Lets Submerge: X-Ray Spex’s Germfree Adolescents at 45
Looking back at an album that was anything but a cliché
It felt like they were gone as soon as they arrived, but they managed one pointed punk classic while they were here.
X-Ray Spex released Germfree Adolescents 45 years ago today. Its point-of-view feels as relevant now as it did then.
The album was a vehicle for lead singer Poly Styrene, who wrote all of the songs. She hadn’t been a punk kid, having been more of a hippy type, dropping out of school at 15 and traveling for a year. When she came back, the consumer-driven aspects of life felt all the more glaring after she’d been living off the land, eating ferns and drinking stinging nettle tea.
That changed when she was part of a small crowd at at Sex Pistols show Hastings Pier on her birthday in July, 1976. This was months before the they released their first single (“Anarchy in the U.K.”) and before Sid Vicious joined. It was basically a covers set.
As the Pistols played, at first straightforward before descending into intentional, not giving a crap anarchy, before a small gathering, she was inspired enough to do it herself, thinking that if these guys could do it, there was no reason she couldn’t.
She placed an ad in Melody Maker looking for “young punx who want to stick it together.”
The “young punx” turned out to be guitarist Jak Airport, bassist Paul Dean, drummer Paul “B.P.” Hurding and saxophonist Lora Logic.
They started playing gigs and recording singles, with Poly zeroing in on her stage persona, with outfits that could be almost anything (army helmet here, neon sweaters there). She also did the artwork for the posters and singles.
Logic, only 15, left early on. The official story was that she left to continue her education, but she’d later claim that she got the boot because Poly didn’t want to share the spotlight. Although she only played on the first single — “Oh Bondage, Up Yours” with “I Am a Cliche” as the B-side, her saxophone arrangements would get used on the album.
The four singles would form the backbone of Germfree Adolescents, which came to the consternation of some in the U.K. press, who felt the album offered “little new.” Those 1978 critics were apparently unfamiliar with advance singles and certainly unaware that the album itself would be the historical record and much easier to find and discover than some old 45s.
The album was not typical of so many other English punk bands, starting with Poly Styrene. The other bands generally did not have lead singers who were (A) women or (B) people of color (her mother who raised her was Scottish-Irish and her father was Somali). To have a lead singer that was both was even more rare.
They were also different lyrically. They weren’t just interested in burning things down for the lulz like the Sex Pistols. The Clash’s political bent had more specific targets. X-Ray Spex were less concerned with individuals and more concerned with systems — be it rampant consumerism or the patriarchy.
That’s how Marianne Elliott picked Poly Styrene as a stage name, because it reflected being plastic and disposable.
Before getting to the original album, one can’t ignore that first single, which would be included on subsequent reissues. “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” seems like an odd omission, given the presence of other singles and because it is such an obvious calling card to action.
Poly’s chuckle can be heard, before she speaks in her Brixton accent, “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard. But I think [cue the scream] Oh bondage, up yours! One-two-three-four!” Jax’s guitar kicks in, with Lora’s blaring saxophone quickly following. Poly sings it with zero holding back, repeating the line, “Oh bondage, up yours/Oh bondage, no more!” throughout. The lyrics don’t spell it out in detail, but the performance (musically and vocally) makes it clear. Poly’s not here for artificial standards of womanhood or for the demands of rampant capitalism. On top of that, the song is just a sheer blast of fun.
VIDEO: X-Ray Spex on the Old Grey Whistle Test
That’s something not to be overlooked. While X-Ray Spex didn’t hide their intentions, they weren’t dour preachers.
“Art-I-Ficial” filled what should have been the first A-side’s slot as album opener. It has furiosity of its own, going after the disposability, lower quality convenience and planned obsolescence of corporate consumerland.
The slot of album opener on subsequent reissues went to “The Day The World Turned Day-Glo,” a vivid sketch where one can practically picture billboards screaming “Buy! Consume!”over it– the mounds of polystyrene foam, the acrylic roads, the rubber bun and fake plastic trees.
Jak, a former glam player, gives it some heaviness while guest saxophonist Ted Buntin, sticks to Lora’s spirit in the arrangements.
Indeed, it won’t be the first thing you notice, considering it’s a band fronted by Poly Styrene, but the sax parts (mostly played by Lora’s replacement Rudi Thompson) give the whole thing a unique sound. It was a helpful reminder that the instrument can add punch to something other than ska.
“Genetic Engineering” is furious as as well, as Poly was understandably wary of that fine line between eugenics and medical advances, years before dystopian concepts like “designer babies” or “let’s let AI do the work of people, because it’ll all be fine” entered the picture.
