X-Ray Spex singer Poly Styrene r.i.p.

Oh Poly

Oh cancer, up yours

If true, extremely sad. No one else like her, ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSrOJ1ig6tI

Do we have confirmation?

Nothing yet, but people have started posting condolences on twitter and on her facebook page. If it's not true, AW-KWARD!

This is the time of day UK news outlets would be running skeleton crews though, right?

sad news for sure. Germfree Adolescents is probably bested on my Singles Going Steady when it comes to first wave brit punk for me

on my = only by, sry

According to an NPR Christgau story I just looked at, her album was scheduled for release tomorrow. Tomorrow.

It was released 3/28 in the UK, but from what I understand she's been too ill to really do any of the promotion she would've liked to.

I listened to some clips and it's REALLY good.

Still nothing anywhere an hour later. Really hoping this does turn out to be a hoax and we won't have to revive this thread for another 50 years.

Oh gosh. Such an inspiration to me as a teen. RIP

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/heardmentality/2011/04/poly_styrene_of_xray_spex_rumo.php

I guess that doesn't really add anything that Johnny Fever hasn't already said.

Yeah, that's from my editor at the Weekly there. Nothing specific still.

hope this isn't true

i hate to be the guy betting on death, but she seems like an unlikely subject of a hoax

really hope this isn't true. :(

germfree adolescents broke my mind in half when i was 17 and still holds up better than just about any other punk album of its time.

Symond Lawes
i just spoke to her mother and its very true, she passed away quietly last night, her mother and daughter were with her, bless you marianne. symond xxx

http://loudersoft.com/7484/rip-poly-styrene/

shit... Oh cancer, up yours

Yes very much up yours. RIP, we'll miss you. :-(

Here's another thread where we curse Cancer. RIP

Aww RIP. Such a great voice.

didn't realize she would have been 20 in 1977. I dunno if the other Spex were younger, but photos of the band made me think they were closer to 16 than 20 in their heyday.

christ. r.i.p.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue5jyj_nosc

probly still my favourite

RIP Poly. So glad I went to the reunion gig a few years ago. She looked so great then too.

Tragic. RIP Poly.

One of THE great voices in popular music history. RIP

Aw, I was hoping to wake up this morning and find out I'd been foolish to start this thread. :(

cancer.grrrr. RIP

RIP

RIP

Maura remembers.

fucking sucks. RIP Poly

Anything that still matters to me about punk was embodied in Poly Styrene.

Kathleen Hanna.

Just... :(

rip

Aw no! I literally found out TWO HOURS AGO about the new album, played & quite liked, and searched "styrene" to see if anything was said about it on here... RIP Poly :(

Everything I read about her over the years suggests she was a decent human being, sad to read about this, the piece in the guardian a while ago made it sound like it was bad, but not hopeless.

Great powerful, foghorn blast of a voice on those old recordings, this is awesome:

http://youtu.be/OGcWtPOL6aQ

She made me feel better about my teenage orthodontia. RIP Poly.

Just wanted to save this photo for posterity that Dangerous Minds used:

http://www.dangerousminds.net/images/uploads/poly.jpg

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/poly_styrene_r.i.p/

Also, Nitsuh's piece is wonderful.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/04/poly-styrene.html

It's a good piece. Not sure about the 'great women of post-punk' idea, though. Siouxsie, Ari and Poly were very much class-of-76 and mobilised by the Pistols gigs of early that year, even if it took them all 2-3 years to get records out. You might call some Banshees and Slits records 'post-punk' but they were solidly rooted in the ethos of London 1976. Delta 5 and the Au Pairs were provincial 3rd-wave 1979ers and of course much more overtly political and serious.

But yes, RIP. It's a real tragedy - she was a true original.

Dr.C! Good to see you here, though for an understandably sad reason. And that's an interesting detail you bring up; it's always seemed much more blurred over here/to a later generation.

