Ari Up R.I.P.

international | gender and sexuality | other press Friday October 22, 2010 18:09 by Dorothy Gale

Ari Up of The Slits has gone to the Great Gig in the Sky. Punks never die, they just pogo too high.
Full text at link.

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.

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.