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Andrew Hook
In memory of Poly Styrene (1957–2011)
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1. THE CRISIS YOU CAN’T SEE
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YOUNG MARIANNE SITS cross-legged on the lawn.
Behind her, the garden party swings. Aristocrats exchange salmon sandwiches, prawn vol-au-vents. A marquee cuts a white rectangle out of a bright blue sky. Somewhere her mother engages, ensures, includes. Her father—his suit the colour of the marquee yet markedly tighter—holds the centre of attention. Within Marianne’s right thumb and forefinger, she rolls a daisy stem back and forth. She doesn’t have to concentrate to feel the tiny hairs: flattening, furling, flattening. Earlier she had read daisy to be a corruption of day’s eye, so given because the whole head closes at night and opens in the morning. She can feel resistance from roots embedded in the soil, as though the Earth is gently tugging back.
Ten-year-old Marianne finds little to interest her in adult conversation. She is not unaware: the aristocrats discuss the government’s closing of military bases in Malaysia and Singapore, much to the chagrin of Australia and the United States. Their wives speculate over the decriminalisation of private acts of consensual adult male homosexuality. The staff offer more food, more drinks—their conversations confined to the kitchen. The sun beats down.
Knowing she could uproot the daisy from the soil, Marianne releases her grip.
From her pinafore dress she removes a pair of pink plastic-framed sunglasses. She slips them over her ears, rests them on the bridge of her nose. Unfolding her legs she stretches those limbs in front of her, then lies backwards onto the grass. Beneath the darkened lenses her eyes are closed. An antumbra of light coalesces on each eyelid. As she waits, it kaleidoscopes. There is a barely perceptible difference in heat beneath her shades.
She opens her eyes to look directly into the sun. The glasses are cheap, newsagent-bought. They came attached by tiny elastic bands to a strip of cardboard. The cardboard bore the design of a fresh-faced girl smiling, her eyes obscured by the shape of the glasses. When Marianne removed them from this semi-diorama, she saw that the girl’s pupils underneath were white, not coloured in.
At school, some of the children have described her as coloured in. She understands her mother has been talking about leaving Kent. She has heard her call it too white and too judgmental. She doesn’t know if she cares about such things. It is warm here, quiet. On brief forays into London she has been struck by the disconnect between people and nature. It is almost as though there they cannot co-exist.
Her mother won’t know she is looking into the sun because of the shades.
She keeps her head still. Over the course of time the position of the sun removes itself from the directness of her gaze, although accuracy might insist that it is the Earth which has turned.
Having remained utterly still, Marianne’s perspective has shifted.
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Upstairs she relaxes the pinafore straps from her shoulders and shrugs her dress to the floor.
Tracing her fingers along her upper back, she detects impressions of grass blades on her skin. She considers canals on Mars.
She drops to a squat, takes ten even breaths and stands sharply. Her cheeks puff with air.
At first there is only a frisson of light around her forehead. Then beads of sweat emerge. Her temperature drops. Goosebumps pucker. She is within the kaleidoscope, as though she has captured it from the sun’s refraction and brought it into her bedroom. Releasing her breath, the sensation gradually dissipates. She reaches for the bed frame, misses.
Going down.
She is going down.
It can’t be more than a minute but when she awakes she notices that the plastic frame of her sunglasses has snapped. One lens lies oval on the white carpet, a disembodied eye.
There are thoughts which she doesn’t share with her friends, with school, with her parents.
She wanders to the window, sits on the ledge. From this angle she cannot be seen from the garden, although conversely she has a bird’s eye view. The marquee cuts a white rectangle out of the green grass. It doesn’t look so clean from here, fresh grey marks having speckled the surface. Marianne plots them with her finger against the windowpane: dot to dot. If there is any significance in the resultant pattern then she doesn’t see it.
She pads barefoot across to her bookshelves. The third one down houses her Zenith B505B Portable Record Player. Sandie Shaw’s Puppet on a String rests on the turntable. She moves the left hand lever to get it spinning, turns the right hand dial up to max.
