Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
My mother was a punk rock icon.
People often ask me if she was a good mum.
It's hard to know what to say.
Sometimes I think of an answer she might have come up with.
"A good mum?" she'd ask.
How banal.
How mundane.
The funeral was surreal.
My memory of it is a blur.
All these people I'd never met,
people who came to say goodbye to Poly Styrene.
This famous person.
Someone so far removed from the mother I knew.
I felt sick to my stomach.
I wasn't ready to be the care-taker
of Poly Styrene's legacy.
I'd just lost my mum.
There was only me now.
The only child she had.
And now she'd gone and left me
to deal with it alone.
Thanks, Mum!
I know your antiseptic
Your deodorant smells nice
I'd like to get to know you
You're deep frozen Like the ice
She's a germ-free adolescent
Cleanliness is her obsession
Cleans her teeth Ten times a day
Scrub away Scrub away, scrub away
The S.R. Way
My mother taught me to love the sea,
for water is the beginning and end of life on this Earth.
I find a kind of solace in retracting her footsteps,
barely visible as they are in the sands of time.
"July 3, 1976.
Hastings Pier.
It's my birthday and I'll party if I want to.
Nineteen today. What a birthday surprise.
Tacky Day-Glo sign, Sex Pistols,
market traders, all my Freudian peers,
cockles, winkles and mussels.
Never did like shellfish."
"I stand centrepoint in an almost empty ballroom.
Three Swedish babes stared at Johnny."
It took me a long time to go through her things.
It was all too painful.
And there was so much to sort through...
Photos, lyrics, albums.
Things of value and cultural importance.
But I couldn't face it.
So, I didn't.
I had her ashes in a box, too.
I kept it in a wardrobe.
She wanted me to take them to India.
But I couldn't face that, either.
It was about five years after she died
that I decided to go through everything.
I was blown away by her artistry.
She did all the artwork for the band herself.
I enjoyed piecing together all the parts of her puzzle.
Building a picture of who she'd been before me.
X-Ray Spex are one of the best exponents
of the so-called punk or New Wave music.
Vocalist Poly Styrene is the punkiest.
Poly Styrene chose her name from the yellow pages.
Otherwise Marianne Elliott, aged 19 from Brixton,
she's thought of by the music press
as one of the most interesting songwriters
to surface from the New Wave.
I know I'm artificial
But don't put The blame on me
I was reared with appliances
In a consumer society
One lady that's been causing
a lot of controversy right around London,
is a lady I've got in front of me now,
a Miss Poly Styrene. Welcome to the program.
The name Poly Styrene,
was it given to you by a publicist, or what?
No, I thought I'd use the name of something around today,
you know, something plastic and synthetic.
and I just looked in the yellow pages
and then I saw it.
-Really? -Yeah.
So that's how the name Poly Styrene finally was born,
-from the yellow pages phone book. -Yeah.
Oh, wow.
It sounded alright,
'cos I thought it was a send up of being a pop star.
It was like a little figure, not me, being Poly Styrene.
Just plastic, disposable.
That's what pop stars sort of meant to me,
so therefore I thought I might as well send it up.
Long before Poly Styrene, there was Marianne Elliott.
Like all good heroines,
my mother cut her teeth on a tough childhood.
A so-called "baby boomer" born in '57,
and times, they were a-changing in post-war Britain.
"Who am I? What the hell,
I'm just an ordinary tough kid
from an ordinary tough street."
We grew up in this estate which was called Gosling Way.
It was one of those old building estates,
where, in our flat,
we had a bath in the kitchen with a lid on.
So there was not a separate bathroom.
There was coal fires
in the main sitting room and one of the bedrooms,
and in the other bedroom there wasn't any fire at all.
We knew we were poor,
but the benefit system wasn't as such as it is today,
and my mum had to work full time.
She was a legal secretary.
And so in a way,
we were kind of like the first latch-key kids.
My nanny, Joan, was a second mother to me.
She looked after me when Mum couldn't.
She looked after everyone,
a true matriarch.
She was well spoken, upright,
but at the same time, something of a free spirit.
She met my grandfather at a dance.
She was surprised when he approached her.
She wasn't used to male attention.
When he asked her to dance, her heart skipped a beat.
She thought he had the darkest
and saddest eyes she'd ever seen.
A real dapper chap, too.
Suited and booted with impeccable style.
"Black is beautiful. White is all right.
You're half-caste girl, Do you wanna fight?
Black girl carries her flick knife.
Will she cut me up for being half white?
The national front are after me.
I'm infiltrating, can't you see?"
My mum was half-caste,
I'm quarter-caste,
my cousin's three-quarter caste.
Even when I was growing up in the '90s,
these were the kinds of terms people would use to describe you
if you were mixed race.
It annoyed the hell out of me,
and I know it upset my mum, too.
It's like saying you're not quite whole,
you're just a part-person, a fraction.
My mum never had no friends as such,
because they just saw her as a black man's whore.
It was bad enough being a single mother.
Being a single mother with half-black children
was absolutely "Hey, hey!"
You know, the white community shunned Nanny, really.
Join the National Front!
The National Front! The National Front!
Join the National Front!
The National Front! The National Front!
When a white person looks at a mixed-race child,
they think, "My God,
a white person went with a black person,"
and vice versa.
It's their genes, really, trying to preserve themselves,
because they see us as a threat to their genetic existence.
There were some nasty remarks sometimes.
I remember her coming home with bruises on her legs
where the boys had kicked her.
She was a fighter,
if you said something to her, she won't keep her mouth shut.
She's gonna answer you back and say.
That whole mixed-race thing
would have been a fairly new phenomena in this country.
There was no social experiment
for black-and-white couples having kids.
And consequently, their kids were very confused.
At school, you'd be like,
"What side should you play on?"
