Post by Fuggle on Nov 28, 2008 13:56:32 GMT -5
The return of punk's first lady
Thirty years after singing of bondage and toothpaste, via a stay at a psychiatric hospital and motherhood, Poly Styrene is back on stage, without X-Ray Spex and ready to take on the music world again, says Nick Hasted
Friday, 21 November 2008
The force of nature who screamed "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" in 1977 is nowhere to be seen. I twice walk past Poly Styrene, the sometime lead singer of X-Ray Spex, who is sitting quietly outside the Soho restaurant of the Hare Krishna temple she joined after she left her band, shattered, in 1979.
There's no obvious glamour or fire in the chatty, laughing woman I eventually greet. But in the less than three years that her band existed, Poly's thick brace, chaotically colourful fashion sense and untrained voice of explosive joy became a crucial punk flashpoint. "People think little girls should be seen and not heard / but I think, oh bondage, up yours!" went her calling card, an attitude taken up in the early 1990s by the Riot Grrrl movement, and by some in each new female generation. In September, X-Ray Spex played for the first time in 17 years. The sell-out show at London's Roundhouse is now being readied as a live DVD.
"I was nervous," she recalls. "Paul [Dean], the original bass player, was shaking. The crowd were singing and dancing in the balconies. I thought I could have done better, so we're organising an awareness-raising festival for 10,000 people, Women against War.
"The Slits [Poly's female punk peers, just reformed too] said they want to do it, and I've got a wish list: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Chrissie Hynde. Then the next year, we might do a beach party festival in Goa..."
All this activity comes from a woman who was sectioned as a misdiagnosed schizophrenic after X-Ray Spex split, and told by doctors she would never work again. But the spirit in her early songs was never going to die so quietly. "We were young and I was living in a nice apartment in Fulham," she remembers of her band's rare sunniness in 1977's summer of punk. "I never felt that I was disenfranchised or suffering, so we were a fun band."
Poly Styrene was born Marian Elliott in 1957 to a Somali dad and the white mum who raised her alone. As a mixed-race child in 1960s south London she learnt to talk her way out of trouble. Bursting with reckless teenage adventure, she ran away at 15, with £3 in her pocket. "I didn't feel scared," she says. "At school we'd read this book about a young Native American boy who, to become a man, had to go out into the wilderness by himself. It was a challenge, to see if I could survive. I lived on what we foraged in the forest. I did a lot of walking through the night, hitch-hiked from one free festival to the next, stayed in hippie crash-pads. I walked in a stream in north Devon all the way to the sea. I sat on a rock with a guy who looked like he was from another planet, with long, platinum-blond hair, blue robes, white eyebrows. It was like if I had touched him, he might not have been real."
The idyll was broken when, bathing in the river, she trod on a rusty nail. This barefoot hippie was let in the back of the Harley Street surgery of a friend's dad to have her septicaemia treated. Seeing the Sex Pistols in Hastings set her true course. By the summer of 1977, X-Ray Spex were playing every week at Fulham's tiny Man in the Moon pub. It made legendary punk venue the Roxy, noted one reviewer, "look like Ally Pally".
In 1978, she spent time with John Lydon and his cohorts in the Fulham flat where, reeling from the Sex Pistols' end, he formed PiL. "It was nasty, when Sid [Vicious] was around there with his big knife. John was always OK on his own. We'd be up all night spinning records. I think John was very paranoid, because of everything that had been built up around him. It was dark, the curtains weren't open. He had these crucifixes upside down on the wall. When his mum died he had her tombstone for the headboard of his bed.
"It was more colourful and fun round my place. Jak [Airport, aka Jack Stafford, the Spex guitarist who died of cancer in 2004] shared my flat for a while. Mad Mary, who was supposed to be my bodyguard, too. We had rooms painted bright pink and blue. We were that much younger and less cynical than John. I've always been an observer, not a suffering artist writing from tortured experiences. I was playing with words and ideas. Having a laugh about everything, sending it up."