Dancing in her underwear accentuates the freedom she feels inside.
Releasing it is only a matter of time.
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“Is it too much to ask you to be happy?”
Marianne pushes a small tinned carrot around gravy.
“It’s not as though you haven’t got everything you need.”
She doesn’t understand the complexity. It is only a carrot. She has eaten everything else.
“Listen when your father is talking to you.”
But she is listening. It is impossible not to.
As if there were choices to be had.
“Is there something making you unhappy?”
She cannot articulate this. There is disunion between her under-standing and theirs.
She finds she shakes her head.
Her father leans back, removes the napkin from around his throat and throws it with some satisfaction onto his plate.
“Then it’s settled. Pop a smile on sometimes, Marianne. Especially when we have company.”
Of course, it is so simple.
The carrot becomes gravy-logged. She watches as it sinks into the plate.
Disappears.
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2. THE WAY A GIRL SHOULD BE
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There are three pound-notes in her pocket and a rucksack bulging clothes hangs from her right shoulder.
She doesn’t care whether they care.
The early evening sky glows a certain pink. Brixton holds an unexpected charm, yet there is still prejudice here. If she has learnt anything since the absence of Kent it is that the city consumes. Yet aside from this it gives: knowledge and excitement and understanding. She reflects on the dichotomy of herself as the green girl and the proto-wild child. There isn’t so much difference. It isn’t suffocation which causes her to abscond, but possibility.
Marianne won’t know that her mother failed to notice her absence until morning. A bed unslept. A name re-called. She buses to the edge of the belt and extends a thumb. A VW Camper—once yellow, now rainbow—pulls to the kerb. As though she had summoned it via the experience of her fifteen years she steps aboard with barely a word. The three occupants nod and smile. Then with a chug—chug—she is away...
Some days she sleeps in the van, others at hippie crash pads. Safe places are identified by a ricocheted arrow within a circle. She considers herself stumbling, from one journey to another. A fug envelops her. She is unchallengeable, accepted. Like dancing, there is freedom to be found in movement.
She follows the festivals: from the Crystal Palace Garden Party with Richie Havens and Sha Na Na, to the Harrow and Wealdstone Football Ground all-dayer; from Rock at the Oval with Zappa and Hawkwind, to the Clitheroe Pop Festival. She watches the Beach Boys sing about sun and surf in an unseasonable summer downpour, glimpses John Peel staccato between acts, as though a flickerbook figure. She spies the crew of Pink Floyd depositing dry ice into a lake as though they were shovelling the ethereal, creating a smoky spooky mist which shifts uneasily between the water and the stage; blue and pink lights coruscating the scene as poisoned fish plop to the surface.
Occasionally she inhales a sweet smoke, her eyes revealing their whites, someone’s hand on her arm. More often than not she shrugs into the moment. There is a balancing act between nuance and knowing. Marianne undergoes a series of equalities she could never have expected from her parents’ relationship. And some days she understands the country is flatlining into nirvana.
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It becomes a challenge to survive. Her opera lessons won’t help her here.
As summer segues into autumn she considers the winter months. The squats are reliant on Calor gas and little else. She wonders how often she will need to sit and extend her hand before someone actually takes it. Money, food, the non-essentials: all are pooled within the community. Yet some have more to offer than others.
Once she holds onto the black plastic of the telephone long enough for the coin to drop before she replaces the receiver.
Music lifts her. She absorbs.
She kicks and shouts.
Often there are screams just beneath the surface: joyous gusts of happiness.
Occasionally, less so.
She is back in the van, in the back of the van.
Tarmac rolls a black track under her foetus-positioned body. The woollen blanket scratches. The Kinks on the radio. A girl—doe-eyed—blinks rapidly under the passing streetlights. Two men in the driving seat.
In that moment she considers herself no more than a twig navigating rapids. It’s all so cool, yeah—but that twig doesn’t know where it’s going.
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“Mari, come here love.”
