Selling two thirds of my LPs two years ago turned out to create some emotional turbulence. The worst part was realising I had parted with records that I should have kept. First out the gate was my copy of Big Star's #1 Album. It was only an eighties reissue but a clean copy. The blood drained from my face when I realised what I had done.
Thankfully in the intervening time I have felt the urge to reacquire only relatively few. Indeed, I used it as an opportunity to pick up better editions, or copies in better quality. I remember the same thing happened when I had an equally huge purge in 1996. I ended up picking up things again which I had sold. To some degree that's one of the good things about vinyl, nothing I parted with was so rare that I couldn't easily buy a replacement. It's a mechanical reproduction, not an original work of art!
The last thing I picked up again though took me by surprise. I had never given it much thought previously. I first bought X-Ray Spex's "Germfree Adolescents" upstairs at the Music and Video Exchange in Notting Hill in the late eighties. I remember I liked "Warrior in Woolworths", oddly not even the most remarkable track therein, but never really paid much attention to the rest of the LP for 26 years. Eventually it was among the thousands of items I sold on Discogs.
Other records I reacquired in these two years snuck up on me in various ways - but there was something definitely uncanny about the way "Germfree Adolescents" seemed to be actually looking at me. I kept finding it peeking out at me in various situations. It was as though it felt I had missed out something about it. "Yoo hoo!" It appeared to be saying.
My reservations about the album in the first case had been to do with it's almost New Wave-like qualities. The saxophone on it had always struck me as a bit cheesy - played in that leering bar-band manner, like Lee Thompson's sax for Madness. The backing band seemed a little like jobbing musicians, probably with a pub rock background. There might even be a bit of the gutter end of glam rock about them? And, tuneful and even a little poppy, it wasn't as obviously confrontational or aesthetically abrasive as the punk rock I respected. So I sort of dismissed it...
In the final reckoning I yielded to its insistence and, seeing a copy on the wall at Flashback in Islington, put down the cash and brought it home. My first realisation was that its very nature, as I've just described it, was exactly why it is the most authentically punky LP of them all. The original, true Punk of this era should be ill-fitting and protean. It shouldn't be calcified into a recognisable form. Possibly the most punk recordings are things like The Mekons "Never Been in a Riot", which staggers along never gaining enough momentum to rock out, Joy Division's thrillingly bleak "Warsaw" - Chuck Berry's influence nowhere in evidence, or even the bedroom electronics of The Normal's "Warm Leatherette" - ultimately that's to say music which inadvertently sounds more like Post-punk.
What is so astonishing about X-Ray Spex though is Marianne Joan Elliott-Said aka Poly Styrene. Oh my! Let us not forget in the first instance that this was Marianne's band that SHE assembled. All of us have our own karma to work through. But she was freighted with more to assimilate than it seems fair for any single person to have to cope with. You can see ideas she was the first to explore being worked out more leisurely throughout Post-punk but notably by The Raincoats and Neneh Cherry, by Prince, and Bjork, in Hardcore and Jungle, and by today's alt-pop figures like Billie Eilish, Charli XCX, Greentea Peng, and Nia Archives.
Thanks to Marianne's daughter Celeste Bell we have the wonderful documentary "Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché" [2021] from which I found out so much fascinating information. Marianne was half Somali, a quarter Scottish, and a quarter Irish. This at a time when in the UK it was much more unusual to be mix-raced. As a teenager she had traveled East on the hippie trail. It was on seeing The Sex Pistols at a sparsely attended show on Hastings pier that she was inspired to form her group.
After a dissociative reaction to time spent with the band in New York, and exposure to harder drugs there, back in the UK Marianne saw a pink light in the sky after a gig in Doncaster, wound up being committed to care, and placed on a heavy cocktail of psychiatric medication. She remained on meds for the rest of her life.
Early interviews with Marianne uncover an exceptionally thoughtful and intelligent young person. The lyrics of "Germfree Adolescents", with their incisive critique of antiseptic life, are more poised and reflective than the standard oppositional punk fare. It's agonising watching her trying to field cringe questions from music journalists. Photos of her reveal a unique style and totally courageous demeanor which, with hindsight, look they would have been impossible to sustain amid the brutality of seventies Britain. Particularly shocking is footage in her daughters documentary, from after a concert in New York, when the tiny figure is mobbed by grim blokes fondling her.
Marianne had one of the best rock voices ever. Taking John Lydon's muezzin-like wail as a departure she brought almost operatic vocal gymnastics to bear on her ranting. But the voice is never grating, always playful, occasionally shifting up registers when that seemed impossible, swooping and ducking over the music, and placed beautifully, slightly back in the mix, in a way which curiously reminds me of Mantronix.
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| Poly Styrene, Lora Logic, and Celeste Bell. |
The usual rockcrit dialogue abruptly cuts off with Marianne's embrace of the Hare Krishna movement in 1983. However, her experience with visions and alternative states of mind, and her travels in the subcontinent connect her directly to the topics I explored in my 2020 book "The "S" Word." I reached out to my contact Stuart Coyle, the Hare Krishna Cow Protection farmer and former high priest at Bhaktivedanta Manor, and he remembers often seeing Marianne at the temple. He was yet more familiar with Lora Logic, the other member of X-Ray Spex who also ended up in the movement. Lora still apparently involved and living nearby. Celeste Bell's documentary was, I thought, very open-minded about the Krishnas and John Robb very sensitively discusses the movement. The film concludes movingly with Marianne's ashes being taken to Lord Krishna's spiritual home of Vrindaban in Uttar Pradesh, India.
If you've not heard it for a while or you are unfamiliar with it, definitely check out "Germfree Adolescents" a truly remarkable LP which seems to get more relevant as the years go by. I'm so happy to have welcomed it back into the fold. I'm going to have to check out "Translucence" now!