The attitude was that
you weren't ever really black enough
and you weren't light-skinned enough.
You know, you were obviously not white
and you weren't black enough
to be part of the black community.
The black kids there, they could all say,
"We're black, we can all stick together."
"We don't like white people."
"I could never go out with a pork head."
But if you're half-caste and you're with them,
you don't really feel that,
'cos, like, your mum might be white.
And they're slagging off white people.
And if you go with the white kids,
you have to reject your father.
My Grandad, Osman Mohammad Said,
wasn't around much when she was a kid.
You could say they were estranged.
He spent his childhood years
as a nomad in the Somali hinterland.
Then he made his way to Yemen to seek his fortune,
ending up as a stowaway on a British merchant navy ship.
He worked his passage around the world,
finally ending up in the docklands
of London's East End.
My mum came to resent
always having to answer the question,
"Where are you from?"
She was a Londoner, born and bred.
But she was also brown,
so her Britishness was always questioned.
In the end, she started to question it herself.
She had this yearning for Africa.
She used to dream about
running away from dreary, soggy England,
where she never felt at home.
"I wanna go back to Africa
and find my heritage.
I wanna learn about the warrior
and how my ancestor lived.
'Cos all I've seen is 'Jungle Book',
and I know that ain't the way it looks.
I grew up on 'Tarzan', too.
What can he do?
What can you do?
I'm gonna cross Ethiopia
and see that ancient land.
And then I'll go to Somalia,
barefoot across the sand."
Hardly anyone knew my mum was Somali.
I mean, most people in the '60s
knew next to nothing about Somalia or Somali people.
Even when I was growing up, they didn't.
When I found out that Poly existed,
that was, like, such a validation for me.
I have a Somali punk icon to look up to?
I was interested in her story because of the difficulties
when you're growing up between cultures.
When you come to a community,
you always want to learn about the people
who've been here before you.
Who've pioneered and kicked doors down
and flattened walls for us to come through.
Identity, that's one of the
current problems at the moment, is identity.
People try to identify with something.
Everybody's looking desperately
to try and identify with one thing
instead of themselves, and that's what that's about.
Identity! One, two, three, four!
Identity is the crisis Can't you see?
Identity
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?
Obviously, identity meant something to her,
because of the song.
It was not only, I feel, talking about
women within rock music,
it was also talking about
how many black women did you see
on the front covers of fashion magazines?
It was, in a way I guess,
up to us to carve our own identities.
She was a woman of colour, working within an industry
full of white middle-class men that had it all their own way.
It's really important that people get that.
When you're mixed-race, it's hard not to feel like
an outsider looking in half the time.
You often feel like you don't belong anywhere.
But that can be liberating, too.
I think my mum got to the point where she said,
"I'm gonna carve out
a place in the world for myself."
And you know what? She did.
The daily papers and the media
refer to you as a bit of a rebel.
Um, do you think you're a rebel in today's society?
I mean, yeah, I suppose I am a bit really.
I am a poseur And I don't care
I like to make people stare
I am a poseur And I don't care
I like to make people stare
Back then,
it was fairly unusual
to be bi-racial.
In a way, we were embraced by punk
and we were part of punk because it was full of people
who nobody else wanted.
We were welcome because we were already outsiders.
I first saw Poly at World's End.
She had a little stall there.
This was just on the very, very edge
of punk beginning, actually.
And she was sitting there wearing...
I think it was lime-green and orange plastic clothes,
and just looking really naughty.
It was to do
with the teenager
and how brilliant we were.
You know, just putting on your dad's sweater
and, you know, some black tights
and running out down the street and stuff.
You know, it was something else.
Even though
she was certainly part
of the punk explosion and scene,
she had a very distinct look
that was very individual to her.
Her home-made clothes,
making your own records, having your own shop,
doing it yourself,
I think that social-political thing of DIY
did inform a lot of punk and post-punk.
But the way Poly did it was kind of unique.
My mum was obsessed with fashion.
She wrote songs critiquing consumerism,
but she was the ultimate shopaholic.
I pretty much hated everything she wore
and felt embarrassed to walk down the street with her
most of the time.
Especially when she forced me
into ridiculous outfits too,
like the matching mother and daughter
Laura Ashley phase she got into.
She liked nothing more
than traipsing around the West End.
"Let's go window shopping,"
she'd say,
and I would groan.
I couldn't think of anything more boring
than walking around department stores.
It was almost as boring as sitting in a recording studio
or sitting in a restaurant while she was being interviewed.
What an ungrateful brat I was!
Clothes are never really you.
That's why people wear them.
'Cos you can just create an image with clothes,
they're just part of a façade.
Which is good fun to play with sometimes.
By the time I was born,
Mum had left her punk phase far behind her.
She always said
she never even considered herself a punk,
that it was just a label, coined by journalists.
At the same time, she recognised
that the scene was the perfect vehicle
for her own creative transformation.
She placed an ad in the "Melody Maker" in 1976.
It said, "Young Punks Who Want to Stick it Together."
She auditioned the band members,
and X-Ray Spex was born.
When she opened the door,
it was incredible.
She had this lovely, beautiful smile on her face.
And when I saw her,
I just felt like I'd always known her.
There's definitely some previous life connection there,
some soul connection.
I sat down with them and there was Jak
playing guitar and Poly singing,
and they sang some songs and said, "Join in."
They gave me a cassette, I took it home,
they rang me up and said, "Would you like to join?
We've got a gig Saturday at the Roxy."
Yeah, I just came in
and the outcome was for anyone to hear me play.
I didn't play very much. He just was very quick.
Two girls together,
it's gonna be lucrative.
Falcon Stuart was my mum's manager.
He was also her first love.
She used to speak about him all the time when I was a kid.
Sometimes she'd say he was the love of her life,
other times, that he'd ruined it.