She follows them down to the stream, the grass dewy between her toes. Behind her, the rotunda dovecote issues coos of encouragement. The morning sky is blue-chill, underneath her thin cardigan her flesh has pimpled and she finds herself shivering. She wonders if she might hitch her way to Africa. What she would find there.
“Come on Mari.”
The stream is no mirror, unless the vista is one of broken glass. She slips out of her skirt, retaining her cardigan and underwear. The water is surprisingly warm, her toes uncurl their tension. Someone laughs and splashes, and she bends to reciprocate. Their familial group charges through the stream, waking ducks, somersaulting liquid spheres which then plunge into the mass.
Fuck!
“Mari?”
Marianne lifts her right leg, regards her foot. A nail, discoloured brown with rust despite the wash, has embedded itself in the soft spot between two of her toes. Looking at it with giddy certainty, she knows that’s not coming out on its own.
“Let’s be having you.”
She falls to allow herself to be carried. On the grassy bank she begins the process which will return her from the stream into the mainstream. As though telescoped, she witnesses their fragile attempts to remove the nail, the journey to the hospital, the concerns regarding septicaemia, her body’s response to infection causing injury to its own tissues and organs.
It would be coy within the moment to transpose a hatred of all things man-made through the consumerist quality of the forged sliver of metal. Yet within the fever-dream lights sparkle in Marianne’s head, caught just behind her eyelids, as though she is seeing something that might actually be there if she concentrates hard enough: the tranquillity of twilight.
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3. THE GERM-FREE ADOLESCENT
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Marianne reads that a thorough understanding of adolescence in society depends on information from various perspectives, including psychology, biology, history, sociology, education, and anthropology.
Her mother fusses. It should never be questioned that love exists.
She oscillates between a fashion designer, an actress and an air stewardess. Her most valuable possession is her soul. Pilgrim’s Progress becomes an inspiration. Joan Shawlee is her style icon. She cleans her teeth exactly as she is told to.
She comes late to braces.
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1976 is a leap year.
Marianne enters the recording studio with a handful of influences and a plethora of ideas.
Silly Billy.
She soft croons over a reggae beat, a background touch of ska. There are seventy-nine days between the 15th April and 3rd July. Plenty of time for dissonance to develop.
Marianne uncurls her feet and pads across the carpet to change channels, the Radio Times falling full-frontal from the sofa onto the floor. She has circled the listing for Plays In Britain, most specifically this week’s edition: Sunshine In Brixton.
Somedays, if she closes her eyes tightly, she can summon Kent through pink plastic sunglasses. Can almost swim through that kaleidoscope.
Returning to the sofa, Marianne identifies with Otis, a sixteen-year-old black youth played by Elvis Payne. A skilled artist with a portfolio of impressive pencil drawings, his true passion is for playing football. As though they are winched together, Marianne edges closer to the flickering set with each setback. She understands it is clear that his talents will fall by the wayside because of the way society and the education system will treat him as a second-class citizen. She understands that the hippie revolution hasn’t been enough. Loving is fine so long as there are others to love you, but she senses an emergence of frisson on the streets empowering the disenfranchised against those who will not care.
The Negative has a bleached white afro.
Marianne twists the channel. Bird’s Eye Beef Burgers—they might look the same but they don’t taste the same—Smash—did you discover what the Earth people eat?—British Telecom—you can chat for as long as three minutes for less than 10p—Campari—...and lemonade, how can you possibly...?—Corona—every bubble’s passed its fizzical—Yorkie—a milk chocolate brick—Guinness—this summer, sit back, enjoy the long cold spell.
Sacha Distel splashes Mandate.
Silver-suited supermodels choreograph Flymo lawnmowers.
A threesome searches for paradise.
When a woman is alone with Badedas, anything can happen.
Poly Styrene switches the set off.
1976 is a leap year.
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Happy birthday.