Songs such as "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" on the album Germfree Adolescents (1978) show Poly's amused curiosity at the consumer society. The exception was "Identity": "the crisis you can't see". "'Identity' wasn't funny," she agrees. "It was partly from seeing a girl called Tracy slashing her wrists in the toilets at the Roxy, a girl who died quite early on. One of those rock'n'roll casualties – her, and Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Isn't it crazy?"
Poly wasn't immune to punk's mood of apocalyptic dread and revolutionary fervour. "I really believed that pop music could create a new world. That's just youth, isn't it? But things were changing so quickly then. So many friends believed 1984 and the apocalypse were coming. I used to read the Book of Revelation. But now I think change is slow. Music changes people's perceptions. And when they grow up, they might be the president of the United States."
The end came in 1978, after a gig in Doncaster, when Poly saw a pink light in the sky. She felt energised, visionary, religious. Objects crackled with electric shocks when she touched them. "It felt like a bad omen," she remembers. "Like I was doing something wrong, misguiding people. It made me think I needed to be careful before I put ideas out into the world. My mother thought I was hallucinating, and I was put in the Maudsley [Hospital]. Because if you see things and hear voices, you're considered to have schizophrenia. I really missed playing. But in hindsight, it got me off the treadmill. I'd been growing up in the public eye, with all my teenage angst. I'm sure that's what Amy Winehouse needs now – to do something away from the public eye, where she can grow up."
In the 30 years since her Doncaster vision, Poly has raised a daughter while having been diagnosed as bipolar, going in and out of hospital. X-Ray Spex played the Brixton Academy in 1991 and made a second album, Conscious Consumer (1995). There have been low-key solo releases, most recently the New Age Flower Aeroplane (2004). Germfree Adolescents has sold 50,000 in the past four years ("I got £178 from EMI," she coolly notes). Down the front at the Roundhouse, the boys who were X-Ray Spex's crowd in the punk days were replaced by girls in make-up, knowing every word. And today, Poly again seems the amused optimist of her early songs, despite the traumas that curtailed them.
"It's worked out fine," she says, laughing. "I feel better for having been on stage, having been told I never could. I'm starting to think maybe what I did then is working. Oh, I didn't waste my time. My youth wasn't misspent!"
A DVD and CD of X-Ray Spex's Roundhouse show will be released early next year
PUNK'S NOT DEAD...
Sex Pistols
John Lydon might be flogging butter these days, but last November the lead singer and other surviving members, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook, performed a one-off gig at London's Brixton Academy to mark the 30th anniversary of their album 'Never Mind the Bollocks'. The Pistols split in 1978 and reformed for a world tour in 1996. They performed again in 2002.
Magazine
Howard Devoto tired of punk almost when it began, leaving Buzzcocks in 1977 and forming Magazine, whose 'Shot by Both Sides' has a riff-heavy grandeur and opaque lyrics that heralded post-punk. Largely retired from music since the 1981 split, Devoto has reformed Magazine, minus late guitarist John McGeoch, for February 2009 gigs in Manchester and London.
The Damned
The Damned's 'New Rose' (1976) was the first UK punk single, and the band have since had numerous splits and reincarnations. This week, Captain Sensible and Dave Vanian start a UK tour in support of their first album in seven years, 'So, Who's Paranoid?', which plays to their mid-period Gothic psych-punk strengths.
The Saints
The Saints forged a punk sound in Brisbane and their self-released 1976 single '(I'm) Stranded' preceded even The Damned into UK shops. Singer-writer Chris Bailey kept the name after guitarist/co-writer Ed Kuepper's bitter 1979 departure. Fan Nick Cave has brokered Kuepper and drummer Ivor Hay's return for high-profile Australian gigs in January.
The Slits
The notorious mud-covered near-nude sleeve of their debut album, 'Cut' (1979), defined The Slits as female punk front-runners, with X-Ray Spex. A tentative 2005 reunion, with originals Ari Up and Tessa Pollitt joined by new players, has gathered pace this year, with a US tour and a major biography due. They play London's Astoria on 3 December.
