Chapter 1Bromley

Foreword

For most of my working life I have written about people who wanted to be looked at. The lit faces of the studio decades, the stage and screen names who were powdered and photographed and sold to a public that had been carefully taught to want them. I have spent years inside that machinery, admiring it, explaining it, tracing the enormous labor that went into the manufacture of a beautiful surface. So when I said I was going to write about Poly Styrene, someone who knew my subjects asked, not unkindly, why I would want a woman who had spent her whole short career trying to take that machinery apart.

That was exactly why I wanted her.

Because she put braces on her teeth at the precise moment the apparatus of pop demanded a pretty mouth. She wore Day-Glo that was engineered to hurt the eye. She stood in front of a saxophone and screamed "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" at the plastic, packaged, consumer Britain that the glamorous people I had spent my life chronicling had helped to build and to sell. She was the saboteur in the theater I had been describing from the good seats, and in all those years I had never once turned around to look at her.

I expected, when I started, to find a footnote. That is the version the record hands you first: the brown girl in the Day-Glo who screamed about plastic for one album, broke down, and disappeared into a religious movement. A curiosity. Ahead of her time, which is the phrase we use for people we did not have the wit to notice while they were standing in front of us. What I found instead was the most accurate account of the manufactured world that anyone in her generation produced, written by the one person who had never been allowed inside it, and therefore the only one who could see the whole of its surface.

The title of this book points at the part of her life that the punk story has never known what to do with. The years in the Hare Krishna community, chanting, raising a daughter, living quietly while the world she had described so exactly went on building itself. Punk read that turn as surrender, a rebel giving up her nerve. I came to read it as continuity: she had screamed that the whole visible world was an illusion designed to sell you something, and then she went to live inside a tradition that says exactly that in a language four thousand years old. She did not change her mind. She only found a word for what she already knew.

I worked from what anyone can work from, and no more: the published record, her daughter's memoir and the documentary built around it, the music press that mostly missed her, the court and hospital and public traces that a hard life leaves behind. I have not invented conversations I did not have or evidence I do not possess. There is enough on the surface, if you are willing to read a life the way she read a shop window.

She is worth a book because she was right. About the plastic, the packaging, the Day-Glo, the algorithm before there was an algorithm, the self that turns out to be a product of the factory selling you the means to express it. The chronicler of the old glamour machine owed the woman who saw through it a full-length look. This is my attempt to give her one.

— Donovan Hadley, Manchester

Chapter 1 · Bromley

Bromley in the 1950s was a place that prided itself on being nowhere in particular. Tucked into the southeastern edge of London, it was a borough of pebble-dashed semis and net curtains, of privet hedges clipped to identical heights, of streets named after flowers that no longer grew there. It was bombed during the war and rebuilt without imagination. The new buildings looked like the old buildings, only flatter. The people who lived in them wanted what the people before them had wanted, quiet, respectability, a garden that didn't embarrass them in front of the neighbors. Bromley delivered all of this with a consistency that bordered on the geological. Nothing happened there, and nothing was supposed to.

Into this nothing, on July 3, 1957, Marianne Joan Elliott-Said was born.

Her mother was a white Scottish-Irish woman, a legal secretary with a sharp mind and a temper that came and went like weather. Her father was a Somali man who had come to England through the docks, part of the long, quiet migration of East African men who arrived in Britain after the war to work in the merchant navy and the ports and the factories, and who found, upon arrival, that the country they had been told was the motherland had no intention of mothering them. His name was not widely recorded. He would not stay.

The marriage, or the relationship, accounts differ, and Marianne's mother did not discuss it freely, was brief. A Somali man and a white Scottish-Irish woman in Bromley in the mid-1950s were not merely unusual. They were a provocation. The Britain of 1957 had not yet passed the Race Relations Act. It had not yet had the Notting Hill riots. It was a country in which a mixed-race couple walking down a high street could expect stares at best and violence at worst, and in which the child of such a couple would inherit not the best of both worlds but the suspicion of all of them.

Marianne's father left when she was young. The details of his departure have never been fully established, and Marianne herself, in the few interviews where she discussed her childhood, was characteristically oblique. He went back to sea. He went back to Somalia. He simply went. What remained was his face in hers, the brown skin, the features that made her unreadable to the white world of Bromley, and the absence itself, which became one of the defining facts of her interior life.

