Quotes from Viv Albertine

Girl bands still do just copy the way men move onstage. To me, that is so backwards, so un-radical.

Doctors didn't know if I would survive. The cancer was too big to operate on, so they blitzed it with chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

I read a lot when I was young. All the obvious, all the greats, from 'Le Grand Meaulnes,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' 'Fear and Loathing,' 'Catcher in the Rye,' 'The Bell Jar,' 'The Female Eunuch,' 'Valley of the Dolls,' 'The Feminine Mystique,' Tom Wolfe. Then, film took over for me. Film was so exciting in the '70s.

Strive to be different and better than what is already out there if you are creating - Benjamin Clementine does that.

We were very deliberately not playing 12-bar structures, blues structures, which rock musicians turned into such a cliche. We tried to... listen to the rhythms within ourselves and take the normal words we used every day in our normal thoughts, which girls hadn't written about before.

I'm still angry at so much - class, gender, society, the way we are constantly mentally coerced into behaving a certain way without us even knowing it. I feel so oppressed by the weight of it all that I just want to blow a hole in it all.

I'd like to be with someone kind who can hold a conversation and is in my age group. If that's too much to ask, I'll do without.

During my childhood and teenage years, everything I knew was at war. My mother and father were at war. My sister and I were at war. I was at war with my atypical nature, desperately trying to fit in and be normal. Even my genes were at war - the cool Swiss-German side versus the hot-headed Corsican.

I'm the angriest and most empathetic person you'll ever meet.

I don't believe in an afterlife. You live on in the people you influence during your lifetime.

I think sometimes men find it easier to be a carer than an accessory. I mean, most women I know in bands are pretty lonely. Guys don't want to travel around with you. I know loads of women who do it, but guys don't do it. They're not brought up for it.