To round off a series of X Ray Spex related posts, here is an interview that Charles Shaar Murray conducted with Poly in May of 1978. This was my first reading of the interview as I transcribed it and bearing in mind where the band were at at the time I found the content to be quite strange. Poly herself makes the point that the topic of conversation through 90% of the interview is Poly, with discussion of the band confined to the last column of the piece and even the switch in the topic was at Poly's instigation. Instead the focus is on Poly's reaction to fame. In her comments she comes across as being in control of the difficulties that come with sudden fame. However, with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to read into these comments a vulnerability in an otherwise strong woman that would ultimately result in some mental health issues a short way down the line.
SUNDAY NIGHT in Croydon, and Poly Styrene's voice is shot.
Flu goes for the throat like a cornered rat: when the victim's a singer, the midrange of the voice gets ragged and shot through with static and the top end disappears completely.
Singing with the flu is like dancing with a sprained ankle or running with a stomach-ache: you can just about do it, but it's no fun.
Poly’s a trouper though: a professional. The show must go on, even if three numbers have to be dropped and the performance runs only a little over 45 minutes, including encores, top whack. Even when calling off the title of the number and giving it that patented Poly Styrene "1-2-3-4!" count-in (which must be confusing for the four male/instrumental members of X-Ray Spex, since it rarely bears any relationship to the actual time the song happens to be in) requires two or three run-ups.
Poly's flu is a drag for her, a source of worry and inconvenience for the band, their manager, their sound mixer and their roadies. But the kids at the Croydon Greyhound don't seem to notice, and if they do notice they don't care. They're more concerned with cheerful disobedience of the absurd "No Pogoing" (yeah, the management of the Croydon Greyhound has a sticture against that particular modern-world activity) and with having a bit of a pose.
The audience was pretty much straight punk dressed up to the nines; the kind of audience I hadn't seen for quite a while. Curiously, the strongest flash was of the similarity between hard-core punx and hard-core teds.
There was that same tight, enclosed, just-us atmosphere of highly specialised rituals performed in highly specialised outfits in front of (mostly) highly specialised bands, and that weird feeling that - at the very least - a small proportion of these kids’ll stay with punk for years in the same way that teds have retained that loyalty for all the trappings of a high point in their lives.
After what seems like an unconscionable length of time but what is in fact the standard rock and roll decompression/setting up the gear time, X-Ray Spex hit the stage: Rudi on saxophone (he looks like a New Wave Bill Nelson and has only been blowing for eight or nine months, though you'd never know it), BP on drums (big, blond and bulky; only been playing a year, and it doesn't show either), Jack Airport on guitar (whacking out the blowtorch ramalama in the finest tradition of Steve Jones and Johnny Ramone) and bassist Paul Dean (the oldest member of the band though he looks the youngest, wheeling out fine looping Rickenbacker bass lines)... and Poly.
The overwhelming impression that you get off Poly Styrene on stage is her sheer, unassuming friendliness and high spirit. She doesn't seem to be performing so much as simply singing the songs and dancing around and grinning and having a good time, and it is this seeming absence of artifice that makes her such an excellent performer.
The conventional discipline of New Wave performing styles has eliminated a lot of the old posturing only to replace it with a new set of anti-postures, which are ultimately no less stylized, but Poly cuts through all the bullshit just by bopping round the stage with that mile-wide grin, free from any hint or taint of artifice, just having a flat-out good time, a genuine, communicable enjoyment of the right here and right now.
The thing is that to considerable masses of people Poly Styrene is some kind of media event, and somewhere in the background of all the garf is the fact that she's in some kind of rock band called X-Ray Spex. Girls' junior glossies and Sunday supplements know all about Poly's taste in shoes, family background, Views On Life In General and so on. One could almost imagine Honey or phoning her up for a quick quote about what she thinks about abortion or Princess Margaret; all the standard celeb stuff. She is therefore a Face to people who've never heard her records or seen her perform.
Which is an indication of how the mass media's collective mind works, because the whole reason that Poly Styrene is now famous is precisely because she sings and writes for X-Ray-Spex. But then if you say "Poly Styrene" to people who aren't particularly into rock and roll they may well know who you're talking about. Say ('X-Ray Spex" to those people and watch their faces go blank.