I think it's reasonably straightforward to recognise those that came in xxx's wake but weren't directly influenced by xxx, but whoever xxx were influenced by as well.

i.e. as opposed to the bandwagon-jumpers, and those that could do their make-up "just like Siouxsie"

Hi Ned :) I still look in once in a while just to keep an eye on things :)

I'm also not sure about the 'great women of post punk' idea either. There's a tendency to group female artists together (or in other combinations such including as Debbie Harry, Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith) when what they have most in common is that they are women and quite different as artists.

After watching the film I downloaded the ‘Translucence’ album...one of the tracks’Sky Diver’ was used in the film that sounded great...will have a deeper listen tomorrow but sounded really nice

Translucence is quite good. She had a gift for melody, very much present in X-Ray Spex but it also translates to other settings.

Yeah liked that garagey element to the Spex sound, noticed that the narrator used the term Power Pop at one point but don't think it totally fitting.
But melody + drive may get you to something adjacent I guess.

Do people think of X Ray Spex as a punk band. I know they played festivals in Blackpool etc in reunion years. & played the Roxy but seems they don't fit the later imposed template. Sui generis possibly which should have remained a punk trope I would think inherently by definition and so on. Did she say she thought punk was just a label.

Thinking about a press release that was shown at several points. Dayglo logo on green paper or to that effect. Looked d.i.y but was that possible at the time.
Either white border around the logo was printed on green which I'm not sure is easy or green is printed on rest of paper.
Just thinking that effect seems to have taken more artifice than would first appear. No computer printing. & typing legible on top of that green.
Not a print expert but not sure that's something that could be done on a xerox machine. Which is odd. Stood out though.

Yeah, I'm guessing that was a Virgin Records promo sheet.

Daughter looks very young for 40.

And also sounds exactly like her mother.

She does, yes.

Dayglo logo on green paper or to that effect. Looked d.i.y but was that possible at the time.

Definitely was possible, and it was a time of graphic creativity and experimentation. I follow the work of Barney Bubbles, thanks to the great curating work of Paul Gorman and others, and there's an interesting cross-over from his graphic work with the hippie/radical newspaper Frendz and Hawkwind to design work on punk and new wave records.

Do people think of X Ray Spex as a punk band

Did at the time ( I was in my early teens and not going to gigs, but following music papers)...And I do now really; they were part of the wave that was inspired by seeing the Sex Pistols early on.

Even at the time there were 'purists' saying that the punk scene was already over by the time X Ray Spex had their residency at the Man in the Moon in the Kings Road.

The definitions around punk were always a bit fluid and frisky. I think Mick Farren observed at the time that the route from hippie to punk was often shorter and more common that people realised.

xp press release To be multiply printed?
Would think that white printed on green would wind up not looking great.
& green printed around white and then having the press release actually legible on it would seem to be a little difficult.
Could have this wrong but at a atime before computerised printing I would think it wasn't that easy.
Presumably this is something that is being produced to be sent to a number of different media outlets which I would have thought was costly.
BUt maybe it was a project that the art department liked so got behind. I'm just thinking looks like there's a lot more work gone into it than would first appear. & presumably isn't the only press release being worked on at any one time.

That is, dayglo logo had a white border. Dayglo yellow on green might not look so odd on its own , probably less noticeable since green/yellow border in other forms of colour creation. White printed on green going to wind up with distinct greenish tinge.

I wonder if press releases and ornate letter heading graphics were more important in the 70s, perhaps because of the lack of digital social media to promote bands.

One thing I've noticed from the Barney Bubbles estate is that just how many people on the music scene, even on the fringes, had their own logo. Ok - the one below is a bit earlier....

https://assets.bigcartel.com/product_images/228894620/F3604650-3CF9-4D11-88BC-084F4F87B13C.jpeg

blue on blue might look a bit blue

I'm a massive Barney Bubbles fan and a Stacia fan. Had never seen that love from Miss Stacia print. Most excellent!

well you're goingto want to have some kind of recognisable tag. Were people graffiting band names in places at teh time?
THink I was seeing mod revival names getting tagged in places or at least things like bus stops.
JUst adds a little something when you're doing your best to get noticed.