A two hour train journey out of the smoke. Poly presses her nose to glass; greenery seguing the scene. Her reflection superimposes, darkens. Elsewhere, white kids bend heads, chuckle. She takes the time to ignore them, shovels coins from an embroidered purse when the conductor comes calling. She doesn’t hesitate. Hastings. She turns the ticket reflexively through her fingers. She cannot resist the nail salon for a good basic French manicure. False nails resemble talons.
The day is sunbed hot. She wishes she hadn’t left her shades on the dressing table.
Sucking her teeth against her tongue she considers how difficult it is to maintain dental hygiene whilst wearing braces. Rolling the sleeves of her pale blue cardigan up and down her arms, she recalls the girl she saw slash her wrists in a club toilet. What must it take to do something like that? Would she ever improve?
The incident held resonance. Poly has spent the past month considering the differences between expectation and experience, between how people are supposed to be against who people actually are.
A field of sheep blot the landscape.
The Neo-Georgian train station with its large central booking hall is a jaunt from the seafront. She takes it leisurely: pleased to return to Kent yet wary of those around her. The septicaemia dented her, somehow, emphasising that not everything is as it should be below the surface.
Seagulls dip and dive. Fish and chips tempt her stomach. Bunting is strung along the seafront, triangular alternations of white, red, yellow and blue. The sky and sea merge in a corrugated haze, such as ink smeared by a rubber. Down by the pier, an articulated lorry disgorges equipment. Poly sits on a bench and watches as Budgie’s roadies—all in long hair and denim—shift amps and instruments.
She is nineteen years old. Today.
The heat speaks to her. Something about opportunity. It doesn’t whisper.
She wanders across the boardwalk, the sea strobing beneath. The poster outside the venue is hand drawn in block lettering. Just like Brigitte Bardot she has never heard of the support. She leans against metal railings, watches the weave and weft of the tide: the motion of a forever loom creating an immense shifting tapestry. All life is there—under the water. She wants to submerge—emerge—transform.
She succumbs to chips as the day lingers into evening, the salt and vinegar soiling her fingers. It might not be much of a birthday, but she wants to see Budgie. They eluded her on the festival circuit, but they’re heavy, man. When the doors open she digs deep for the £1.25 and enters the theatre. Strangers channel her. She loops the strap of her bag over her head.
Stagelights backcomb her hair as a dandelion clock. She turns and notices her shadow against the wall by the mixing desk. A curious excitement pitches her insides. Live music is really something. She is fifteen again—squatting, shotting. Within the darkened environment—challenging the sun which will hang fire another one hundred and fifty minutes—distinctions are levelled. Everyone is here for one thing. Camaraderie in numbers.
Almost unnoticed the support take the stage.
Oh sweet fuck.
A coterie of devotees charge the front: an oasis of attention. The music is tight, powerful. People are jumping, spitting. The band’s clothes are held together by safety pins. Poly finds her legs moving, her mind.
She is caught in crisis by the twittering fans of Budgie—bemused and dismissive—and the vortex stage front. As the band de-tune their instruments and hurl abuse at the audience her decision is clear. She pops into the melee.
Outside of the building the gulls continue to swirl. Along the sea front children dig into raspberry ripple screwballs with bubblegum at the bottom. Parents bemoan the heat, talk politics. Bed and Breakfast landladies update their signs. The chasing lights of the amusements beckon like lighthouses commandeered by mermaids.
Poly catches—romanticises—the lead singer’s gaze. He sweeps the assembled, leering.
“Do you know who we are?”
She cannot catch the names swung in reply—both affectionate and abusive—from those around her, but the singer’s response through the mic is deafening: Yes, we’re the Sex Pistols.
It’s a no-brainer to leave before the headliners.
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4. PAINTING THE WORLD TO BE UGLY
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“Why have you called yourself Poly Styrene?”
“My thing is like consumerism, plastic artificial living. I’ve done a lot of travelling around, living in harmony with nature. There’s now so much junk around us. Let’s send it up. Look! This is what you have done to me, turned me into a piece of Styrofoam. I am your product. And this is what you have created: do you like me?”