It's through circumstances like these that you get situations where certain people get incredibly famous for no other reason than than they're well-known, and their celebrityhood is the most real thing about them. They may nominally be actors or singers or models, but that's jive: what they are is really Celebrities.
Roddy Llewellyn is the classic current example of someone who is a Celebrity for no reason whatever. He's made a record and signed with Phonogram (who should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves) but I very much doubt if he'd have gotten anything other than the bum's rush if he'd walked in the door with a demo tape. He's not a celebrity because he's a singer; he's a singer because he's a celebrity.
This whole syndrome automatically devalues anyone it grips: that's why Poly Styrene would be in real trouble if it wasn't for the fact that she writes great songs, fronts a good band and performs with such transparent joyfulness that you'd have to have lemon juice for blood not to dig her, just like they did in Croydon the other week.
She's an Original, and it is to be devoutly hoped that all the readersand witnesses of the Poly Styrene Media Event Show who haven't already done so bend an ear and eye to X-Ray Spex before they file her under "someone heard of vaguely, possibly a singer…"
BUT OF COURSE the real reason that Poly Styrene will ultimately never be swallowed up by fashion and by Thuh Sceeeeene is that hanging out with the scene makers and taste makers and groovy useless people that infest the London version of this particular universal snakepit holds less than zero attraction for her.
She did the whole Chelsea riff, living in a self-contained flat in the basement of Spex' manager's pad in FuIham, until the creeping plastic started getting too close and she got out, packing up her stuff on a day's notice and moving back to live with her mother and sister in the house in Brixton where she grew up."
"You feel all the time that people are draining you, draining off your energy all the time until you think, 'Blimey, I haven't got anything left to give. Leave me alone.' That's why I came back to live down here, because living in Chelsea got to be a bit too much. This is what I know: my family and my old friends and I feel normal again.'
She explodes into laughter: a volcanic eruption of laughter that encourages you to laugh with her. All but her most serious statements are punctuated with frequent laughter - the kind that you find described as "infectious" by the lazier variety of popular novelist, but when you hear Poly's laugh the cliche ceases to be a cliche. There's just the faintest hint of a suspicion that it's a sign of nerves; rooted somehow in a defensive reflex.
Still, if the hangers-on and the hangers-out and the energy vampires are already affecting Poly to such an extent at this comparatively early stage in her career, what's it going to be like later?
"Later it'll be all right. I'm a fast learner and I make lots of mistakes, but only once. It'll get to the point where I'll change and start again.
When I was living there, it was all these people who kept coming up to me and feeding me up with all these images and ideas which easily got me carried away as to what I was, whereas I'm really not that way at all.
"I just want to be like me. Me: normal person.
"They were trying to project all sorts of things on to me. People start coming up to you and pretending that they're your sisters, and coming to my flat and probing me to find out the answers to all sorts of questions. I don't know where they come from, all these kids, but they always seem to find out where you are… it’s just a whole little scene, that area, which is why I moved out.
"They think they're something special, but they're not. When it comes to the crunch they're really not very substantial. They're posers pretending to be something special and they treat you like you're something special so that they can know you and become something special themselves."
Is that what "l am a Poseur" (the B-side of the excellent "Day The World Turned DayGlo" single) is about?
"In a way, but in a way I think posin' is a laugh. But just dressing up and having a laugh - and only providing you know the difference between the reality of it and the fantasy of it. There's a line between what's real and what's games. What I was frightened of down there was becoming a thing like all the other people down there. I could see what I'd become like, which is why I changed and came back down here."
Spex have just returned from a brief season in New York (at the personal invitation of CBGB boss Hilly Kristel, no less) and the reality/fantasy line is a lot thinner over there…
"There it's even stranger, because they really idolise people. They scream and things like that. Oh, strange! People had already heard about us and came specially to see the band; kept coming up to me and asking me all these questions about this, that and the other. They try to make you special, because that's what they want... you wouldn't be worth anything to them if they thought you was just ordinary."
That giggle explodes again.