It wasn't exactly a secret
but actually, I wasn't quite sure
what the relationship was with Falcon.
But it became increasingly apparent
that they were in a relationship,
and obviously he was a lot older than her,
and was managing the band.
He was a bit like her patron,
in a Renaissance sense, more than a manager.
Do you live in a basement flat in his house?
-Yeah, why? -I was just asking.
I'm not trying to imply you're having an affair or anything.
No, I'm not saying that you are.
I just wondered if, what the...
What the significance of it was?
I think, well... It's like...
well, there he can look after you,
so it's like a patriarch deal.
Do you know what I mean?
Oh, well, no, not really.
Shall we go inside?
He seemed to be mesmerised by her.
She was different.
She wasn't the norm, she was different.
Definitely I think he saw potential.
He saw it from the very beginning.
I kind of had a soft spot for Falcon.
I think he genuinely cared for Marianne.
But it wasn't a relationship
which could sustain itself in a healthy way,
because it wasn't built on a healthy way.
Every romance she had ended in tears.
She longed to be loved so very much,
but she could never sustain a relationship
longer than a few years.
"The infamous Roxy Club
in Neal Street, Covent Garden, London WC1.
X-Ray Spex manager Falcon Stuart and I
drop in to check out the talent.
Names that scream out.
Billy Idol and Generation X,
The Buzzcocks, Siouxsie and the Banshees,
Captain Sensible and The Damned,
Johnny Moped and Chrissie Hynde.
Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex
are booked for the following week."
I'd never even been to a gig, and by chance
and by great good fortune and luck,
the first gig I ever went to was X-Ray Spex.
I think it was 60p to get in,
went downstairs, waited, expecting a tiny, dirty hall,
nothing much going on.
And then Poly Styrene came out
and it was... everything changed for me right then.
I fell in love with her, I fell in love with the band,
I fell in love with the music, I fell in love with the idea.
To see my sister on that stage,
and the energy and the power
and the expression...
She just was incredible to watch.
But her words are important as well, aren't they?
If only for the titles,
even if you don't hear all the words.
The titles are all very...
Trash really.
Her day consisted of writing, largely,
and she'd write with a biro
on bits of paper or in little books.
And sometimes she'd say,
"What do you think of this? What do you think of this idea?"
I mean, nobody else was really singing so much about
what Poly was singing about.
It was either about being funny
or being kind of pseudo angry,
or making some kind of
artful points about the banality of daily life,
which had its own weird excitement to it.
Some of my earliest memories of Mum
are of her sitting at her little typewriter,
totally absorbed in whatever she was writing.
There was rarely a moment
when she wasn't working on a new song.
Sometimes I felt jealous of her music.
Her songwriting robbed me of the attention I craved.
My grandmother would tell Mum off
for leaving me to my own devices.
She'd come over and find me half-dressed
with unbrushed hair, causing chaos,
drawing on the walls with crayons,
while Mum was lost in her own world.
Creative people don't always make the best parents,
and she certainly neglected my needs at times.
Little girls should be seen and not heard.
Oh bondage, up yours! One, two, three, four!
"I read a book by William Wright,
and discovered a newfound sense of freedom.
Images of the Suffragettes chained to the railings of Buckingham Palace
shot across my photographic memory.
A faded dream of Bowie's 'Suffragette City',
'Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am' ringing in my ears.
Pictures of ball and chained African slaves
were stored in my psyche, in sepia of course.
I replayed the biblical epic 'Moses'
on the screen in my head.
The story of the bondage of the Israelites in Egypt.
I had an innate desire to be free.
To be free from unwanted desires
seemed desirable."
Bind me, tie me Chain me to the wall
I wanna be A slave to you all
Oh bondage, up yours!
Oh bondage, no more!
Chain-store chain-smoke I consume you all
Chain-gang chain-mail I don't think at all
Oh bondage, up yours!
Oh bondage, no more!
Now recording-wise, you've got a single out
called "Oh Bondage Up Yours!".
Now that has struck a bit of trouble as far as airplay is concerned.
-True? -Yeah, well...
I expected that, really.
A lot of men in the media
didn't want women to step into that place,
to be given more power
and more say and more visibility.
Everybody always talks about "Oh Bondage Up Yours!"
because in a way, just that sound
cuts through a sort of glass ceiling
of what women singers could do with their voice.
It was like a clarion call,
and it was the way she sang,
it was so urgent,
and it was like a call to arms.
It was like, "I am so fed up!"
"The journalist Lucy Toothpaste asked,
'Are you liberated?'
'Are you referring
to "Oh Bondage Up Yours!"', I asked.
Lucy replied, 'Well, yes. Is it about women's liberation?'
'Yes and no,' I replied."
I was just talking about all forms of bondage.
You know, repression, everything else.
Sexual bondage stems from that, so it's all part of the same thing.
It all depends which way you interpret it.
So it's much to do with sexual bondage?
Yeah, it's to do with all bondage.
And it's bondage because it hasn't been played,
that proves it as well, hat is bondage in itself.
I think a lot of people assume
my mum was a staunch feminist,
because of "Oh Bondage",
because of the way she subverted
conventional ideas of femininity.
But I don't think she felt any allegiance
to a particular political position or stance.
She wasn't ideological.
She was an observer rather than a critic.
There was even a part of her that longed to be a wife,
a stay-at-home mum.
She often complained about that,
that she had to work,
to be a breadwinner and a mother.
She secretly wished she could be a lady of leisure.
We didn't use the word feminist very much at the beginning.
I was never afraid of the word.
But people had their preconceptions,
and when somebody asks you, "Are you this,"
and you know that you are your version of that,
but you're not the version of the person who's asking.
It's always very difficult,
and particularly for women
to make music
that has any social commentary to it,
without it appearing,
particularly if you're black,
that you're the archetypal young, angry, black female.
