Audiologue

Former X-Ray Spex frontwoman, Poly Styrene, died of breast cancer yesterday at the age of 53. The band’s most well known song may be “Germ Free Adolescents” but this one, “The Day the World Turned Day Glo” is my favorite. It’s such poetic angst. This was sad timing for Styrene who, along with the Spex, made a minor comeback in 2007 when the music mags reunited some of the old timey punks that were still living for the 30th anniversary of the Sex Pistol’s album, Never Mind the Bullocks.

The Spex formed around the later half the 1970s after Styrene caught a Sex Pistols performance and was inspired to start a band which seemed to be the case for a lot of bands that followed the Sex Pistols. This video goes to show you just how young they were at the time. A teenager runaway who traveled around music festivals, Poly Styrene was a kind of hippie. She made her outfits, had a mouthful of braces, and curly hair. Lora Logic was the other girl in the band, and for a time, played saxophone. So the band was one of the more unique ones at the time. I tend to think of them less as punk and more in that post-punk, experimental phase that came later. Her performing cut short, though, when they diagnosed her as schizophrenic, and later, as having bipolar disorder. And by the early 80s, she joined a religious cult. It was years before she was back on the scene again, touring and making new music, culminating in the release of a solo album called Generation Indigo  only just last month.