Her mother raised her alone, or nearly alone, in a series of flats and houses, the family relocating north from Bromley to Brixton in south London while Marianne was still small. Bromley was the birthplace and the borough on the certificate; Brixton was where Marianne actually grew up, in a part of the city where the Somali fathers had been more visible and where the Caribbean-rooted Black British communities were beginning to organise the streets that would become, in the next decade, the centre of one of the country's most loaded racial geographies. The work was secretarial. The money was tight. The neighborhood, at the start of the period, was mostly white. Marianne was, in her early years, often the only brown face in her school, on her street, in most rooms she entered. She learned early what it meant to be looked at, not admired, not hated, just looked at, with that particular English stare that combines curiosity and judgment and the faintest suggestion that you have made a mistake by existing in this particular postcode.

She was not, by any account, a miserable child. She was watchful. She was funny. She had a vivid internal life that expressed itself in drawing and singing and a habit of saying things that adults found startling. But she was also a child who understood, before she had the language for it, that she occupied a position in the world that the world had not prepared a place for. She was not white. She was not Black. She was not Somali, having never been to Somalia and having no contact with her father's family. She was not Irish, though her mother's people were. She was something that Bromley did not have a category for, and Bromley was a place that ran on categories.

The England she was born into was still, in most meaningful ways, the England of the 1940s. The war had ended twelve years earlier, but the rationing mentality persisted. Austerity was not a policy but a personality trait. People saved string. They reused envelopes. They ate food that tasted like apology and called it dinner. The welfare state was new and still trusted, the National Health Service barely a decade old, the grammar schools and secondary moderns still sorting children into futures based on a single exam at eleven. If you passed, you went one way. If you failed, you went another. The system was not designed for ambiguity, and Marianne was ambiguity incarnate.

She attended local schools in Brixton and the surrounding area. The accounts of her school years are sparse, she did not write extensively about them, and her mother was not the kind of woman who kept scrapbooks. What is known is that she was bright, that she was bored, that she read voraciously, and that she left school at fifteen without qualifications, as many working-class children did in the early 1970s. The school system had not failed her, exactly. It had simply never noticed her.

What she noticed, during those years, was the world around her. Not the natural world, Brixton offered little of that, but the manufactured world. The shops. The advertisements. The packaging. The way that everything was wrapped in something, and the wrapping was designed to make you want the thing inside, and the thing inside was never as good as the wrapping suggested. She noticed the gap between what was promised and what was delivered, between the image and the reality, between the bright, clean, modern surfaces of consumer Britain and the grey, cramped, damp reality of actually living in it. She noticed plastic.

This was not a metaphor, or not only a metaphor. The 1960s and early 1970s were the golden age of plastic in Britain. Everything was becoming plastic, furniture, clothing, packaging, toys, kitchen implements, the dashboards of cars, the cases of televisions, the handles of doors. Plastic was the future. It was clean, modern, hygienic, disposable. It replaced wood and metal and glass and paper with something that came in any color and cost almost nothing and lasted forever, which meant that it accumulated everywhere, in cupboards and bins and gutters and rivers, a bright, indestructible tide of stuff that the country had not yet learned to see as a problem. Marianne saw it. She saw it the way a painter sees light or a musician hears pitch, as the defining characteristic of the world she was born into. Everything was fake. Everything was wrapped. Everything was for sale.

This perception would become the foundation of her art, but she was years away from making art. For now, she was a teenage girl in Brixton with no qualifications, no money, no father, and a face that made people stare. She needed to escape.

At fifteen, she ran away from home. She left with three pounds in her pocket, which in the early 1970s was enough to begin a journey but not enough to sustain one. She was a hippie, or was trying on the hippie identity the way she would later try on and discard every other available identity, and the hippie world of the early 1970s offered what the world of Bromley did not: movement, community, the possibility of a self that was not determined by where you had been born or what color your skin was. She hitchhiked from music festival to music festival, sleeping in crash pads and commune spaces and the tents of people who accepted her without asking for credentials. It was, by any conventional measure, dangerous. It was also, by any honest measure, the first time she had been fully herself, unanchored, exploring, under no obligation to be what Bromley expected her to be.