Falcon manages her. A better bird than budgie.
They score a line for music paper ads looking for young punx who want to stick it together. It runs in Melody Maker and the NME Christmas issue of 1976. People respond.
They make the Roxy at closing time. One foot in the door after the other.
I was writing new songs every week, about what I saw around me so it would be historical. Some songs are timeless: they can apply to any generation. I was trying to do a diary of 1977: I wanted to write about everyday experiences.
Poly remembers Malcolm McLaren, stage left at Hastings pier, wearing a brown gossamer see-through t-shirt.
She fabricates a dress from a bin bag. Compliments it with headgear from Army & Navy stores.
Her voice a shouted powerhouse.
Her lyrics enough for a writer.
The band form and re-form with her as constant. Within a matter of months there is interest. How far can we take this? She has passionate ideas. Wants to beat stagflation.
Marianne still exists. Poly is no Aladdin Sane. No Stardust. The naivety of childhood runs through Poly like a sword. A positive vibe. If the punk Poly has lost the hippy Mari’s man it’s no loss. It’s simply the age of doing things differently.
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“Everyone’s in a type of bondage—restricted, crushed and alienated by our modern materialistic society.”
Poly writes school textbook lyrics, torn pages stuffed into a back pocket. Ideas tumble like children down a grassy bank. If she is dishevelled then it’s deliberate. Punk has widened doors. There are job opportunities in the music industry. It’s no longer a question of little girls being seen and not heard.
Up yours is terribly British. Acknowledge that cliché.
They aim for a kick in the establishment. Not for the first time, Poly has a vision.
Under strobe lights the effect slows until she can count each dust mote suspended in faux sunshine. They’re in rehearsal. Logic has left the building. Saxophone dreams. The band chug—chug—on. Poly pauses mid-hallucination. Still holding the microphone, she walks between band members, their movements staccato, the results soundless. Turning, she sees herself, military-capped, the light reflecting from her braces as though illuminated barbed-wire. She finds herself mouthing lip-read lyrics, nodding in approval. Finding the edge of the stage she vaults the short distance, takes a seat front row. Product is meant to take you out of yourself, she thinks. Is this what advertising is all about?
It’s 1977. And she is going mad.
She finds Logic in the toilets. The fifteen-year-old is her own person, not a foil. Poly puts an arm over her shoulder.
“What is it?”
Falcon thought two girls in the band would be an interesting dynamic. Poly wishes she could be sure.
“Just taking a moment.”
Poly understands. They were both unorthodox before it was acceptable to be so.
Only it isn’t acceptable. Outside the London microcosm bands are finding it impossible to play.
There’s outrage.
Poly hustles Logic back to the stage. If the saxophonist realises the band are already playing then she doesn’t acknowledge that Styrene is already singing.
Poly snaps back into herself, putting the art into Art-I-Ficial.
Her existence is elusive.
She dances, one foot to the other, her arms up and down. Synchronicity. The hall is empty except for Falcon, watching from the back row. His eyes intent.
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The Zenith B505B survived the journey from Kent to Brixton. It survived late sixties pop, early seventies psychedelic, mid-seventies progressive rock. It survived countless requests to have it turned down. It survived being left behind whilst Poly travelled. It survived.
When she spins Live At The Roxy WC2, she squints as she drops the needle tentatively at track 4, side 2. Most times she scrapes the end of 15 by Eater, a band of boys of whom she is already old enough to be an auntie, but this adds anticipation. The hiss between tracks mimics the static she creates pulling her mohair jumper over her head and throwing it onto the bed. Then it kicks in. Then she kicks in.
If she cannot help but dance then God help the others.
The recording leads to a residency at The Man In The Moon pub. The band are over it. They tighten. She hones her lyrics. There are others: Siouxsie Sioux, Pauline Murray, Ari Up. They’re in it together. She realises for the first time that when something is called a Movement you can actually feel it moving. Whereas once she might have been a twig, now she is the tree. She can sense the influence, branching, multiplying. Yet despite individuality, there are times when she double takes the audience. She stares at them as much as they stare at her. There’s a difference in doing what she wants to do once she begins to be appreciated.