Poly had her own ideas about everything.
She didn't follow fashion,
she didn't follow trends.
And so, I think the idea of
anybody telling women what to do when it came to their rights
was something that she would oppose.
She talked about people treating each other
like they were commodities,
not just women being objectified,
but all different kinds of people being objectified.
And also not just, "I'm the victim
and everybody's taking advantage of me,"
but writing in this way of like,
"I live off you and you live off of me."
"And we're like, both doing it."
That's something that
as a feminist artist is incredibly important.
And I think these ideas were so far ahead of their time.
Good evening, it's "Top of the Pops".
and we're gonna make you feel like dancing.
Here's the chart rundown.
-Okay, you're going. -Alright, what are you gonna do
when we get rich, Jak?
Well, I wanna buy a bubble car
and a little house...
And, uh... have a harem.
A harem, woah!
Do you think X-Ray Spex
is gonna be bigger than The Beatles?
-Um, yeah. -Yeah. Oh, good.
-Positive. -Good, good.
We tried to be different. We had saxophones.
We had a female singer.
And Poly's voice, she could blow them out of the water.
I mean, did you ever think
that you would be able to walk out on stage and send an entire club
off their brains?
No, I don't think like that.
All going all around the place?
Richard Branson of Virgin Records
wanted to sign X-Ray Spex.
And he was really, really keen.
But we went to EMI.
The first time I can remember
that I was aware of her
was seeing her on "Top of the Pops".
It wouldn't really even have occurred to me,
at the time,
that she was part of the punk movement.
But there were things about her
that I thought was the very best of punk.
I can definitely remember
what happened to me
the first time I heard Poly's voice.
It was like an awakening for me.
There were a lot of men around,
but obviously being a woman, and being a young woman,
and I think Poly being a woman of color
on that scene,
was another reason why she became
a huge role model for me.
And I actually started singing because of her,
to be perfectly honest.
I was Tinkerbell
And you were Peter Pan
In the '80s, when I was little,
Poly Styrene was still
a pretty fresh memory in the pop world.
and people would sometimes stop my mum in the street
to tell her how much they loved her.
It didn't really faze me, to be honest.
It's all I knew.
Her reactions would vary
according to whatever mood she was in.
She used to joke that being famous but broke
was the worst of both worlds.
She had all the attention that comes with fame,
but lacked the means to protect herself from it.
Seeing Poly on "Top of the Pops"
with braces on her teeth,
just kind of laughing
and being a normal human being,
it was a really, really
powerful statement.
You could see she'd made an effort,
but she hadn't made that sort of Twiggy and Clodagh Rodgers,
soft, floaty...
She just wasn't floaty
and that was just such a bloody relief!
For the regular pop charts,
we were supposed to all look like Joni Mitchell.
Poly was funny looking, with her braces and...
her unsmooth hair
and her very futuristic style.
I remember when the album came out,
she was really annoyed
because the record company had slimmed her image down
on the front of the album cover,
and BP's as well. And she was really angry
that somebody had manipulated her image.
"Why couldn't they just put me on as I was?"
Do you dress to make people laugh,
or to make them think?
I mean, when you put something on,
do you think the idea is
to make people laugh with you, or...
Somebody said to me that your...
you know, your teeth braces,
somebody said it was just a device, you know?
-No. -A stage prop.
-It can't come off. -Can't it?
No, not yet, anyway.
-Is it screwed in? -No, it's cemented on.
Then again, with those braces on her teeth,
Poly Styrene is hardly Linda Ronstadt.
When Mum was young,
she was pretty confident about the way she looked.
She'd never been short of admirers.
But the experience of being famous
made her insecure.
The public scrutiny over the way she looked
started to grate on her.
She felt like journalists were celebrating her
by insinuating that she was unattractive and overweight,
totally not getting
what she was trying to achieve by
choosing not to over-expose her voluptuous form on stage.
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.
People make difficulties
within the entertainment industry.
Certainly, they make difficulties
for young women of colour,
there's absolutely no doubt about that.
Young women of any ethnicity,
I think, find it quite difficult.
I think she needed time off.
She needed,
she definitely needed respite periods,
and as everybody knows in the music business and when you're setting up,
it's go, go, go, go,
and I think that was totally destructive for her,
it really was.
"My God, our name and fame
is spread all over the three worlds.
'We will be famous just for one day.'
David Bowie.
'Everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.'
Andy Warhol.
'I am a cliché.'
Poly Styrene."
This one is called "Let's Submerge".
It's dark and eerie And it's really late
Come on, kids Don't hesitate
We're going down
To the underground
We're going down
To the underground
X-Ray Spex were one of the first wave
of punk bands from London
to come to New York.
In New York, punk rock was a new sort of
youth culture division that was happening,
like investigating this more sort of nihilist attitude,
with the fallout of hippie and the fallout of Vietnam,
and this kind of failed Utopian ideal.
We went for a residency in New York
at a venue called CBGB's.
CBGB's was like a stinky toilet of a place.
It was grungy and ghastly and stinky.
It's dark and eerie And it's really late
Come on, kids Don't hesitate
We're going down
To the underground
We're going down
To the underground
Everybody below 14th Street, New York
was at that gig.
'Cos everybody would talk about it
throughout the summer.
I can see now
Paul Weller, The Jam, and Debbie Harry,
sitting in the front row,
cheering us on.
Who the fuck are you? Who the fuck is this?
Oh bondage, up yours!
What was so exciting about it was that
when they did "Oh Bondage Up Yours!",
Poly would hand me the microphone
to sing "Up yours".
It was somewhat as if I was being knighted.
That was wonderful.
When we were in New York
we did two gigs a night.
In between times, we went drinking,
went to parties,
or met women.
All kinds of things happened.
It was totally different to London.
Everything was open the whole time.
Now it seems, "Well, so what?"
