X-Ray Spex

July 3, 1976. Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, a Somali-Scottish girl living in London, decides to celebrate her nineteenth birthday by going to see the Sex Pistols at a venue on the pier in Hastings, on England's south coast. Having dropped out of school at 15, the young hippie had spent her teenage years trying to launch a music career that never quite took off, largely due to the latent sexism of a scene dominated by white men. The rage she carried inside her was thus bound to merge with that of the Sex Pistols, who inspired her to form a band. Changing her look and rechristening herself with the curious moniker Poly Styrene (a nod to consumer society), in the closing months of 1976 Marianne places a couple of musician-wanted ads looking for "young punks" to play with her. Answering the call are saxophonist Lora Logic, guitarist Jak Airport, bassist Paul Dean and drummer BP ("Big Paul") Hurding. Thus X-Ray Spex are officially born.

X-Ray Spex were, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most emblematic British punk bands. Poly Styrene's voice – instantly recognizable – manages to convey, with astonishing charisma, everything from adolescent innocence to adult rage. Shy yet provocative at once, in her lyrics Poly paints the aesthetics of throwaway consumerism, piling herself up on stage with cheap costume jewelry and gaudy outfits sold at her London boutique. It's on that very street, next to the pub where she worked, that X-Ray Spex play their first official gig, and within just a few months they find themselves playing the Roxy. A year later, in September 1977, the band's debut single is released by none other than Virgin. It's "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!", later adopted as a feminist anthem, even though Poly would always stress its broader message over the years.

Lora leaves X-Ray Spex before long, rumor has it for stealing too much of the spotlight from Poly. She'll go on with Essential Logic and play saxophone for artists like Red Crayola and the Raincoats (crossing paths again with Poly at George Harrison's Hare Krishna manor in the mid-Eighties). She's replaced by Rudi Thomson, a former model and musician, who on the various tracks of "Germ Free Adolescents" only partially reworks the arrangements Lora had devised before leaving the band. Partly thanks to him, the X-Ray Spex sound proves to be something subversive and unprecedented; the saxophone adds further expressiveness to Poly's screams, as on "Art-I-Ficial", a true manifesto placed, not by chance, as the album's scorching incipit: "I know I'm artificial/ but don't put the blame on me/ I was reared with appliances/ in a consumer society".

On "Obsessed With You" the beats per minute spike dizzyingly, in a track whose DNA is clearly recognizable in bands that would form elsewhere after X-Ray Spex, Bikini Kill being one obvious example. Poly's vocal style, along with her independent, multifaceted personality, would greatly influence the Olympia band's leader Kathleen Hanna, as well as the style of other Riot Grrrl singers like Corin Tucker (Heavens To Betsy, Sleater-Kinney). But the album's influence on Nineties American indie/alternative rock takes shape more broadly throughout the whole record, including through the seemingly harmless midtempo glam-punk of "Warrior In Woolworths" or the dream-pop of "Germ Free Adolescents", which foreshadow the style of bands like Breeders and Wild Flag. Impossible to miss are the almost sing-song choruses, a departure from X-Ray Spex's usual violent refrains, which turn into viral statements: "He's the rebel on the underground/ She's the rebel of the modern town".

Standing out like a diamond at the halfway point of the record – closing side A of the vinyl – is "Identity", with the saxophone's polyphonic riff doubling down on the "arms race" Poly invokes and the risk of individual schizophrenia within the "society of the spectacle" ("When you look in the mirror/ Do you see yourself/ Do you see yourself/ On the TV screen/ Do you see yourself/ In the magazine/ When you see yourself/ Does it make you scream").

Everything becomes synthetic and artificial, in an almost prophetic way, as in tracks like "I Am A Poseur", where the voyeurism of future TV shows and social networks is anticipated with shrewd sarcasm ("Exhibition is the name/ voyeurism is the game"), just as "Genetic Engineering" outlines the viral traits of the power of scientific tools and mass media – the word "TV" recurs like a migraine-inducing mantra throughout the record – in spreading shapeless populisms ("Genetic engineering/ Could create the perfect race"). This track also revives the postmodern taste for historical appropriation, which also underpins "Plastic Bag", dominated by a fixation on Nazi officials and the everyday exploitation of the individual.

Poly, like Munch and Ensor, paints the alienation of her society and the masks humanity carries around with extreme detachment. This dystopian vision prevails on tracks like "The Day The World Turned Dayglo", set in a world where even trees become artificial. The song closes the album magnificently, with a tone and register that feel more like the opening of an abyss than a definitive ending.

"Germ Free Adolescents" was later reissued in two versions: the first in 1991, with the tracklist reordered by Poly and including four extra tracks, among them the band's glorious debut single "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!", left off the original because the saxophone was played by Lora; the second in 2005, with a full CD reissue. But the band's story had already come to a halt many years earlier. In 1978, while on tour, Poly decided to shave her head at John Lydon's house. She did it as a symbolic act, according to what she told the tabloids, not wanting to be labeled a sex symbol. In truth, fame was starting to put serious pressure on her mental health: in the end she simply had to give in to her demons. The singer left the band after a – mistaken – diagnosis of schizophrenia (she would later be found to have bipolar disorder). In 1980 she returned with her first solo album, "Translucence", but by then Poly's outlook had drawn closer to that of the Hare Krishnas. Meanwhile, she helped nurture the vocal talent of a very young Neneh Cherry, a musician's daughter introduced to music by Ari Up and the full Slits lineup.

Poly, Lora and Paul Dean would reunite to record a second X-Ray Spex album ("Conscious Consumer") in 1995, but punk's youthful rage was long gone by then. Poly, besides being immortalized in the landmark film on the London punk scene "The Punk Rock Movie" (Don Letts, 1978), would be celebrated after her death (in 2011, from cancer) in the documentary "I Am A Cliché" (Celeste Bell & Paul Sng, 2019), a project strongly driven by her daughter, who revisits not only her music but also her fight against misogyny and racism.

Forty years on – with plenty of water having passed under the bridges of punk and alternative rock – the message and sound of X-Ray Spex, as bold and prophetic as they were back then, remain, even today, frighteningly modern and relevant.

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13/10/2019