Poly Styrene, the punk upstart from X-Ray Spex, is promoting a new album ? and fighting cancer
Poly Styrene had just finished working with celebrated producer Youth on her first album of commercial pop since leaving X-Ray Spex in 1979, when she began to feel a slight pain in her back.
Styrene, a feminist punk hero acknowledged by everyone from Beth Ditto to Karen O as one of music's most extraordinary women, went to her GP in the south coastal town of St Leonards-on-Sea, and was told to take painkillers. Eventually, after months of growing agony and being bounced between GP and A&E, she demanded an MRI scan. The diagnosis sent her reeling: breast cancer had spread to her spine and lungs. Then "a little fall" fractured her spine in two places.
Three months on, the singer is promoting the ironically upbeat album, Generation Indigo, from a St Leonards hospice bed, barely able to move, in a room containing a TV and a wheelchair. But despite only recently being given cancer "wonder drug" Herceptin (her liver is too weak for chemo), she bears no grudges. "My GP said it was a tricky one to find," she says.
Unbowed, even cheery, she finds this interview, and the thought that the world is listening, therapeutic. "It keeps me going," explains the still-childlike 53-year-old, who was admitted under her real name, Marianne Elliott-Said. Convinced she can win the latest in a lifetime of battles, she speaks in a voice that, although weakened, is as full of defiance as it was when she laid down her mission statement with X-Ray Spex's 1977 debut single, Oh Bondage, Up Yours! "Some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard," it began. "Well I think, Oh bondage, up yours!"
Of mixed race (British-Somali) and wearing dental braces, Styrene challenged the convention that female performers should be submissive and conventionally beautiful. Styrene doesn't miss the braces, though: "They made it difficult to clean your teeth."
The hospice is close to where it all began, on her 18th birthday, when she saw the Sex Pistols play an empty hall on Hastings pier. "They had drainpipes, shortish hair, and played covers. But they must have had something because I thought, 'I can do that!'"
Punk brought liberation and a platform for her pioneering lyrics about the environment and the consumer society ? but, for all her brashness, she was still vulnerable. The music industry tried to sexualise her, and Sid Vicious once threatened her with a scythe: "He said, 'Don't you like our company?'" At the height of her stardom, a "traumatic experience" prompted her to shave her head. "I'd read that girls in concentration camps did that after being raped by the Nazis," she says, refusing to expand. "You do it to be cleansed."
After a gig in Doncaster, she saw a pink light in the sky: "Everything I touched felt like static electricity." She was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and sectioned for several months. Then, in the 1980s, after giving birth to a daughter, she found peace in a Hare Krishna temple, although eventually fled over reports of paedophilia within the sect, and attempts to marry her off. "I did get engaged once," she says, "but couldn't go through with it. Some of them were misogynistic, too crazy." She did keep the faith though.
There was another reason for her withdrawal from music. In 1991, Styrene was diagnosed as bipolar, and suspects she had it all along. "It's great for creativity, but not really for a career," she says, explaining that her songs arrive in spurts, "like little gifts".
In 1995, when she briefly reformed X-Ray Spex after a nurse said, "Get back out there! Don't let Kylie Minogue take over!", she was hit by a fire engine. This spring, she should have been touring. Instead, she's devouring the news, and thinks Gaddafi should be allowed to depart Libya "so there will be least bloodshed". In a whisper quieter than the rustle of her blankets, she says: "You remember that old song 'Que Sera Sera, Whatever will be, will be, the future's not ours to see'? I've always felt that. It's been a rollercoaster ride, but I wouldn't change a thing."
Generation Indigo is out on 28 March.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/23/poly-styrene-interview
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