But at the time, that was new.
Put on the TV, had tons of channels.
We only had three at home.
In New York, this is like the future.
Oh, is this "Tomorrow's World", you think?
I don't know what program it is.
Unlike our grandparents,
we live in a world that we made.
We are crammed like battery hens with stimuli.
Capitalism, plus electronics,
gave us a new habitat.
Our forest of media.
For the first time ever, save $5
on our original, realistic pocket weather radio.
Now on sale at Radio Shack stores,
only $10.95.
Rain or shine,
the exclusive, realistic pocket weather radio.
And there's only one place you can find it.
It wasn't a conscious attempt to be clever.
I just thought that
I'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.
You'll look so pretty and have such fun.
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 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 gonna be like,
I don't want it."
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.
New York was the start of something,
a new feeling she couldn't quite shake.
She started to question everything around her.
Was any of it real?
I think the consumerism side of New York
and the advertising and the bright lights
and dazzling lights everywhere,
that did destabilize Poly
and affect the way she was writing songs.
-Are you gonna change, do you think? -I dunno really.
I mean, we're just changing already a bit, you know.
Just in the sort of... You know, just the songs.
It's just the way everything else
reflects everything else, and you're just part of it.
So the music reflects what you feel,
and also it reflects what's happening around you.
The further she went down the rabbit hole of fame
and all the excess that goes with that lifestyle,
the more absorbed she became
in the dystopian futurism of the world
she was creating through her lyrics.
I think the artifice and insincerity
she was surrounded by in the music industry
influenced her.
It influenced her imagining of a plastic,
synthetic universe,
where the natural world has retreated,
the final triumph of everything that's fake.
"I muse over the future
and all it may bring.
I open Pandora's box of hope.
I envision a time in the distant future
when synthetics rule.
The downside:
Humankind destroy the natural environment.
The upside:
Burgers will be cruelty-free, veggie rubber buns."
I clambered over Mounds and mounds
Of polystyrene foam
Then fell into A swimming pool
Filled with fairy snow
And watched the world
Turn Day-Glo You know, you know
The world turned Day-Glo You know
I wrenched The nylon curtains back
As far as they would go
Then peered through Perspex window panes
At the acrylic road
And watched the world Turn Day-Glo
You know, you know
The world turned Day-Glo You know
Uh-oh
I think she was aware
of how society was changing
into a very consumerist society,
and probably coming a lot from America.
She saw into the future.
She felt the world was a monolithic,
cruel place,
and why can't it be a nice place?
All those songs, "Art-I-Ficial",
"Highly Inflammable", "Genetic Engineering",
all these songs were progression from the early stuff,
which was about relationships and about herself.
The consumer society was there in front of her eyes.
The whole CBGB's experience
changed my mum as a person.
She was exposed to the city's seedy underbelly.
And she lost whatever innocence she still had left.
She told me that she was given something to smoke
at a party there one night,
and it tipped her over the edge.
Now she'd also lost her mind.
There was what you might call a darkness
to the New York scene
that was very different from the British scene.
It was much more accepting
of heavy drug use.
Disco candy was everywhere.
Hip people took coke in America.
It just turned people into demons.
And Poly was that sensitive,
that no doubt
she picked up on that negative energy.
I went to New York.
It really turned my head.
All that attention,
they treat you like you're really different.
It got to me. I was worn out and doing drugs
and I was smoking a lot.
People were all around telling me how wonderful I was.
I didn't start to exactly believe it,
but I started to get very insecure.
-Goodnight. -Give us a kiss.
She didn't like that environment,
she didn't like "Top of the Pops".
She didn't like mixing around all those kind of people.
She felt they were very superficial
and very not genuine.
I remember her coming off stage
and totally collapsing
and crying her eyes out,
as if she totally forced herself
to go on stage in the first place.
And I could see she wasn't well,
she wasn't okay.
I mean, it isn't normal for people
to be surrounded with people... telling them that they're great.
That isn't a normal situation, most people do not get that.
It isn't normal to be...
up on stage and people jumping all over you and ripping your clothes off,
that isn't a normal thing for anybody to take.
And then you get people coming backstage as well,
you get people coming to your house,
and then you get people trying to break in,
and then you just get people surrounding you all the time.
And you just are never on your own,
and that's just not normal.
So therefore, you just say, "Go away, I don't want to see anybody."
The thing with Poly
is that she was
at the same time very resilient
and yet very vulnerable.
Especially being so much in the vanguard,
her immediate support system of people who really got her
was not that large.
We read every week in the music trade papers
the exploits of, say,
The Sex Pistols and Johnny Rotten.
Are you a follower of The Sex Pistols yourself?
I mean, I like The Sex Pistols.
Yeah, I like them.
'Cos they're sort of part of our generation, really.
John Lydon, who she really liked a lot,
and obviously got a lot of her inspiration from,
was living 'round the corner
at Gunter Grove at this point.
We used to see him, sometimes, riding along,
we'd stop and say hello.
She was kind of infatuated,
or at least had a crush of some sort on John Lydon.
But she felt not taken seriously by him
and the rest of them.
Apparently, Sid Vicious had locked her in a cupboard
under the stairs.
She asked where the loo was
and he tricked her into going into this cupboard,
slammed the door and locked her in for about an hour.
Yeah, she was really, really upset by that.
They were lads, they were laddiest,
unthinking, mean things.
Undercutting things,
things designed to make you feel like nothing.
Like, worse than nothing.
As if they had no regard for you.
That was the sort of milieu that Poly encountered,
that encouraged her
to go into the toilet at John's house.
I was 'round at Johnny Rotten's place
and Poly turned up at the door.
Which was a brave thing, 'cos you go around to John's place,
it's like baptism by fire.
I remember she was sitting there
and not really saying much.
And we were shooting the breeze and being typical lads
and sort of ignoring her.