Thirty years after singing of bondage and toothpaste, via a stay at a psychiatric hospital and motherhood, Poly Styrene is back on stage, without X-Ray Spex and ready to take on the music world again, says Nick Hasted
Friday, 21 November 2008
The force of nature who screamed "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" in 1977 is nowhere to be seen. I twice walk past Poly Styrene, the sometime lead singer of X-Ray Spex, who is sitting quietly outside the Soho restaurant of the Hare Krishna temple she joined after she left her band, shattered, in 1979.
There's no obvious glamour or fire in the chatty, laughing woman I eventually greet. But in the less than three years that her band existed, Poly's thick brace, chaotically colourful fashion sense and untrained voice of explosive joy became a crucial punk flashpoint. "People think little girls should be seen and not heard / but I think, oh bondage, up yours!" went her calling card, an attitude taken up in the early 1990s by the Riot Grrrl movement, and by some in each new female generation. In September, X-Ray Spex played for the first time in 17 years. The sell-out show at London's Roundhouse is now being readied as a live DVD.
"I was nervous," she recalls. "Paul [Dean], the original bass player, was shaking. The crowd were singing and dancing in the balconies. I thought I could have done better, so we're organising an awareness-raising festival for 10,000 people, Women against War.
"The Slits [Poly's female punk peers, just reformed too] said they want to do it, and I've got a wish list: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Chrissie Hynde. Then the next year, we might do a beach party festival in Goa..."
All this activity comes from a woman who was sectioned as a misdiagnosed schizophrenic after X-Ray Spex split, and told by doctors she would never work again. But the spirit in her early songs was never going to die so quietly. "We were young and I was living in a nice apartment in Fulham," she remembers of her band's rare sunniness in 1977's summer of punk. "I never felt that I was disenfranchised or suffering, so we were a fun band."
Poly Styrene was born Marian Elliott in 1957 to a Somali dad and the white mum who raised her alone. As a mixed-race child in 1960s south London she learnt to talk her way out of trouble. Bursting with reckless teenage adventure, she ran away at 15, with £3 in her pocket. "I didn't feel scared," she says. "At school we'd read this book about a young Native American boy who, to become a man, had to go out into the wilderness by himself. It was a challenge, to see if I could survive. I lived on what we foraged in the forest. I did a lot of walking through the night, hitch-hiked from one free festival to the next, stayed in hippie crash-pads. I walked in a stream in north Devon all the way to the sea. I sat on a rock with a guy who looked like he was from another planet, with long, platinum-blond hair, blue robes, white eyebrows. It was like if I had touched him, he might not have been real."
The idyll was broken when, bathing in the river, she trod on a rusty nail. This barefoot hippie was let in the back of the Harley Street surgery of a friend's dad to have her septicaemia treated. Seeing the Sex Pistols in Hastings set her true course. By the summer of 1977, X-Ray Spex were playing every week at Fulham's tiny Man in the Moon pub. It made legendary punk venue the Roxy, noted one reviewer, "look like Ally Pally".
In 1978, she spent time with John Lydon and his cohorts in the Fulham flat where, reeling from the Sex Pistols' end, he formed PiL. "It was nasty, when Sid [Vicious] was around there with his big knife. John was always OK on his own. We'd be up all night spinning records. I think John was very paranoid, because of everything that had been built up around him. It was dark, the curtains weren't open. He had these crucifixes upside down on the wall. When his mum died he had her tombstone for the headboard of his bed.
"It was more colourful and fun round my place. Jak [Airport, aka Jack Stafford, the Spex guitarist who died of cancer in 2004] shared my flat for a while. Mad Mary, who was supposed to be my bodyguard, too. We had rooms painted bright pink and blue. We were that much younger and less cynical than John. I've always been an observer, not a suffering artist writing from tortured experiences. I was playing with words and ideas. Having a laugh about everything, sending it up."
