This CD was part of the Kerrang! Hometaping series, in which various leading lights of the hard rock scene, invariably men (do shout me if this has changed, as I have since given up on K!, but my optimism’s economy-size) compiled mixtapes of their favourite tracks past and present. This one, compiled by Casey Chaos of parental-guidance-sticker-collecting Cali-punk-metal outfit Amen, wasn’t a bad mix, looking at it now. For the most part.
But it was the presence of I Am A Cliché on the tracklist that put the CD on regular rotation on my Discman. That track stood out, sparking nicely off The Distillers and The Adverts (the sum total of female input, there) and kicking defiantly against the roll-your-eyes-or-lose-your-lunch misogyny of Let’s Fuck by the Murderdolls (at least the CD had range). And the more I listened to Poly Styrene‘s life-affirming shouts, the more alert I felt to the complete shit that passed (passes!) for acceptable attitudes to gender in some of the rest of the bands on the CD, in the mag, in my music collection, in general. (For that jarringly educational juxtaposition, Casey’s at least to be thanked.)
From there it was a short leap to the rest of Germ Free Adolescents. Nobody forgets the first time they hear the crisp, sing-song pronouncement that opens Oh Bondage, Up Yours! : Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but I think… (when I set up this blog, I entered it as the mousefloat text description for the Music Box category on the sidebar). Every time I hear it, I feel that emphasis on but I think… reverb through me: powerful, unabashed and instantly compelling. And funny. “Playing with words and ideas, having a laugh about everything, sending it up”, as Poly herself put it to the Independent in 1998 (this approach was arguably worlds away from Amen’s bloodied-up on-stage histrionics, so it’s perhaps faintly ironic she made Casey’s list of hometaped heroes, but anyway).
Poly passed away this morning, having, as her site team have aptly put it, “won her battle to go to higher places”. For me, it’s the loss of a personal hero – she formed the Spex in 1978 by throwing an ad in Melody Maker with a header demanding the attention of YOUNG PUNX WHO WANT TO STICK IT TOGETHER.
She’s on record, in a recent interview with 6Music quoted in her BBC obituary, as saying, “I know I’ll probably be remembered for Oh Bondage Up Yours!… I’d like to be remembered for something a bit more spiritual.”
For me, the impact of X-Ray Spex actually was akin to something spiritual. Poly threw into stark, uncompromising relief the lack of female voices normally in play in mainstream rock, in Kerrang!, and so on. She made me wonder, for the first time, what I thought about that. (Clue: it ends in “up yours”.) So I think in a way, although the Spex’s one album probably will always be her most famous music, that’s okay.
Cheers, Poly. Here’s to you. Rest in peace. (Say hi to Ari Up for us.) The world’s a little bit less day-glo now, and much the worse for it.
- Listen to Germ Free Adolescents on last.fm
- Visit Poly’s official site and find out about her solo projects – her newest album Generation Indigo came out last month
- Poly Styrene Remembered: a photo set on NME.com
Team BadRep is currently on holiday and will return to the usual posting schedule next week
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Sexuality in Rock’n’roll is one more area weighed down heavily by its history and language. While none could or should deny the aspects of sexual interest and thrill inherent in live music, the performance space is problematically male-dominated.
– Ian Penman, NME, 1979
I really wish that I’d been born a boy; it’s easy then ’cause you don’t have to keep trying to be one all the time.
– Gaye Advert, 1977
Women in bands, when under the media spotlight, often find themselves swindled out of due credit by virtue of their gender. If they’re not being accused of clinging to the coattails of their backing boys to disguise their own lack of musical ability, they’re being judged on their aesthetic appeal to the exclusion of anything more relevant. It’s disappointing to observe how ubiquitously this principle applies. Even in the midst of punk, as girls picked up guitars, bass, and drumsticks, taking the stage alongside boys as more than cooing vocalists or backing dancers, they attracted that lethal combination of critical suspicion and prurient interest.
I love punk partly for the number and variety of women it involved and the freedom of expression it offered them. I loved X-Ray Spex – a Somali-British teenage feminist demagogue whose vocal screech swooped like a bird of prey over twisting vistas of saxophone. I loved The Slits and their slippery, shuddering dub-punk hymns to the tedium of sex and the joys of shoplifting. And most of all, I loved Gaye Black, bassist for The Adverts and widely regarded as punk’s first female star.
Despite their intelligent, era-defining songs like Bored Teenagers and The Great British Mistake, you have to dig through several layers of punk sediment before the Adverts come to light. They were one of the first punk bands to gain commercial success, and how much of this achievement was down to Gaye is open to depressing debate. A groundbreaking example of the Babe on Bass, her experience prefigured the problems faced by lone women in bands from Blondie to Paramore: scepticism towards their musical ability tied to a disproportionate focus on their looks.
