Poly Styrene: the punk singer who challenged stereotypes
In its earliest days, punk was the reserve of white male frontmen, but at only 19, Anglo-Somali musician Poly Styrene changed all that. When X-Ray Spex formed, she routinely bamboozled audiences by wearing braces, shaving her head, and daring to be a woman in such a uniquely masculine genre. Her sound and spirit provided crucial inspiration for the riot grrrl and Afropunk movements, creating one of the most singular legacies in punk.
Outside an early Sex Pistols gig, it occurred to her they seemed invincible on stage despite the fact they were unsigned. It was a pivotal moment, given she’d attempted to chart with a reggae single and was dejected when it didn’t happen. Soon after her Pistols awakening, she placed an ad in search of “young punx who want to stick it together”, and in 1976, X-Ray Spex set out to stick out to do just that.
The thing that made Poly Styrene a feminist icon wasn’t that she sported braces to show she didn’t care about conventional beauty standards, but more that it didn’t seem to occur to her to care in the first place. Her clothes, often a bizarre combination of bright cardigans and mini dresses, didn’t speak to the leather and bondage trend that gripped punk either. Her daughter Celeste said this was in direct opposition to the contrived nature of punk fashion, which she did effortlessly by combining “granny-chic with kids’ dress up”.
Rampant consumerism was often what X-Ray Spex took aim at, with their 1978 debut, Germ Free Adolescents, poking fun at society at large. But it was their 1977 single that became most closely associated with Styrene’s revolutionary feminist message with its opening shriek: “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard / But I think ‘oh bondage, up yours!'” Music journalists would often miss the metaphor, assuming she was decrying BDSM. “I was just talking about all forms of bondage, repression, everything else,” an exasperated Styrene once explained.
Her shrill, impassioned voice made the band hugely, almost unexpectedly popular, given she spoke to an entire generation fed up with over-sexualised ideals of what being a woman in music meant. But it wasn’t without significant personal cost. Poly Styrene’s contemporaries often dismissed her, and her mental health suffered. On one unceremonious night after a routine gig, Styrene claimed she saw a pink light in the sky and felt objects crackle when she touched them.
This led to her being sectioned when she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. X-Ray Spex broke up, and she somewhat retreated into obscurity. But she never felt as though she was inherently troubled, once describing herself as an “observer, not a suffering artist writing from tortured experiences”.
Following her death in 2011, her complex life was the subject of the documentary Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché, but there was always a sense she was someone who couldn’t be captured fully. She remains a punk icon, and as her daughter once described her, someone who “you couldn’t tie… to an ideological or political position because she was so fluid – she was constantly changing her mind.” She doesn’t share the same wealth of interview footage and press appearances her male punk peers did, but it was always the music that held the true essence of her rebellious spirit anyway.
