Weekend Diva Blogging: Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex

By Kathy G.

Poly Styrene backstage at CBGB's in 1978. She used a schoolbus-shaped lunchbox (seen in photo, at upper right) as a purse.

Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard
But I think -- oh bondage, up yours!

   -- "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!", X-Ray Spex

Poly, you had me at "up yours!"

The first time I ever heard X-Ray Spex's seminal (feminal?)  "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!" it was love. They were everything I wanted in a band: loud, rude, raw, and exuberantly, ass-kickingly feminist. My oppressed and unhappy adolescent heart swelled with joy.

They were great, but as my friend Scott McLemee points out, X-Ray Spex, for all its glory, never quite found an audience among American punks. Other female-headed British punk bands of that era found some degree of sorta kinda semi-popularity (like Siouxsie and the Banshees) or at least had a serious hardcore cult goin' on (The Slits, The Raincoats).

But not the Spex, a fact which Scott attributes to their having a saxophonist in the band: "The punk-rock taste police could be pretty rigid about that sort of thing." And it's not really like Lora Logic was an especially good saxophone player, either (though that's part of the charm). The sax playing is more at the Bill Clinton level, except I think Bill had more chops. In fact, there's a pretty funny video floating around Youtube somewhere that's a mash-up of an X-Ray Spex video with interpolated footage of Bill on the sax.

Now on to Poly Styrene. Born Marian Joan Elliott in Brixton to biracial parents, she was 19 when the first X-Ray Spex recordings were released. She actually looked even younger, maybe partly because she was still in braces. With a voice that's been described as "effervescently discordant" and "powerful enough to drill holes through sheet metal," Poly was a compelling stage presence. She also had a funky, outrageous sense of style, dressing in military uniforms, wearing an Army helmet over her Afro, and using a schoolbus-shaped lunchbox as a purse. She wasn't exactly your nonthreatening, male-approved, media-safe rock goddess, but she was confident, outspoken, witty, energetic, and above all, uniquely, defiantly herself. Which is one of the things I honor most about her -- she modeled a different way for women to be.   

The Spex' songs were mostly socio-political in nature -- like a lot of other British bands of the day, the lyrics were often anti-consumerist and critical of capitalism and advertising. Their songs were described as "vivid word portraits of consumer fantasy gone mad." The band only existed from 1976 to 1979; then they broke up and Poly ran off with the Hare Krishnas (I'm not kidding). Poly later released a solo album, and the band reunited for a time in the 90s. Supposedly they're scheduled to re-reunite later this year, but those kinds of gambits can be depressing, and I prefer to remember them as they were.

Why did I choose to write about Poly Styrene (one of the all-time great punk names, btw) this week? I think it's partly because a month or two ago, I listened to Germ-Free Adolescents for the first time in years, and I was surprised at how fresh and vibrant it sounds, still. It's also because, having started this whole blogging thing, I'm reminded once again of the similarities between the left blogosphere and punk rock.

I haven't heard this expressed before, but I can't believe I'm the first person who's noticed it/felt it. Punk came along when rock and roll was flabby, stale, boring and corrupt and managed to shock some life back into it. In some ways the situation with the blogosphere is utterly incomparable, because no matter how hard mainstream rock and roll sucked in the mid-70s, our media and our political system today are far more deeply and frighteningly decadent, dysfunctional, and disgraced.

But in the blogosphere, there's often a blast of rude and righteous anger that's exhilarating and ultimately, empowering, as there was with punk. There's also the democratizing, do-it-yourself ethos of the blogosphere. Just as any joker with a computer can bloody well start a blog, any member of the human species who learned three chords on a guitar could start a band. And in both cases the "amateurs" have far outshone the professionals. Just as the Ramones were worth boatloads of Emerson, Lake, and Palmers, Digby is worth any number of David Broders.

Indeed, there are people in the left blogosphere who spent some time on the punk scene. I know James Wolcott and Jane Hamsher were involved with punk at one time. And come to think of it, the indie film scene Jane was a part of also has some parallels to punk rock and to the blogosphere.

Anyway, it seems to me that, just as punk rock was where it was at in the mid-70s to early 80s, and indie film was the place to be in the mid-to-late 80s, the excitement and cultural energy these days is with the left blogosphere.

Well, after that digression, back to Poly Styrene, who no doubt contributed in some small fashion to my becoming the foul-mouthed fem blogger I am today.

There weren't as many Youtubes of X-Ray Spex as I would have liked, but there were some decent ones. Unfortunately, there were no good videos of them performing "Oh Bondage, Up Yours," which has got to be their greatest song. Okay, there is one video (which you can find here) but the sound and visual quality are so shaky that I decided to just post an audio Youtube of the song. It's below -- the visual is the cover of their album Germ Free Adolescents, and it's an image that always tickled me.

Here's another one of their great songs, the trippy "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo," complete with cheesy special effects:

Next, a song about love, adolescence, and obsessive compulsive disorder that I always found kinda sweet, "Germ Free Adolescents":

Another of their anti-consumerist anthems, "Art-I-ficial." Key lyric: "I wanna be instamatic / I wanna be a frozen pea / I wannna be dehydrated / In a consumer society."

And finally, "I Am a Poseur."