And at some point during the conversation,
during the night,
she'd got up and went into the bathroom.
And no one thought anything of it.
And then I guess we were talking for a while
and not realized she'd been gone
for like, half an hour.
And then we heard the bathroom door open
and we looked up,
and she started to walk down the stairs...
And she'd cut all her hair off.
I'll be honest with you, we were totally insensitive to the moment.
The thing is, she had a gig coming up.
What do you do? She'd got a gig coming up,
at Victoria Park, massive gig.
The National Front is a Nazi front!
We played at Rock Against Racism,
along with Tom Robinson Band,
The Clash, Sham 69.
There were 80,000 people there.
That was a really huge gig.
If you were ever at one of those events,
like the big events in Victoria Park,
it made one feel that
one was part of a positive army
of like-minded people. You felt so empowered.
You really felt that this generation
had made racism and fascism laughable and passé.
When we were driving to the venue,
and Poly was wearing a woollen scarf
wrapped around her head, and she said,
"Oh, I shaved my head last night."
And Falcon said,
"Well, you bloody well do not take that scarf off
while you're performing."
And she winked and said, "Oh no, I won't."
Halfway through the song "Identity",
she was going "Identity..." and she started to unravel it.
She did it in a kind of
seductive, teasing manner.
She started hovering her hand around the top of her head
and taking bits of it off like that.
By the time she got to the end there was gasps at the front
of the audience, going "Oh my God..."
"Skinhead!"
Falcon was going mad about it.
We all laughed our heads off.
She said she didn't want to be a sex symbol.
And she'd said if she ever thought she was turning into one,
she'd shave her hair off.
And that's what she did.
She wasn't the first woman
to shave her head in an act of defiance,
and she certainly wouldn't be the last.
It was a powerful statement,
but it was also a cry for help.
She really needed a break.
There was so much pressure on her
to keep doing it.
Something had to give.
The moment that changed me forever
was seeing a Day-Glo UFO
in Doncaster one night after a concert.
It was a bright ball of luminous pink,
made of energy, like a fireball.
Everyone else thought I'd lost the plot.
It was the last leg of their tour.
She'd gone up to her hotel room after the gig.
And she said all of a sudden,
she saw this bright light in the sky,
in the night sky, that...
didn't appear to be a star.
It seemed to be moving,
getting bigger and bigger,
and what's more, it was coming towards her.
And it zoomed right up to the window
and seemed to be probing the room,
hovering there, taking it all in,
and she's sat there, like, frozen.
She'd said at breakfast time the next day,
"Oh, I saw a flying saucer outside.
It's told me to give up
the electric and plastic way of life."
"Go for a simple life."
We said, "What are you on about?"
Took no notice, got in the car.
And in the car, she started taking her clothes off,
saying, "I want to go back,
I want to be Marianne, I want to go back."
She was a very, very sensitive person.
And she was almost like a sponge.
She would absorb
lots of things which were going around her,
for better or for worse.
When you put somebody which is so hyper-sensitive
and so open and so intelligent,
and then you put them in this environment
where there's all this different mix of people
wanting different things,
'cos, you know, she was a commodity as well...
it wasn't a conducive place for her to be
for who she was.
I mean, she was telling me when she was even younger,
when she was like three years old,
she thought that, you know, she'd met some people from outer space.
She was such a high being.
A very high, spiritual being,
even when she went off the rockers.
I mean, I remember when we were walking through
Kensington Gardens one afternoon.
She saw these crows.
You know, she says that they're...
Like the Vikings used to say
they were the eyes of Odin,
and all that.
She said, "Watch them, they're watching us."
People started saying she'd lost the plot,
that she'd gone mad.
But she didn't see it that way.
She felt that she was going through
some kind of spiritual awakening.
That she could see things
that others were too blind to see.
My mother thought I was hallucinating,
and I was put in the Maudsley.
'Cos if you see things and hear voices,
you are considered to have schizophrenia.
The first time she saw herself singing on the telly,
she was on a psychiatric ward.
Men in white coats carted her away
after an episode.
There were lots of episodes.
One worse than the other.
She was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia
when in fact she was suffering from acute bipolar disorder.
It felt like a bad omen.
Like I was doing something wrong.
Misguiding people.
I was dealing with a lot,
and then to be given a label like that,
only to find out later that I wasn't,
and that they had got it wrong, was really difficult.
They said to me,
"You're a young girl who has got out of her depth
and you will never be able to work again."
That is a very hard thing to be told at 21.
I'm sorry I didn't treat her very good.
I wasn't really sympathetic at the time.
I was worried, but mainly for my own self.
Selfish.
The only thing that really worked
were the drugs they gave her when she was sectioned.
They would pin her down and inject her
with tranquillisers
strong enough to knock a horse out.
I saw my mum being sedated many times.
I must have been about four years old
when I realised something wasn't right.
Suddenly I was able to detect the changes in her mood,
the constant cycle of elation and despair.
I'll never forget those nights
when the sensation that someone was watching me
was so strong that I'd wake up in a panic,
only to see her shadow at the foot of my bed.
She'd stand in the corner of my room
watching me as I slept...
her eyes wide with fear.
I was scared too,
scared of her.
I know your antiseptic
Your deodorant smells nice
The show must go on, they said.
So, she tried to keep it together.
Keep singing, keep performing.
The medication helped for a period,
but she was starting to push back
against the pressure.
to keep up the façade of Poly Styrene.
I'm like an actress that's something else.
On stage I'm one thing
and off stage I'm something else.
But most people are not.
I just consider myself as a person first,
and anything else,
what anybody else might call you, well,
they're just names, really, aren't they?
Just given to trends and people
and things like that.
I think a lot of people thought,
"Oh, Poly Styrene's gone mad."
