant, and that
goes tits up because of Ron and his impulsive behaviour. What I don't write
about is that the label then set up a Press dinner the following week, with a table
full of Press, held at another fancy restaurant. We had chastised Ron so badly
after that first one that he was really well behaved at this next Press dinner
because we were all so fucking pissed off at him. But they were really
disappointed, because they had all heard about this explosive thing at the Odeon!
So, we kind of screwed up there too. Those
things can be fun, but they can be so exhausting. They're better with hindsight.
When you're the one who's just been really embarrassed in front of a huge
restaurant in this outrageous way, it's not the best feeling in the moment,
unless you're the one who's either high or is compelled to do it. Looking back,
I actually regret the level of shit that I gave him that time, because I think
the next week, he should have wrecked that restaurant too, and it would have
been a lot better press. You can't hold your hands to the fire, and then get
mad when you get burned.
In all those years, he only missed one show, which is pretty remarkable, but that show was a fucking nightmare for him to miss, because we were touring with the Lemonheads. We were playing colleges, which was a terrible idea anyway, and they hated us, but they loved the Lemonheads and they were always desperate for us to get off the stage! We were playing in this gym, which had a big basketball clock and we were just watching the time count down until, we had to go on. Because we knew we wouldn't get paid if we didn't play, it ended up being just me and Matt singing and playing. It was horrible. All the time, these big fun games were happening with people in inflatable sumo wrestling outfits bouncing at each other! It was surreal. We're trying to make a vibe happen, and we had ‘boing, boing, boing’ going on in the gym in the background. We got paid, but when Ron got there, we literally beat him up with these big jousting poles that they had for the event.
'You can't hold your hands to the fire, and then get mad when you get burned'
OL: People expect bands to misbehave, though. If the Rolling Stones had been very well behaved, if the Sex Pistols had been a lovely, polite bunch of boys, I don't think we would remember them as much. We remember them because they're not well behaved, and almost as much for that as for the music, in some cases
ALI SMITH: Not to sound like a big stuffed shirt, but I think I was just trying to hold on to some sense that I would survive. You know, I look back and sometimes I think, ‘oh, why do you have to be worried so much?’ It's not like I wasn't up for it, but it was a lot to handle. You know, some experiences are sometimes better as stories later on than they are at the time.
OL: That's true. You're in genuine danger in some of these
situations. You can be electrocuted, you can be stabbed, foreign police are
threatening to lock you up forever, all those kinds of things.
ALI SMITH: And being a woman, there's an extra layer of
danger too. I just wanted to know I was gonna be okay.
OL: I want to bring things up to date a bit by talking about your
life post-Speedball Baby. You’ve moved from the States to Norwich. I'm not
going to ask you what the differences are, because you've written about those
elsewhere. You're in Norwich. It starts
with an ‘N’, so does New York. That's good enough for me. Is place important,
though? Does it change you, living in a different place? Does it alter your
mental landscape in a J G Ballard-ian way?
ALI SMITH: Beautifully put. Yes. Everything changes. There's a Venn diagram of
things that are changing. Speedball Baby was 25 years ago. I am changing. I've
gone through a lot. The city (NY) changed, and then it changed back, in the
cycle that it always does. It's dire,
and then it's like, oh, maybe it's improving, but we hate those improvements,
because it's gentrification. Then it's back to being really dire. Meanwhile,
I'm changing. Things were changing all the time, and meanwhile I was calcifying
into this old New Yorker, a character that I know quite well, which I grew up
with, which I had around me all the time. I could see myself heading there.
There's a romanticised version of it, like in all the New York movies
from the 70s - walking through a
gunfight with a shopping cart. You know, you will not be stopped! There's kind
of a beauty to that, just getting on with it and not being scared of anything.
But it's also a big price to pay for me, who wants to feel life and wants to be
connected to my son, my husband, people, myself! And who has only ever been a
New Yorker. ‘Native New Yorker’ is a title that you wear like a tattoo across
your face. It's the premise, and everything works backwards from there. Once in a while, I say to my
husband "am I just a NY lady on a side street now?" And he's like, "No, don't
worry!". Moving is a relief. It's almost like taking off a heavy coat, but knowing that the
coat's still there. The coat is beautiful. You're so happy you've owned the
coat. You're so grateful for the coat, but it's getting you down now. It's
pulling your shoulders down. Life is finite, but it can be longer if you shape
shift and look around and keep your mind and eyes open to new experiences. And
that's where I feel I am now.
OL: As a native New Yorker, do you look back across the
Pond in dismay at the things happening in the US now? Is it now a harder place
to be a creative in?
ALI SMITH: Well, it's a real confirmation of our
decision to move, you know? It's horrifying, both objectively and in the fact
that all of my friends and family are traumatised, and they're living in very
visceral trauma all the time. I'm separate from it, and the good part is that
it gives me a slight bit of bandwidth with which I can offer to listen more
than I would have if I had been there, being furious all the time. It's hard to
experience that, you know? All of it, it's very real. I'm trying to just be
glad for the choices that we made and the opportunities that we had to get away
from it and hope that it's not going to shake out as they (Trump) might want it
to.
This monstrosity of an administration in America has removed all sorts of meaningful things or bullied Google into removing them from Google Calendar, including Black History Month, including Indigenous Peoples' Month, including all these things, and including Women's History Month. So, in that context, and beyond that context, I'm just reminded of how important it is to continue to hear women's stories, and not just celebrity stories, because that's how we know history, that's how we know what happened, that's how we understand and give context to our lives. It's really important that women get to the pen and get those stories heard over and over again. We have to stop this dumbing down. We have to step away from this idea that the only stories that matter are celebrity stories. It's just culturally stupid, and about the most punk thing you can do now is to be an older woman and to say, ‘no, you're going to listen to me, I feel my story was really meaningful, and you're going to spend the time to listen to it’. So, yes, I was thinking about the renewed context of the cultural hatred towards women and anybody who's not a white Christian man in America. We still haven't escaped that bear trap. Will there be plays that aren't produced because they're too ‘woke’? Absolutely. Will they find a home? They probably will, somewhere in the side streets. So, maybe it's all going back down into the underground where a lot of the good stuff comes out. That's the optimistic version. When people are angry and they're fighting, you do tend to get creativity springing up in adversity.
OL: That's what humans do, don’t they? They adapt. They
cope. They manage as best they can. They survive. Sometimes that's all they can
do. Everyone’s worried about the future, but then again, they always were!
ALI SMITH: Put that in! Everyone’s worried about the future, but then
again, they always were.
OL: Thank you Ali for taking the time today to talk to
OUTSIDELEFT.
Essential Information: ‘The Ballad of Speedball
Baby: A Memoir’ is available now through online and real bookshops. You can also listen to, and buy, Ali’s
excellent new musical collaboration with Marco Butcher (Jam Messengers/Jesus and
the Groupies) on Bandcamp here.
All images copyright Ali Smith.