The freedom ended, as the freedoms of the road tend to end, with the body making a demand that the spirit could not override. Wading in a stream near one of the festivals, she stepped on a rusty nail. The wound became infected. She developed sepsis. She had to be treated, which meant returning to the world she had fled, to hospitals and addresses and the kind of institutional care that required you to exist in a fixed location with a fixed identity. She went back to her mother's home in Brixton. The adventure was over. The perception it had given her, the experience of living outside the categories, of being a person rather than a category, was not.

The episode established a pattern that would repeat throughout her life: an impulsive move toward freedom, a crisis of the body or the mind that interrupted it, a return to safety. The same pattern would play out at a larger scale in 1978, when the freedom of X-Ray Spex and the intensity of the tour ended in a psychiatric ward. It would play out again in the Hare Krishna years, when the freedom of the spiritual community gave way to the constraints of communal life. The life of Marianne Elliott-Said was, in structural terms, a series of escapes and returns, each one teaching something about what freedom was and was not, what safety cost and what it purchased.

She needed to work. She worked in shops. She drifted through the kind of jobs that working-class teenagers drifted through in early-1970s Britain, temporary, low-paid, offering no future and demanding no commitment. She was good at selling. She had an eye for what people wanted and a mouth that could talk them into wanting it more. But she was also, already, somewhere else in her head. She was writing. She was drawing. She was singing, in her room, along to records, in a voice that she was not yet sure belonged to anyone.

The records she listened to were eclectic in a way that reflected her position. She was not embedded in any single musical community. She did not have older siblings who handed down a canon. She found things on her own, reggae, because it was the music of the other brown and Black kids she occasionally encountered; pop, because it was everywhere; soul, because it moved her; the emerging sounds of glam rock, because it was strange and bright and seemed to be about transformation, about becoming something other than what you were born as. David Bowie, who was also from Bromley, was performing his Ziggy Stardust shows in 1972 and 1973, and while there is no evidence that the teenage Marianne saw him perform, the idea of Bowie, the idea that a person from Bromley could reinvent themselves entirely, could put on a costume and a voice and become something alien and luminous, was in the air she breathed.

She attempted, briefly, a career as a reggae singer. This was the mid-1970s, and reggae was the dominant music of Black Britain, the sound of the Windrush generation and their children, the music of resistance and community and faith. Marianne loved it. She felt it in her body. But she was not, in the eyes of the reggae world, Black enough. She was mixed. She was from Bromley. She did not have the roots, literal or cultural, that the reggae scene demanded. She recorded a single, "Silly Billy," in a reggae style, under the name Mari Elliott, and it sank without a trace. The reggae world did not reject her violently. It simply did not recognize her.

This was the pattern. The white world saw her as not white. The Black world saw her as not Black. The music world saw her as not anything in particular. She was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old, and she was falling through the gaps in every category that Britain had constructed, and she was beginning to understand that the gaps were the point. That the categories themselves were the problem. That the sorting and labeling and packaging of human beings was the same impulse that sorted and labeled and packaged everything else in the consumer world she had been watching since childhood. That identity was plastic, too.

She did not yet have the language for this. She did not yet have the music. She had only the perception, sharp, restless, furious in a way she could not yet express, that something was wrong with the way the world was organized, and that the wrongness was not accidental but designed.

She was living in London by now, moving between squats and bedsits and friends' floors, part of the loose, floating population of young people who existed in the margins of the city in the mid-1970s. London was cheaper then, and dirtier, and more dangerous, and more free. You could disappear into it. You could become someone else. The city was full of people becoming someone else, immigrants, artists, runaways, dropouts, the debris of the counterculture that had promised everything in the 1960s and delivered very little in the 1970s. Marianne moved among them, not quite belonging to any group, absorbing everything.

She was in this state, rootless, watchful, beginning to understand that her not-belonging was not a deficit but a vantage point, when punk arrived.