She had a brilliant band,
she had all the success,
and suddenly just walked away from it.
It took an incredible amount of strength
for my mum to walk away from X-Ray Spex,
the band she herself had put together,
the band that was doing so well.
They were at the height of their success.
I think she understood that
the only way she could continue to exist
as an authentic person,
as someone who was true to herself,
was to kill the persona she'd created.
Poly Styrene had to die
so Marianne Elliott could survive.
"Read Time magazine
over continental breakfast in the south of France.
Genetic possibilities filled glossy pages.
On a golden stretch of sand in Cannes,
I worshipped the sun god,
in a sunshine yellow towelling bikini."
When I'd met her,
she'd been in a convalescence place
to get over the traumas.
I was staying in a flat, just off the King's Road,
and one night, we walked past this quite flashy designer shop.
And she was outside, looking in the window.
She was dressed in a sort of '50s-type flared skirt
and hair sort of straightened and long
and white stilettos.
Anyway, I thought, "I can't let this go."
So as we were walking past, I said,
"Ah, you're Poly,"
and invited her to come and have a drink with us.
All alone In a tropical garden
Parakeet trills Slowly harden
It was all rather whirlwind.
They were inseparable for a time.
They didn't even tell anyone when they got married
at the Chelsea Registry Office on the King's Road.
Oh, yeah, we got married.
We got married in the September,
we only met in June.
After, I dunno, three months of meeting Poly
she was pregnant.
Mum was 24 years old when I was born.
She told me that having me was the best thing she ever did.
But motherhood was a challenge.
Her mental health was still fragile
and there were times when she couldn't look after me.
It was hard for my father, he was so young.
They were both kids, really.
I knew that Poly had been admitted,
you know, sectioned and all that.
I still loved her, though.
I'm obviously gonna stick it out no matter what.
Just as I met her,
her album was coming out, Translucence.
The solo album.
If you listen to the lyrics, it's totally different.
How you make such a jump from that power pop
to something almost akin to Joan Armatrading?
It seemed like she'd been
through some kind of trauma.
And music was her way of dealing with that.
For people that have had bad times in life in some way,
music can be a way of, like, healing themselves.
She was after that in her own music.
So, I was there for all the interviews,
and, you know, journalists coming 'round.
But their reviews were really damning.
Like totally. Like, "What is this bollocks?" almost.
EMI, dismayed
at the negative response from the press,
said "That's it."
They obviously had the option on their side.
Now it just went from bad to worse,
to be honest with you.
I was on the dole.
There was mass unemployment back then, really.
We ended up at my mum's
and then her mum's,
and then, she'd had enough of it.
She went off to India.
And Celeste and I, we stayed at my mum's.
I think she really decided then
she was gonna go head-first into the Indian scene.
She started dressing like proper saris
and with a dot on the forehead.
And so she went back to London
and threw her lot in with the Hare Krishna.
And I mean everything, all her furniture, everything.
Moved in with them.
This is Bhaktivedanta Manor in Hertfordshire,
European Headquarters of the Hare Krishna movement.
George Harrison bought it for them last year.
Most of their day is spent worshipping Krishna
and learning his philosophy of perfect consciousness.
I think it was The Beatles and George Harrison,
that's how we got into it.
She was a hippie, really.
Too sensitive for the world.
She needed something to give her some stability in her life.
I was a small child
when we went to live in the manor.
I understand why she wanted us to live there,
surrounded by nature,
and full of little Hare Krishna children
I could play with.
She changed her name yet again.
This time it was a name
given to her by her guru, Bhagavan.
Now she went by Maharani.
He gave me a name too, Radha Shakti.
X-Ray Spex saxophone player Lora Logic
joined the Hare Krishna movement
at around the same time as my mum.
They'd fallen out after Mum cruelly sacked her from the band
during the Roxy era,
but they found a common purpose in Krishna consciousness,
which brought them back together.
I don't think it was coincidence,
I think it was highly planned
by the universal laws, 'cos nothing's an accident.
But I was a bit surprised.
We had to relate on the platform of the fact
that we were equal spirit souls,
and a platform where there's no false ego or pride.
Yeah, she changed, she changed a lot.
I went to the Hare Krishna temple
with her a few times, actually into the temple.
And she was very different in the temple.
She was very hypnotised by it.
The Hare Krishna kind of saved her in a sense,
it gave her another world to exist in.
She's fragile, you know,
and I think they provided a family for her,
and a comfort.
More than punk, than music, more than being creative,
the Hare Krishna was a central pillar of her life,
and it was really important to her.
As hard as she tried,
my mother couldn't completely escape her past life.
Those past traumas continued to haunt her,
and she would suffer a series of nervous breakdowns
during our time in the temple.
She was very mentally unstable then,
and she looked so disturbed.
It was probably triggered by so many things: hormones,
giving birth,
and then the whole new experience
of living in a temple.
She used to do some wacky things in the temple.
I mean, she'd be, like,
in the temple room with no clothes on.
She'd be chasing celibate monks around,
who were in their pyjamas.
She went to India,
and she'd have to be put on a plane and flown home
because she completely lost it.
I think a lot of it was just due to lack of sleep.
She didn't sleep.
She didn't know how to look after herself very well.
It's like she was never quite in her body,
she was always somewhere else.
It was probably all too much for her.
Our heaven had become a hell,
and it was about to get much worse.
We moved into a house near the temple,
and my mother eventually
took me out of the children's ashram,
which was a kind of Hare Krishna boarding school.
I was truly isolated now.
She hadn't been able to leave the house for weeks,
and my little stomach
was as empty as the kitchen cupboards.
One day I climbed out of my bedroom window
and left home with the social workers.
The nosy neighbours were concerned for my welfare.
I had to leave,
for the sake of my own mental health.
I know it broke her heart.
I abandoned my mother
and the world she had created for me.