The world turns too much with her.
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5. VISION ON
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Everyone’s on Top Of The Pops. Poly notices the illuminated studio sign indicating that cameras are live. She knows the show is a vehicle for vapid commercialism which pays little or no attention to talented, unknown bands.
She supposes this must mean they have made it.
They’ve been numbers 23, 24, and 19. The album is top 30.
She can’t deny she enjoys the attention.
There’s an idea in portraiture that it’s the photographer’s job to set the subject at ease. She doesn’t believe that.
She rotates her arms, jerks.
The studio adds state-of-the-art graphics to the performance which will date much quicker than the song.
Even in 1978 the audience don’t know what to expect. Dressed as a toy soldier mannequin she performs in front of mannequins. Some of them wear tank tops. They move with the artistry of the condemned.
It’s too easy to be judgmental.
X-Ray Spex are building to a headlining UK tour. Poly supposes this is what it is to be successful. It’s become difficult not to be noticed. She’s described as an archetype for the modern-day feminist punk. She sees another label.
Before the tour she returns to her Brixton home, lifts the record arm from the vinyl. She slows the spin with both hands, picks up the product and regards the cuts. It’s a beautiful thing: the weight of the vinyl, the bubblewrap-effect inner sleeve printed with her lyrics, the test-tube outer sleeve designed by Falcon which she approved and loved. One fits in the other fits in the other. Leaning it against the windowsill she sits opposite, her toes touching the cardboard. Outside, the view is all red brick and slate roof. Television aerials extend like fronds of coral. Through those twists of metal her neighbours might have seen her sing. She shakes her head, the understanding is too immense. For a moment, the world fails to make sense—after having not made sense for far too long. She watches women whose hands are red raw from cold haul shopping bags whose plastic stretches and cuts into their flesh unforgiving.
There are few who will be different.
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Gig follows gig follows gig.
Their set might be short but it’s intense. Each member of the audience is revealed then concealed through semi-synchronised pogoing.
They don’t spit her way. One of the benefits of being female, although she doesn’t milk this asset.
Rudi’s sax cuts through the sound like a saw. He might not be as freeform as Logic, but he won’t flip. Airport, Dean and Hurding are solid, a frenetic background to Poly’s nuanced shout which occasionally couples a childlike speaking voice into the ferocity of her punk caterwauling. She is elevated by her lyrics, buoyed by enthusiasm. Nihilism tempered with literacy. She is a Ballard, an Acker, pure Styrene. She rails against a consumerist society she finds intent on commodifying its inhabitants, as though they—the people—are the products sought to be bought by a queue of washing machines, dishwashers, toothpastes and television sets. And it dismays her that they enter the supermarket so willingly.
The scene is not without its enemies. At some venues she battles racism, misogyny, the occasional bottle. You’re not who you’re supposed to be. There is bravery in being herself, in channelling these passions to these people. She runs a string of pearls around her neck in the tawdry dressing room at one gig, tipping her hat rakishly on her afro, her lips forced into a smile by the cage of those braces, her body hidden beneath shapeless plastic. She is a dynamo whose energy is generated by the times. She allows herself to wonder who she might have dreamed to be in another decade. She understands that inevitably we are product, one way or another. And even to fight is to embrace.
The music thrills, but here at the tail of the tour she yearns for her quirky shop at Beaufort Market and all its coloured plastic sandals. She might dress the world in those daylight fluorescent pigments. Even if within a year she knows the punk fashion will go overground, became as conformist as anything it tries to overthrow, she adheres to the challenge of that revolution. When she rises from the dressing room and throws herself into the melee her outlook is timeless. She is the spokeswoman for her generation.
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The hip young gunslinger, Julie Burchill, writes You don’t need X-Ray Spex to see flying saucers.