Punk did not arrive in Britain as a coherent movement. It arrived as a series of shocks. The Sex Pistols played their first gig in November 1975, at Saint Martins School of Art, and for the next year they played wherever they could, pubs, art schools, clubs that didn't know what they were booking, in front of audiences that were small enough to count and volatile enough to make counting pointless. The Clash formed in June 1976. The Damned were assembling. The Buzzcocks drove down from Manchester. The whole thing was happening in a handful of London venues, the 100 Club, the Roxy, the Nashville, and in the music press, where journalists were trying to decide whether they were covering a movement or a joke.

The famous moment, the one that every punk history cites, was the Sex Pistols' appearance on Bill Grundy's television show in December 1976, when they swore on live television and the tabloids exploded and punk became, overnight, a national scandal. But by then, punk had already been happening for a year, in small rooms, in front of small crowds, and Marianne Elliott-Said had already been in one of those rooms and had already had her life changed.

The Sex Pistols concert that changed her life took place on Hastings Pier on Saturday, July 3, 1976, her nineteenth birthday. The Pistols were supporting Budgie, the booking was an accident of geography rather than design, and the room was nearly empty. What was not in dispute was the effect. She went, she watched, and she understood, immediately, two things.

The first was that this music was not like other music. It was not about virtuosity or beauty or craftsmanship. It was about urgency. It was about saying something so loudly and so directly that the usual mechanisms of filtering and packaging and presentation were overwhelmed. The songs were short. The playing was rough. The singer, Johnny Rotten, did not sing so much as sneer and spit and accuse. The guitars were a wall of noise that made no attempt to be pleasant. The drums were a stampede. The whole thing was over in twenty minutes and it felt like being inside an explosion.

The second thing she understood was that this music, for all its claim to be about the streets and the dole queues and the boredom of working-class life, was not about her. The Sex Pistols were white. The Clash were white. The Damned were white. The Buzzcocks were white. The entire punk scene, which was positioning itself as the voice of the dispossessed, was white. The women in it were mostly girlfriends or fashion accessories. The people of color were absent. The rage was real, but it was a white rage, directed at a system that had failed white working-class men, and it had nothing to say about the experience of being brown and female and mixed-race in a country that didn't know what to do with you.

And so Marianne Elliott-Said did the most punk thing anyone did in 1976. She decided to make her own version.

She would not join someone else's band. She would not audition. She would not wait for permission. She would form a band that sounded like nobody else, that looked like nobody else, that said the things nobody else was saying. She would put a saxophone in it, because punk did not have saxophones and she thought it should. She would sing about the things she had been noticing since childhood, the plastic, the packaging, the fakeness, the way that identity itself was manufactured and sold. She would scream, because screaming was the correct response to the world she was living in. And she would call herself Poly Styrene, because the name said everything, synthetic, disposable, mass-produced, and somehow, despite all of that, indestructible.

The name was the first act of genius. In a scene that rewarded self-invention, Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Joe Strummer, Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene was the name that went furthest. It was not a name that suggested toughness or danger or mystery. It was a name that suggested a material. A cheap, ubiquitous, artificial material that was slowly filling the world. By naming herself after it, she was doing three things at once: she was identifying the enemy, she was becoming the enemy, and she was laughing at the enemy. She was saying: I am what this world makes. I am the product of your factories and your advertisements and your plastic civilization. And I am going to scream at you until your eardrums crack.

Nobody in Bromley had ever done anything like this. Nobody anywhere had ever done anything like this.

She was nineteen years old.

To understand what Marianne Elliott-Said was about to do, it helps to understand what Bromley had already produced and what it had failed to produce.

Bromley was, by the mid-1970s, one of the more culturally significant suburbs in England, though nobody who lived there would have said so. David Bowie had grown up there, in a house on Plaistow Grove, and had spent the late 1960s and early 1970s inventing and discarding identities, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, before leaving for Berlin. Billy Idol, who would become one of the most visible figures of the punk-to-new-wave transition, was from Bromley. Siouxsie Sioux, who would form Siouxsie and the Banshees and become the queen of goth, was from Bromley. The so-called "Bromley Contingent", the group of early Sex Pistols followers who included Siouxsie, Steve Severin, and Billy Idol, were from Bromley. The suburb had produced, or was about to produce, an extraordinary concentration of people who wanted to be anywhere else and who expressed that desire by making themselves as strange as possible.

