A little before midnight, my taxi arrives at a club called the Vortex. The weather is atypically dry, and the neighborhood, like the rest of London, is a shopping district with its eye on the tourist trade. Half a block away ten or twelve teenage boys dressed like horror-movie morticians jump up and down and hit each other. Their hair is short, either greased back or combed to stick straight out with a pomade of...

"I think we did a lot to set the pace," says Up in her half-British, half-Jamaican accent. "We helped change music for women. And because the Slits didn't get credit at the time,...