STYRENE WAS BORN Marianne Joan Elliott-Mentioned in 1957 to a Somali father and an English mom, who raised Styrene and her siblings alone in a Brixton council property. In her teenage years, struck with artwork and rebel, Styrene fled dwelling to hitchhike to hippie music festivals, stoking an ecological consciousness she would carry to punk. She immersed herself in theater, trend, poetry and music. A bookish autodidact who left college at 15, she gravitated towards philosophy, the occult, Freud and Jung. As a cinephile she favored the retrofuturism of “Barbarella.” Her rock idols had been David Bowie and Marc Bolan. She liked soul and reggae, and Bell stated she cited singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Joan Armatrading as large inspirations.
Styrene’s first pre-punk single was a pop-reggae tune known as “Foolish Billy” about teenage being pregnant. It was produced by a person 16 years her senior named Falcon Stuart who would change into her boyfriend and the supervisor of X-Ray Spex. (Bell stated she obtained conflicting tales about Stuart, who died in 2002, over time, noting within the movie: “Generally she’d say he was the love of her life; different instances, that he’d ruined it.”)
When punk hit, Styrene, at 19, was galvanized. Enamored of the Intercourse Pistols — a beforehand unseen clip of Styrene dancing within the crowd at considered one of their gigs recurs within the movie — she positioned an advert in Melody Maker looking for “yung punx” to “stick it collectively,” and assembled a crew that included the bassist Paul Dean and, briefly, the saxophonist Lora Logic (till Styrene kicked her out).
The band signed with Virgin for the basic “Oh Bondage Up Yours” — its opening declaration, “Some folks assume little ladies must be seen and never heard/However I believe, oh bondage, up yours!” turned feminist punk scripture — earlier than shifting to EMI for “Germfree Adolescents.” (Styrene was an uncredited producer on the album, Bell stated.) The LP took them to “Prime of the Pops” and the BBC, which broadcast a tv documentary known as “Who Is Poly Styrene?” the place the singer famously described that she picked her stage title as a result of it’s plastic and disposable: “That’s what pop stars are supposed to imply, due to this fact I assumed I’d as effectively ship it up.”
The early BBC movie and “I Am a Cliché” each depict Styrene’s psychological well being struggles, which the pressures of fame exacerbated. In 1978, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia; she was in a psychiatric hospital the primary time she noticed herself singing on tv. Bell believes her mom’s situation was worsened by the media’s sexist scrutiny of her physique in addition to the destabilizing nihilism in punk.
“Lots of people assume X-Ray Spex had been much more underground than they had been. However my mum did have that brush with superstar,” Bell stated. “There’s a type of fame the place you’ll be able to by no means escape from it, and that was the type of consideration that my mum had, despite the fact that it didn’t final very lengthy. It didn’t final very lengthy as a result of she obtained out.”
Supply: NY Times