Though you do want to not look gimmicky and you also don't want to look like you sold out to the man by it all looking too utterly professional.
Underground artists are useful and can add credibility not that you're own shouldn't be enough. Badge of honour and the company being kept. Also presumably the understanding taht an underground comic artist isn't selling out to the man by doing that.

I definitely think of X-Ray Spex as a punk band, their noise and velocity and Poly’s immortal yawp all very much scan as punk (as opposed to, say, Essential Logic, who seem post-punk even tho “Aerosol Burns” is indisputably a punk classic).

never heard Translucence before, this is wonderful

X ray spex are/we're punk because they split before they 'moved on' with their sound, "Highly Inflammable" excepted

They're somewhere between punk and new wave without really being post-punk.

they are 100% "class of 77" punk to me, the LP is a bit more filled out in sound but all the lyrics are like ur-punk Rosetta stones

can I watch this now btw? where?

I guess the (excellent) title song of their first album is sort of new-wavey, but I count them as ground-zero punk, just like everyone else on the The Roxy London WC2 album, even if some of them like the Buzzcocks and Wire proceeded in different directions.

xpost upthread:

If you are outside the UK you will be able to watch the film very soon; we are working with international partners to bring the film to the US, Europe and beyond. As soon as we have more information on international screenings as well as DVDs and Bluray DVDs we will let you know (an email will be sent to check we have your current address). The film will also be screened at several film festivals around the world throughout 2021, the first of which will be SXSW, March 16-20. We will announce the full festival line-up very soon.

That said one wonders if VPNs could help with this:

https://www.modernfilms.com/polystyrene/watch

Sky Arts showed it last night in the UK which might mean it gets a repeat in the middle of the night over teh next couple of weeks, Might not. Worked with the Rob lloyd film anyway

it's on again friday (along with the Rock against Racism thing that was shown after it which also features Poly and was worth a watch if you needed reminding how racist the late 70s were)

I think I taped the 2 of those and teh damned thing taht was on after the RAR . Haven't checked tehy all came out yet though. may be low on space

The Rock Against Racism one looked a bit like it was produced by the propaganda wing of the SWP but was useful for showing that, despite what a lot of people seem to think now, punk and punk rockers were, for the most part, very much on the right side of history. As did the Poly Styrene doc.

My sister was at the Victoria Park gig... but so were a lot of other people!

Translucence is on Spotify. Probably never looked for it or under teh name Poly Styrene until now.
There's also a much later solo lp up there.
The Pre X Ray Spex single was included on ana anthology some years ago too so may be up there somewhere too.

That newer one, Generation Indigo, was released right around when she died. It's pretty good!

Just rewatched this and liked it a lot more. I think I was feeling too restless to appreciate it fully last week.

The archive footage and photography in general is very good. There’s something about a lot of the voices that still feels a bit flat and lifeless.

i liked that they broke away from the normal talking head presentation these docs usually have and didn't show the heads. it didn't feel flat to me but perhaps that's what made it seem flat?

US screening is happening! Online via the SFFILM Festival, get a ticket now

https://sffilm.org/event/poly-styrene-i-am-a-cliche/

Excellent doc!

Now streaming!

Amazing

Amazing

connection issues, sorry for double post.

One post for each strand of the double helix.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/arts/music/poly-styrene-i-am-a-cliche-documentary.html

I liked this, but I may have built up unrealistic expectations over time. I was surprised, checking my email, it was only 2017 when they started crowdfunding--feels like farther back than that. I know her daughter initiated, wrote, and directed the film, but I didn't find her segments especially compelling. I found the 40-minute BBC documentary, Who Is Poly Styrene? (still on YouTube), more moving. On a positive note, I spent the first half wondering why they hadn't used the amazing Top of the Pops clip of "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo," then almost the whole thing turned up. And although this was the second documentary in a row I'd seen with Thurston Moore holding court (right after Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child), his "Oh Bondage" story is a good one.

Thurston Moore is the alt-Bono.

Indeed