My secret life: Poly Styrene, Singer, 51

Interview by Charlotte Philby
Saturday, 19 April 2008

The house I grew up in... was a white-fronted, Grade II-listed council house in a mixed part of Brixton, but I still felt the racial tension. Once I was hit over the head with a cricket bat, it was just that kind of area. Even if you were Italian, you were a "wog".

When I was a child I wanted to be... a fashion designer, an actress and an air stewardess. But then I started a small clothes label which never took off, failed an audition to Rada, and never applied to be an air hostess.

The moment that changed me for ever... 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...........

The whole interview is here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/my-secret-life-poly-styrene-singer-51-811129.html

The return of punk's first lady

Thirty years after singing of bondage and toothpaste, via a stay at a psychiatric hospital and motherhood, Poly Styrene is back on stage, without X-Ray Spex and ready to take on the music world again, says Nick Hasted

The force of nature who screamed "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" in 1977 is nowhere to be seen. I twice walk past Poly Styrene, the sometime lead singer of X-Ray Spex, who is sitting quietly outside the Soho restaurant of the Hare Krishna temple she joined after she left her band, shattered, in 1979.

There's no obvious glamour or fire in the chatty, laughing woman I eventually greet. But in the less than three years that her band existed, Poly's thick brace, chaotically colourful fashion sense and untrained voice of explosive joy became a crucial punk flashpoint. "People think little girls should be seen and not heard / but I think, oh bondage, up yours!" went her calling card, an attitude taken up in the early 1990s by the Riot Grrrl movement, and by some in each new female generation. In September, X-Ray Spex played for the first time in 17 years. The sell-out show at London's Roundhouse is now being readied as a live DVD...

...Poly Styrene was born Marian Elliott in 1957 to a Somali dad and the white mum who raised her alone. As a mixed-race child in 1960s south London she learnt to talk her way out of trouble. Bursting with reckless teenage adventure, she ran away at 15, with £3 in her pocket. "I didn't feel scared," she says. "At school we'd read this book about a young Native American boy who, to become a man, had to go out into the wilderness by himself. It was a challenge, to see if I could survive. I lived on what we foraged in the forest. I did a lot of walking through the night, hitch-hiked from one free festival to the next, stayed in hippie crash-pads. I walked in a stream in north Devon all the way to the sea. I sat on a rock with a guy who looked like he was from another planet, with long, platinum-blond hair, blue robes, white eyebrows. It was like if I had touched him, he might not have been real."...........

Whole article & photo here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/the-return-of-punks-first-lady-1027858.html