"It's strange
there because it's not very real. I tried not to get involved in any of it, but
up to a point you can't help it because people try and get you sucked into it
and pull you into their little games, and I don't want to get pulled into anybody's
little games.
"That's why I feel so drained, so totally exhausted, as if I hadn't got anything left to give. Well, I have, but it's as a performer and a writer, and to write you can't get involved in anything like that. You have to be detached from everything in order to write. I have to observe things in order to write about them: I can't get too directly involved.
"That's why I get a little frightened sometimes, because if I feel I'm getting too involved in hype and other things, all that sort of crap... interviews are all right, because they help work things out of your mind, but the other stuff is pretty self-indulgent.
"I don't want to become totally self-indulgent, because I write things that other people can relate to. If I get totally into myself I won't be able to do that. What I write will just become a reflection of me instead of a reflection of everything else. For some people that works, but it's not what I'm about.
"I don't personally want to indulge in my own fantasy, my own self-Image...
"THE DAY The World Turned Day-Glo" and the equally impressive but as yet unreleased "My Mind Is Like A Plastic Bag' are reflections of Poly's fascination with the synthetic excesses of the (you should pardon the expression) Modern World.
She celebrates the supermarket culture in the same way as the Topanga Canyon geeks and Woodstock dude-ranchers celebrate Nay-Chur. In America, Poly came face-to-face with Tack on a grander scale than she'd ever previously dreamed of, and it damn near put her off for life.
"It wasn't a conscious attempt to be clever: I just thought that'd write about all these plastic things because they seemed to be creeping in more and more, which is why New York totally blew me apart. I saw everything that I'd been writing about in extreme but for real.
"For them it wasn't a joke, it was the way they lived for real. For me it was all a joke: play with it, indulge it, have fun with it because there's not really that much of it over here. But when you go there it's so bad that you think, 'God, if that's what it's going to be like I don't want it.' "
Poly fights the encroaching wave of plastic by meeting it half-way. Her shirt front is adorned with carefully selected examples of exquisitely awful tack plastic jewellery: her very stage name is a comment on product-isation. Could she see herself going the other way and fleeing the tack by (gulp) going to live in the country?
"The weird thing' about all the plastic is that people don't actually like it, but in order to cope with it they develop a perverse kind of fondness for it, which is what I did. I said, 'Oh, aren't they beautiful because they're so horrible.'
"It's very perverse and I realise that, and that was what was so frightening about New York. People had developed a real fondness for all this stuff and when I'd go round to someone's house they'd give me things and say 'This is a Polystyrene present'. I just went, 'oh no! I don't like it! I don’t want to develop a perverse liking for it! Take it away! Leave me alone!' "
JUST ONE OF the pitfalls, of success: being taken too literally by people with little humour and less insight. But - in order to avoid the pitfalls of success - do you have to avoid success itself?
"No, I don't think you have to avoid success; you just have to avoid all the bullshit. If you can evade the bullshit and the hype you'll be okay, but if you start getting involved then it's dangerous.
"Sometimes I'll go along with it because I think it's funny and I think it's a laugh, but I don't believe any of it. When it comes down to the crunch ' I don't believe nothing! I’ll pretend I believe it. I'm a bit wicked that way because I enjoy pretending , I enjoy letting people think that I'm being pulled along in this little game, but always knowing when I'm going to make it stop.
"That's my saving grace. That's how I've survived all my life.
"I've been around a lot. I left home when I was 15, and I've been all over the place, and that's how I survived. I've done all kinds of silly things, but I always knew when I'd got to the point where it was time to stop: I got into a lot of tight spots, and up to a point I quite enjoyed them, because I've always liked playing the victim . . . up to a point. Beyond that point ... ah ha! No wayyyyy!"
COULD YOU see yourself drawing that line within rock and roll; saying this is where it stops and getting out of Da Biz entirely?
"Nope. I'd love to get out, but not yet. I don't want to go on doing this forever an' ever, but then again I have the temptation to do something else. What I'd really like to do is direct a film or write a screenplay. I'd do exactly the same thing; create a whole bunch of fantasies and projections and silly little games and do 'em on film.