Songs such as "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" on the album Germfree Adolescents (1978) show Poly's amused curiosity at the consumer society. The exception was "Identity": "the crisis you can't see". "'Identity' wasn't funny," she agrees. "It was partly from seeing a girl called Tracy slashing her wrists in the toilets at the Roxy, a girl who died quite early on. One of those rock'n'roll casualties – her, and Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Isn't it crazy?"
Poly wasn't immune to punk's mood of apocalyptic dread and revolutionary fervour. "I really believed that pop music could create a new world. That's just youth, isn't it? But things were changing so quickly then. So many friends believed 1984 and the apocalypse were coming. I used to read the Book of Revelation. But now I think change is slow. Music changes people's perceptions. And when they grow up, they might be the president of the United States."
The end came in 1978, after a gig in Doncaster, when Poly saw a pink light in the sky. She felt energised, visionary, religious. Objects crackled with electric shocks when she touched them. "It felt like a bad omen," she remembers. "Like I was doing something wrong, misguiding people. It made me think I needed to be careful before I put ideas out into the world. My mother thought I was hallucinating, and I was put in the Maudsley [Hospital]. Because if you see things and hear voices, you're considered to have schizophrenia. I really missed playing. But in hindsight, it got me off the treadmill. I'd been growing up in the public eye, with all my teenage angst. I'm sure that's what Amy Winehouse needs now – to do something away from the public eye, where she can grow up."
In the 30 years since her Doncaster vision, Poly has raised a daughter while having been diagnosed as bipolar, going in and out of hospital. X-Ray Spex played the Brixton Academy in 1991 and made a second album, Conscious Consumer (1995). There have been low-key solo releases, most recently the New Age Flower Aeroplane (2004). Germfree Adolescents has sold 50,000 in the past four years ("I got £178 from EMI," she coolly notes). Down the front at the Roundhouse, the boys who were X-Ray Spex's crowd in the punk days were replaced by girls in make-up, knowing every word. And today, Poly again seems the amused optimist of her early songs, despite the traumas that curtailed them.
"It's worked out fine," she says, laughing. "I feel better for having been on stage, having been told I never could. I'm starting to think maybe what I did then is working. Oh, I didn't waste my time. My youth wasn't misspent!"
A DVD and CD of X-Ray Spex's Roundhouse show will be released early next year
PUNK'S NOT DEAD...
Sex Pistols
John Lydon might be flogging butter these days, but last November the lead singer and other surviving members, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook, performed a one-off gig at London's Brixton Academy to mark the 30th anniversary of their album 'Never Mind the Bollocks'. The Pistols split in 1978 and reformed for a world tour in 1996. They performed again in 2002.
Magazine
Howard Devoto tired of punk almost when it began, leaving Buzzcocks in 1977 and forming Magazine, whose 'Shot by Both Sides' has a riff-heavy grandeur and opaque lyrics that heralded post-punk. Largely retired from music since the 1981 split, Devoto has reformed Magazine, minus late guitarist John McGeoch, for February 2009 gigs in Manchester and London.
The Damned
The Damned's 'New Rose' (1976) was the first UK punk single, and the band have since had numerous splits and reincarnations. This week, Captain Sensible and Dave Vanian start a UK tour in support of their first album in seven years, 'So, Who's Paranoid?', which plays to their mid-period Gothic psych-punk strengths.
The Saints
The Saints forged a punk sound in Brisbane and their self-released 1976 single '(I'm) Stranded' preceded even The Damned into UK shops. Singer-writer Chris Bailey kept the name after guitarist/co-writer Ed Kuepper's bitter 1979 departure. Fan Nick Cave has brokered Kuepper and drummer Ivor Hay's return for high-profile Australian gigs in January.
The Slits
The notorious mud-covered near-nude sleeve of their debut album, 'Cut' (1979), defined The Slits as female punk front-runners, with X-Ray Spex. A tentative 2005 reunion, with originals Ari Up and Tessa Pollitt joined by new players, has gathered pace this year, with a US tour and a major biography due. They play London's Astoria on 3 December.