And it had been a beautiful world, Mataji.
I was eight years old
when I went to live with my grandmother,
who was eventually granted custody of me
after a long and bitter court case.
It was clear Mum had neglected me.
I was three and a half stone
when I was removed from her care.
I needed years of therapy.
To say that I was an angry kid
would be an understatement.
I told the court I wanted to live with my nan,
the ultimate betrayal
as far as my mother was concerned.
Our relationship was pretty rough for a while,
lots of shouting, slammed doors and angry tears.
She pushed me down the stairs once,
and I never let her forget it.
She wasn't in her right mind of course,
but I blamed her for ever bringing me into this world.
But time is the greatest healer, they say.
And we eventually
found it in our hearts to forgive one another.
She moved to Hastings in the early 2000s
and I moved to Madrid,
but despite,
or maybe thanks to being thousands of miles apart,
we were closer than ever.
The slow pace of the town
and the calming effect of the sea
restored a kind of mental balance
my mother had lost all those years ago.
She was refreshed and energised,
ready to start creating once more.
She was even ready to get on stage,
something she had sworn she would never do again.
How do you feel now?
I want to know
Clear as a crystal
I can see your face
I think it was Poly's last gig,
which none of us were to know.
But I remember she was on fine form,
and you gotta understand, I hadn't seen her since the Roxy days.
And she'd been through a whole load
of trials and tribulations.
And to see her come through all of that,
it looked like the sky was the limit,
and that there was
a whole new lease of life in front of her.
Up until a few hours before,
I never really was sure if she was gonna do it.
It was very, very difficult for her to get the confidence.
Mum had been taking medication on and off
for her bipolar disorder
since her first breakdown.
I'd always felt that
she didn't take her meds as often as she should have,
and it was a real source of contention between us.
She felt the medication
had a dampening effect on her creative expression.
But she realised
she wouldn't be able to get through the gig without it.
She was terrified that the anxiety of performing live
would lead to yet another breakdown.
But despite all that,
she gathered the courage she needed
to get on stage in front of thousands of people.
And even if she was pretty heavily medicated,
she kicked arse out there,
gave it all she had.
I was so proud of her.
One, two, three, four!
I joined her on stage
for an encore of "Oh Bondage Up Yours!".
It was beyond amazing.
Bind me, tie me Chain me to the wall
I wanna be A slave to you all
Oh bondage, up yours!
Oh bondage, no more!
Oh bondage, up yours!
Oh bondage, no more!
Now the moment had come, I felt strange.
Half scared, half excited.
It was weird looking at the things
I'd always taken for granted.
Never bothered to think about.
Things like pets,
friends,
places I went to.
But I knew I had to go then, or I never would.
She had just finished recording
a new album, Generation Indigo ,
when we found out
she had breast cancer.
Those last months,
when we were blissfully unaware
of the disease that had already spread to her bones,
were some of the happiest times
I ever spent with my mother.
We worked together on the album,
writing and recording new tracks.
She was in her element, really,
doing what she knew best.
And I was so lucky to be able to do it with her.
I hit the button called send
You're my virtual boyfriend
You're like a MySpace friend That's all
Just a text or a missed call
I just thought it was funny, 'cos everybody were having these relationships online.
And it's great, but you never see each other.
Well, you probably do sometimes.
But I just thought,
why not write a love song about that?
You're not meeting, but you're actually...
And then at the end, just press delete to end.
I found working with her
very life-affirming.
Even when she was at death's door, ironically.
She had a great spiritual perception
that was wrought from hard experience.
I finally took my mum's ashes to India,
to Vrindavan,
the holy city on the banks of the Yamuna River,
the place where Krishna was born.
This was her last request.
Being there was almost metamorphic for me.
I saw with my own eyes
everything she had told me about the place.
Everywhere I went, I felt her presence,
and I was able to understand her a little better.
She'd wanted to take me there for many years.
But a spiritual pilgrimage to India
didn't have much appeal when I was a teenager.
I went through a period
where I rejected everything that my mum cared about,
including her religious beliefs.
I was angry for a long time.
I felt my mum hadn't lived up to my idea
of what a good mother should be.
I just wished I had normal parents
and a normal childhood,
where my mother didn't have a mental illness,
wasn't a Hare Krishna,
had a regular job,
didn't have so many crazy friends.
But by the time I started to really appreciate
how lucky I was to have such a remarkable woman
as a mother and a role model,
it was too late.
She was leaving her body.
Everything about her was inspirational.
She was born an inspiration.
She was, she was just...
That's who she was.
The legacy of someone like Poly
cannot be overstated.
What she did
stands as a great example for women,
not only in the 21st century, I think it'll stand forever.
Because she was brave, man.
There is something
in Poly's sound and in her voice,
in her expression, in her lyrics
and in who she was.
You could say it's anti-establishment,
or it's anti-this and anti-... But for me it was like,
I could see that it was possible.
That it was important
to fight against the predictable holes
that we are all surrounded by as human beings,
but particularly women.
For me, her legacy was to open up the box,
give everyone new tools,
and new ideas and new possibilities.
The world is playing catch-up
with Poly Styrene,
not the other way around.
When I saw her, like, three days before she passed,
she said to me,
"You see the lights on the trees?"
"Every one of those lights is like a soul who's passed."
There was something out there
and in the not-too-distant future
she was going to be part of.
I remember the last time I saw her
like it was yesterday.
A piece of me died that day.
I cried even though
my Mum always told me not to cry for the dead.
She said it's just the beginning,
even if it feels like the end.
I am a cliché.
I'm a cliché I'm a cliché
You've seen before
I'm a cliché Live next door
I'm a cliché You know what I mean
I'm a cliché Pink is obscene
Huri yama yama Huri yama yama
Boredom, boredom
Huri yama yama Huri yama yama
Boredom, boredom