Comments

[MadDogM13]

Love your blog, and love this series. And especially love your attention to this overlooked godmother of punk. Sure sounds to me like Exene listened to her, and I know the divas in Sleater-Kinney were fans and inheritors.

Do you know if she's still a practicing Hare Krishna?

[ykcir]

No fair on ELP!! Listen to their predecessors The Nice doing "America" from West Side Story--very punk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NArOpaKC3E

[snarkout]

Kathy, I love this band -- I was listening to the recently-ish issued Essential Logic compilation last week -- but I think the reason they don't get their due in the U.S. is that the band was defunct before punk broke in the U.S. First Lora Logic then Styrene dropped out (Styrene to join the Krishnas, Logic to gig around with the Raincoats and Essential Logic [and then join the Krishnas]). I'm fairly sure that the Raincoats hadn't even toured the U.S. by the time that X-Ray Spex were defunct.

Going to cover Kleenex at some point?

http://www.amazon.com/Liliput-Kleenex/dp/B000056KY8

[snarkout]

Sorry, I was recapitulating what you said. But yeah -- X-Ray Spex were gone before the Raincoats had put out an album, and before London Calling was released in the U.S., so it's not surprising that they never attracted much of a following here. I believe Jon Savage devotes some space to them in England's Dreaming, though.

[Scott McLemee]

Well, not to get into an argument about "when punk broke" in the U.S. -- but I'm inclined to say rather that it was here to begin with and only "broke" in the UK later.

Anyway, look again at the picture of Poly at the top of this post. She's at CBGB in 1978.

Although the band broke up not much later, that doesn't entirely explain why they had so little impact. Being interested in punk and postpunk in the early 1980s meant tracking down defunct bands. As I recall, you'd find "Oh Bondage" on some compilations, but that was about it.

By contrast, Wire had a serious cult following here, even though its lifespan overlapped with that of X Ray Spex pretty closely.

[snarkout]

Wire were around through 1981, though I take your point. It's probably more that there were some outspoken Wire fans (notably Mike Watt) in the '80s. The Slits had John Peel championing them; the Raincoats (later) had Kurt Cobain; the Runaways had a million riot grrl bands (and moved a ton more records than the others). Of course, saying that X-Ray Spex weren't famous and influential because they weren't famous and influential begs the question, but other than a Kim Gordon cover of "Oh Bondage Up Yours" they really don't seem to have made as much as an impact as they probably deserved.

(And I'll grant that London '77 is an adaption of Detroit/NE Ohio '75 and various New York iterations of the same, but saying that it broke in the UK is okay shorthand for how it played out commercially, right? I wasn't there, so all I have to go on is what got people revved up enough to write books.)

[Scott McLemee]

I think of Wire being more or less kaput as of '79.

Actually the main reason Wire springs so readily to mind is that this post sent me to the shelves to find my X Ray Spex double CD (lots of versions of what wasn't, alas, a huge output) only to discover that it's missing in action. But the alphabet being what it is, this has turned into an occasion to revisit "Pink Flag" and "154."

So...thanks, Kathy! Great set of YouTube links too.

[Kathy G.]

Snarkout, not sure who else I'll do in this series -- it will depend on my mood. And MadDogM13, yes, I think Poly still is a practicing Hare Krishna. The official X-Ray Spex website seems to imply it.

I agree with Scott that punk started in the U.S. first and got to the U.K. only later. It irks me when people argue otherwise. And Scott, I'm glad you liked this post -- your post from last year helped inspire it, in a roundabout way.

Also, I'm sorry you can't find your X-Ray Spex CD, but dude -- you've got to get on Rhapsody.com. It's only like $14 a month to listen to an unlimited amount of music (though it's more if you actually want to download the files to your hard-drive).

I know we fogies are still attached to the physicality of our CDs, tapes, and the like, but mp3 downloads are a million times more convenient. Rhapsody doesn't have everything, but it does have a vast amount of stuff. The hubby and I discovered it last year and it's given us great pleasure. We've listened to new stuff, old favorites, and other great old stuff we'd almost forgotten about in the first place (like X-Ray Spex). I'm listening to The Slits as I'm writing this. You really should check it out!

[Tom Hilton]

X-Ray Spex were amazing. One minor correction: Lora Logic (who did interesting Not-quite-as-punk stuff later as Essential Logic) left before they recorded the album; the saxophonist is Jak Airport, I think. Logic might be playing on Oh Bondage, Up Yours.

[will]

"Germ Free Adolescents" is sweet ? Jesus that is one of the most hilarious and tragic songs I've ever heard. But not sweet.

[Joy]

Seriously, thanks. I'm a big Polly Styrene fan myself. I remember listening to "Oh, Bondage" on a tape in the back of my friends old, falling apart car. Thanks for taking me back.

[Ray Davis]

Speaking as a '76 era punk, the critical difference was that Wire received an American release and X-Ray Spex never did. For "Oh Bondage", I and my friends had to depend on cassettes bootlegged from the radio. It was damned hard to find _Germ Free Adolescents_ stateside even in '78 and '79, and the rarer-and-rarer LP stayed outside my budget until after my first computer programming job. (It's still the most expensive record I ever bought.) _Translucence_, at least, I was positioned to snatch as soon as it hit the import bin.