But the Bromley Contingent was white. It was middle-class, or at least not truly working-class. It was art-school adjacent, fashion-conscious, concerned with surfaces and style in a way that Marianne, who could not afford to be concerned with surfaces because her surface, her skin, was the thing that marked her as different, found both fascinating and irrelevant. She was not part of the Bromley Contingent. She was from Bromley, but she was not of it. She was watching from the outside, as she had always watched everything from the outside, and what she saw was that even punk, even this supposedly radical, supposedly inclusive, supposedly anarchic movement, had an inside and an outside, and she was on the outside.

Her mother's flat. The market stalls. The bedsit. The records. The notebooks she was filling with lyrics and drawings. The television, with its advertisements for products she could not afford and did not want. The streets of South London, grey and endless. The National Front marches, which were becoming more frequent and more frightening, skinheads in boots carrying Union Jacks through neighborhoods where brown and Black people lived and worked and tried to survive. The graffiti, NF, KEEP BRITAIN WHITE, that appeared on walls and bridges and bus shelters, a constant, casual reminder that there were people in this country who did not believe she had the right to exist in it.

All of this was going into the songs she was writing, though she did not yet know they were songs. She was writing words, sharp, compressed, imagistic, more like slogans or prophecies than lyrics. Words about plastic and identity and bondage and freedom and the way that everything in the modern world was designed to make you buy something you didn't need and become someone you weren't. Words that came out of her own experience, biracial, female, working-class, mentally alert in a way that would later be diagnosed as something else, but that described a condition that was universal. Everyone was being packaged. Everyone was being sold. Everyone was a product of the germfree, Day-Glo, genetically engineered, identity-dissolved consumer civilization that was building itself around them. She was just the one who could see it, because she was the one who had never been allowed inside it.

She started looking for musicians.

The search for musicians was not romantic. It was practical and messy, conducted through classified ads in music papers and conversations in pubs and at gigs. Marianne wanted three things: energy, willingness to play fast and loud, and a saxophone player. The saxophone was non-negotiable. She had heard it in the rhythm and blues records she loved, in the soul music that moved her, and she knew that it could do something in a punk context that guitars alone could not. A saxophone could wail. It could screech. It could sound like a factory siren or a human scream or a fire alarm. It could cut through the guitar noise like a blade through plastic. It was the sound she heard in her head when she imagined her band, and she would not compromise on it.

She found Lora Logic. Born Susan Whitby, Lora Logic was fifteen years old, four years younger than Marianne, and played the saxophone with a ferocity that belied her age and her slight frame. She was also, like Marianne, an outsider, a teenage girl in a scene that was not designed for teenage girls, and she played the saxophone the way punk demanded everything be played, as if it were a weapon and the audience were a wall that needed knocking down. She was the missing piece.

The rest of the band assembled around them. Jak Airport on guitar, Paul Dean on bass, B.P. Hurding on drums. They were competent, enthusiastic, and willing to follow where Marianne led. They were not, individually, exceptional musicians, but they did not need to be. What they needed to be was loud, fast, and committed to the vision that Marianne was building, and they were all of those things.

They rehearsed in whatever spaces they could find, squats, community centers, the back rooms of pubs. The sound they developed was unlike anything else in punk. The guitars churned and buzzed in the standard punk fashion, but over them, Lora Logic's saxophone screamed and swooped and wailed, adding a layer of chaos and color that no other band had. And over all of it, Marianne's voice, high, sharp, almost childlike in its clarity, capable of shifting from a conversational tone to a full-throated scream in the space of a syllable, delivered lyrics that were denser, stranger, and more intellectually ambitious than anything else in the punk movement.

They called themselves X-Ray Spex. The name, like Poly Styrene, was perfect. X-rays saw through surfaces. They revealed the hidden structure beneath the visible world. Spectacles, spex, were lenses for seeing. The band's name promised to see through the plastic, the packaging, the manufactured surfaces of consumer culture, and to show the audience what was underneath. It was a name that declared a mission.

Bromley had produced another band. But this one was different from anything Bromley, or anywhere else, had seen before. This one had a brown girl out front, wearing braces on her teeth and Day-Glo clothes, with a saxophone player beside her, singing songs about a future that nobody else could see yet.

The year was 1977.