"I like to feed up other people's fantasies, make 'em think that they've really got me going and then I'll shock 'em: I'll change. I like to be underestimated just a little bit. It's not just you that does it, other people like to feed you up with their little games and you take advantage of it until youthink uh uh, time to go ho-ommmme…
"That's what I'm like.
"No death to the
individual' for me. That's all I've got. Without it I wouldn't be able to write
or anything.
That's why I'm so careful of not being manipulated by anybody. Temptation's great: people will try and manipulate you, specially if they think you're easy, a soft touch, which I appear to be up to a point because I make myself that way. But I ain't easy: I do know what's going on.
"Or maybe it just goes on in my head."
Yeah, maybe you're just getting all sweated up playing table tennis with yourself.
"Yeah, probably. That's because I think too much. I'm not completely mad… well, I am at the moment; it's because I've only just got out of Chelsea. It was driving me mad.
"Nothing actually took me over, but I could see that it might and I felt very vulnerable. There's so many fakes up there… you get boys coming round trying to find out if you're gonna screw 'em because I've got this sort of asexual image…"
You've got what???
"You knew, I said that I wasn't a sex symbol and that if anybody tried to make me one I'd shave my head tomorrow. And so they come round and they say Oh, I really fancy you and they want to see how far you go and I say all right you can sleep under the table. A lot of them come round probing me up about sex.
"That's quite weird. And of course, if I sense that someone's trying to probe me about something I just feed 'em up with bullshit. I just give 'em what they want to hear.
"Young kids would come around dressed up from Seditionaries and they're probing me about all these rumours that they've heard about me. Such sexual questions; they must be perverts, you know what I mean? If you can't sort sex out for yourself there must be something a bit wrong with you. What sex is… I think a lot of kids are hung up about sex and that's bad.
"A lot of kids come up to me and they say, 'Oh, I'm on the game', and I just say, 'Oh yeah?' or they say they hustle because they think that 'Oh, maybe she was on the game when she was younger'. Or they say, 'I don't do nothin', I just give blowjobs,' trying to see what makes me blink, trying to suss me out. Or they say, 'I don't like sex, I'm bored with it just to see what you say.
"I'll say 'Oh really? I think it's great.' And then I'll say that I hate sex . . . I'll contradict myself all the time because I don't like being probed about questions like that.
"If they really want to know, sex to me is like a beautiful thing and it shouldn't be abused, you know what I mean? You shouldn't sleep with just anybody, you shouldn't sleep with anybody for money, you should just I sleep with somebody you really like and that's it.
"And it's not a power or control thing. That's what I don't like about sex; that's why I haven't slept with anybody for two years ... 'no, about a year and a half. With too many guys, if you sleep with 'em it's like a power/control thing."
Yeah, but that ain't something that's wrong with sex, it's a basic flaw in the human character and it permeates all aspects of human life and interaction. Sex is just the place where seems least appropriate.
"That's one of things I find most dangerous and disturbing, because it shouldn't be like that. I object to people thinking that I'm into that as well and trying to put me through those kind of things. It's all inferiority complexes etcetera etcetera-etcetera.
"When I was younger I used to be really insecure, really full of complexes, I used to think, 'I'll never get a boyfriend because I'm half-caste; I'll never get a boyfriend because of this or that . . .' you think all sorts of stupid things about yourself, and of course that's what's wrong. You have to think more about other people…
"I've talked so much about myself that it's really disgustin'. I should talk more about the band.
"A lot of people focus on me and think it's all me, but the music is good and if you could listen to it piece by piece and instrument by instrument you'd see how good it is. None of them have been playing long, but they're all good. I wouldn't like to say that any of them are better than any of the others or that I'm better than the others. I'm at the front because that's what I do and I write the songs, but each and everyone of them in their own right is as good as anybody else and as good as me.
"It's important to me that that's made clear, and also that I don't tell anybody what to do or what to play. Nobody treads on anybody else's toes. It don't work like that. When I formed the group I looked for people who had a natural talent. It didn't matter to me how long they'd been playing, If they had something there that was really good then it'd be all right and it would develop…".
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