She could have the impact of five Runaways, Patti Smith’s armpit, and Blondie’s split ends on Britain’s vacant female scene.
– Jane Suck, Sounds, 1977
Gaye’s elevation to national sweetheart began as a generic punk fairytale. In 1976, she and her partner TV Smith made an escape in time-honoured fashion from their Devonshire coastal town to London, where they swiftly formed a band. The Adverts became a fixture at pioneering punk venue the Roxy before being snatched up for a tour with the Damned and a contract with Stiff Records.
A devotee of Iggy Pop and the Stranglers’ bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel, Gaye made her musical presence a vital part of the Adverts’ brand of thuggishly intrepid punk. Their breakthrough single Gary Gilmore’s Eyes hinges on her instrument’s ascending throb. Most Adverts songs are played as though they’re throwing punches, TV Smith’s vocals advancing in one-two jabs while Gaye’s bass lines bob and weave. On stage, she was a static and self-contained sounding-board for Smith’s livewire showmanship.
image by Flickr user ariel awesome
But her visual presence hit equally hard: she caught your eye, you caught your breath. Her iconic look – battered black leather and a kohl-rimmed thousand-yard stare – drew on Suzie Quattro and Joan Jett’s effortless rocker fundamentalism rather than the try-hard iconoclasm of Jordan or Siouxsie. Gaye was punk’s terrifyingly blank, stark, dead-eyed minimalism made flesh, the girl nihilist next door.
For Greil Marcus, both Gaye and the Slits were punk’s ‘pretty people who made themselves ugly’ – although clearly not ugly enough. As the reminiscences of her admirers on tribute websites and YouTube comments testify, Gaye was punk’s first female pin-up. Her press and TV appearances stirred hearts and hormones across late-70s Britain, pulling the plug on her wish to be one of the boys.
I wasn’t made to feel as conscious of the fact that I was female [at the Roxy], as I was by the rock press.
– Gaye in Vacant: A Diary Of The Punk Years, Nils & Ray Stevenson
In a 2001 interview with the website Punk77, Gaye recalled that “the media would concentrate on irrelevant things like clothes or be extra critical of my playing in the same way that some men are prejudiced against women drivers”. The hackneyed trope of whether girls can play seems especially incongruous in punk, a musical movement studded with gleeful and defiant amateurism. Nevertheless, Gaye’s playing was picked on as “plodding” and her mute ‘fixed sultriness’ unfavourably compared with the vocal talent of other punk women. This latter criticism betrays, among other things, a peculiar disapproval of girls in non-singing positions, as though there were a correct set of requirements for band composition, with musical preoccupation on the part of female members an intrinsically suspicious transgression of their allotted role.
1978 single cover, uploaded to an extensive gallery of punk singles cover art by Flickr user Affendaddy
Dismissal of Gaye’s musical credentials went hand-in-hand with an insistence on her value as eye-candy. According to the NME, their bassist’s ‘superb squeakers’ were the best thing about the Adverts and the only conceivable cause of any mainstream notice they might attract. Stiff Records instantly latched onto Gaye’s looks as a marketing tool, giving the Adverts’ debut single a cover bearing a close-up of her face – all eyes and lips, the band’s name an afterthought. This was a stunt pulled without the band’s prior knowledge, which Gaye avenged by refusing to appear in other band photographs for the single.
As the Adverts gained more media attention, Gaye’s image began to dominate the band’s press. Again, the novelty of her status as sole female in a role other than singer seemed to confer as much fascination as her looks. She complained of fending off photographers’ requests for her “to pose with my jacket undone” and sudden “leching” from men she’d considered her friends. After ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ hit the Top 20 and the band appeared on Top of the Pops, the national response to Gaye was extraordinary. The Sun described her, bafflingly, as ‘one of the saucy girl singers who have taken over pop’, and the Daily Express swooned that she possessed:
…[the same] fragile beauty that made the world and Mick Jagger fall in love with Marianne Faithful. Gaye is beautiful, she is as dark as Marianne was fair, with black hair and Castillian white skin…
This presentation of Gaye, and its explicit comparison to pliant and angelic pre-punk darling Faithfull, attempted to explain her as a continuation of the past, rather than a messy break with it. As revolutionary a moment as punk was, it operated within a reactionary framework in which its icons were objectified and misunderstood.
The Adverts disbanded in 1979, their split hastened by Gaye’s discomfort with, and other band members’ resentment of, the puddles of critical drool collecting at her feet. Gaye’s enduring reputation as prototypical punkette pin-up tends to overshadow what she actually did – which was, in her own words, “[try] to get a good sound and play right. I’m not one of Pan’s People.” She had the misfortune to attempt this within a context in which women on stage, regardless of their reasons for and intentions in being there, were automatically sexualised, examined and evaluated in a manner wholly absent from attitudes towards their male counterparts. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
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[Thanks to tvsmith.com and Punk77 for several of the above quotes.]
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