# The Hare Krishna Years *A Biography of Poly Styrene* — Legendary Biographies No. 090 - **Subject:** Marianne Joan Elliott-Said (Poly Styrene) - **Written by:** Donovan Hadley - **Shelf:** Music / Rock - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 199 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 199 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-090-4) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-181-9) - **Content notes:** mental illness; cancer death Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/090-the-hare-krishna-years.html ## About this book In 1979 Marianne Joan Elliott-Said was admitted to an institution, and the press printed the word schizophrenia. It has since been re-diagnosed as bipolar disorder. The correction arrived long after the story had set, and by then the wrong word had done its work on how everything she made was read. She was the daughter of a Scottish-Irish legal secretary and a Somali aristocrat-in-exile who worked the docks, and she grew up mixed-race in Brixton. She ran away from home at fifteen. She founded X-Ray Spex in 1976 after seeing the Sex Pistols play Hastings Pier, cut Oh Bondage Up Yours! in 1977 and Germfree Adolescents in 1978 — the first punk album by a Black woman in British rock history, and twelve months the British punk press did not know how to write about. At twenty she disbanded the group, after seeing a giant pink flying saucer over a Doncaster motorway. In 1983 she joined the Hare Krishna movement and moved to the Bhaktivedanta Manor in Hertfordshire, where she stayed for the next two decades. Donovan Hadley's biography takes those years as the centre of the life rather than the epilogue to it. He works through the solo albums, Translucence in 1980 and Flower Aeroplane in 2004, the X-Ray Spex reunion at the Roundhouse in 2008, and the breast-cancer diagnosis of February 2011. She died on April 25, 2011, at fifty-three. Bromley, July 3, 1957: the first Black woman to front a British punk band, a prophet of mid-1970s consumer culture, and a devotee whose years at the Bhaktivedanta Manor the music press needed twenty of its own to work out how to read. ## Contents 1. Bromley 2. The Gig 3. Oh Bondage Up Yours! 4. The Sound 5. Germfree Adolescents 6. The Break 7. The Quiet Years 8. Hare Krishna 9. Solo 10. The Daughters 11. The World Catches Up 12. Generation Indigo 13. St Leonards 14. Celeste 15. Race and Punk 16. The Body 17. The Prophet 18. The Scream ## Questions **Who is The Hare Krishna Years about?** Marianne Joan Elliott-Said (Poly Styrene). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Hare Krishna Years — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,712 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,500 words, 18 chapters, 199 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: mental illness; cancer death. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Donovan Hadley is a Manchester-based culture writer for The Guardian and Sight & Sound. His biographies cover the film, theatre, and television figures whose work shaped the British and American midcentury. He spends his time researching archives to reconstruct the quiet moments behind major cultural milestones. His published work includes titles like The Nightmare Man, Frequency, and The Gap Year. He has also explored midcentury creative communities in books such as The Fifty Million Dollar Man, The USC Film School, Apartment Five C, Room 607, and The First Cast. He lives in Manchester, England, where he spends his weekends browsing local independent cinemas and collecting vintage film reels.