Nancy Spungen is dead. Andy (XTC) Partridge is on the cover of NME. Paul Morley reviews John Cooper Clarke, who resolutely avoids the serious and the sentimental for the grotesque and the irresistible. Poly has been to Paris and suffered fireworks over acoustic numbers. New York City just can’t get enough. A rollercoaster cacophony threatens stability. Music is off the rails.
It rains in Doncaster. Poly watches from the bus as their equipment is hurried inside. She resists the temptation to bite her fingernails. She is wearing the clothes she will perform in that evening. No costume changes for her.
The skyline is dominated by the Minster in the middle of the town. Poly notes the lights of the Frenchgate shopping centre as they wink off in twilight’s thrall. The local newspaper bemoans the closing of yet another coal mine. She considers objects as security blankets, wonders how some of those workers will cope.
They have travelled thousands of miles to play a handful of gigs to a few hundred people.
She runs a hand over her newly-shaved head.
There’s trouble at t’mill.
In the advancing dusk a dirty urban fox noses a black binbag. Poly sits straight, holds breath. There is an untruthfulness to being on stage, of being scrutinised; of having others’ opinions imprinted. The fox pulls at something viscous, a meniscus. Poly wonders if she might become the character she represents to the audience when onstage. One step removed from her existence. She wonders how many steps it might then take to fall from that stage, as the fox fades into nothing, consumed by the shadow of the night.
Poly?
Since when has Falcon started calling her that?
Come on, Poly. Over here love. Give us some skin.
The only difference between a rural fox and an urban fox is the matter of its postcode.
After the gig the crew roll some marijuana. They need to chill from the high. Poly stands outside the tour bus. The sky has cleared. She inhales the smoke. It’s become something to do, she stops ravaging inside.
Jak is talking but she understands she is no longer listening. The sky is fracturing. A pink light—a rose punk—blisters the dark. It emerges like a foetus, pushing aside the veil. She stumbles back, her right hand connecting against the bus which crackles with a new kind of electricity. She can hear the music, chug—chugging—establishing a beat. There’s a relentless energy to be mined, and suddenly her consciousness is racing and her body is far enough behind not to follow.
The pink coalesces imaginable. She recalls the heat of the Kent sun, the burning freedom of existence, the deception of succession.
She’s not smashing potato but she’s close enough for an encounter of some kind.
An object appears. Charged with the same electricity which courses through her. She holds onto Jak and he jerks backwards at her touch. Mohair static.
The light blooms, cuts a pink rectangle out of the diminishing night sky.
Kaleidoscopes.
Poly senses the ground shift beneath her feet, as though the movement she has expected has finally arrived.
She falters into day-glo.
Uh.
Oh.
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6. THE OPERATOR’S JOB
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The room is as white as the end of 2001. After this, the first thing she notices is her mother’s hand on the bed rail. After that, the second thing she understands is that there is a bed rail.
As if seeing UFOs were out of this world.
Someone says: You’ve been diagnosed, sectioned, and likely will never work again.
With the speed of 33 1/3 rpm played at 45 the remainder of her life segues: translucence into Krishna following a conscious consumer then a flower aeroplane until she advocates generation indigo. Various stages of enlightenment.
It is then she understands: I was misdiagnosed, sectioned, and thought very hard about being myself again.
Meanwhile she is appropriated, but if the Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago and mankind only 200,000 years ago, then the blister pack of punk’s influence was punched out before it began.
It’s taken thirty-three and a third years to accept that being herself is also an invention. Bi-polar.
For sale: one hundred 75mm Polystyrene UFO discs. Ideal for sequin crafts, tissue paper decorating and various other decorative uses.
A bargain at three ninety-nine.
Marianne lies on her back looking out from the sun.
Perhaps if she had owned a pair of x-ray specs she might have seen the cancer. With or without pink frames.
But it’s of no matter.
She thinks back to the UFO. Unidentified.
She hears: Even when she was very ill, in her last weeks, she glowed from the inside.
She has given back more than she can take.
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Marianne opens her mouth, but it isn’t to sing.
No more.