AUDIO: X-Ray Spex “I Am a Poseur”
“I Am a Poseur” follows the amusing lead of “I’m a Cliche.” Poly sings it like she means it, a commentary other bands who weren’t really standing for anything (“I am a poseur and I don’t care/I like to make people stare”) as well as sarcastically pushing back against those who thought girls, especially biracial ones, couldn’t be punk.
The Bromley Contingent were a group in the Sex Pistols’ orbit around the scene. Some would become famous later (Billy Idol and Siouxsie Sioux). Most would not. One night, one of them, Malcolm McLaren employee Tracie O’Keefe, was having a bad night. She was sitting in the restroom of London’s Roxy, scratching and taking a razor at her wrists. O’Keefe would be okay then, but subsequently died of aggressive bone marrow cancer at 18 in June 1978.
Poly was a witness in the Roxy, which inspired “Identity.” 45 years later, when right-wingers are pushing back in cruel fashion against any identity that doesn’t fit the most narrow white, straight, Christian, non-trans boxes, the short burst of song feels even more relevant. It comes from someone with her life history, but could apply to anyone struggling to fit in and not really wanting to consider how confining the box is.
VIDEO: X-Ray Spex “Identity”
“I Can’t Do Anything” was both girl group homage and knowing skewering of its worst cliches, like the bad boyfriend (“Freddy tried to strangle me/With my plastic popper beads/But I hit him back/With my pet rat”).
“Let’s Submerge” is a sarcastic anthem of the scene with some nice lines (“The Hades ladies are dressed to kill/Dagger glares from Richard Hell”).
“Plastic Bag” is an abrasive rocker with disquieting interludes, a tale of how information overload could exist even before the internet and social media.
The title track slows down the tempo and turns down the volume to great effect (complete with keyboards). There are lots of undercurrents here: the tendency of some to view women’s bodies as “unclean”, impossible beauty standards, the “cleanliness is next to godliness” trope, possible OCD.
“I Live Off You” doesn’t just point the finger outward, as it points out how everybody winds up being complicit in the system. It has a nice solo from Thomson to boot.
Virtuosity was viewed with suspicion in punk circles. While nobody in X-Ray Spex were going to win “Player of the Year” awards, the album isn’t as ramshackle as you’d expect. It never becomes too atonal, as there’s always a hook around the corner. The band gets the job done efficiently.
“Obsessed With You” is almost metallic. It has nothing to do with lust, unless you count the lust business has for potential buyers. The term wasn’t in regular use yet, so it’s not directly in the lyrics, but the message is clear: “It’s you. You’re the product.”
The closest Germfree Adolescents gets to love is the couple in “Warrior in Woolworths.” But even then, they’re more interested in scheming and rebelling than in making out.
The album is both testament to Poly’s strength as a writer and her utter indomitability as a singer. She had a certain range, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her. If she broke on a note, so be it. She attacks it knowing she has something to say, but she also does it with a smile on her face. The result is utterly magnetic.
It’s also clear she was on to something. For an album depicting band members in test tubes, the futuristic view turned out to be even more accurate (sometimes distressingly so) than even she imagined.
Listeners in the U.S. had to go to record stores or mail order to get import copies, as the album didn’t get a release here until 1991. But people did find it. Along with the Slits’ 1979 album Cut, it was practically a how-to manual for Riot Grrrl.
Kathleen Hanna finally got to hear Germfree Adolescents in 1989, the year before she co-founded Bikini Kill.
“I was really blown away by the lyrics and how much there was a critique of capitalism,” Hanna said later. “Poly obviously is a poet. It was such a perfect marriage of emotion and technique. I was like, ‘How have I never heard of this band before?’ It seemed better than the Sex Pistols.”
AUDIO: Bikini Kill “Rebel Girl”
It wasn’t just the obviously influenced. FKA Twigs, in 2014, named it her favorite album of all time, citing its confidence, its bold creativity, its lyrical stances and how inspirational Poly was to her as a performer.
“It still amazes me,” Poly told John Robb in 2008. “You know, like you don’t really think of yourself [that way]. You just think, ‘I did that. I was really young.'”
X-Ray Spex weren’t meant to last. Fame, even at the level of they experienced, wore on Poly. “You feel all the time that people are draining you, draining off your energy all the time until you think, ‘Blimey, I haven’t got anything left to give. Leave me alone,'” she said in 1978.
Her up-and-down nature, with mood swings and hallucinatory moments, was misunderstood. She wouldn’t be diagnosed as bipolar in 1991.
Sometime in 1978, someone traumatized her. She never revealed details, saying in 2005 that it was of an incident of a “sexual nature,” and that it brought back childhood trauma (she’d been held at knifepoint when she was three). That, combined with other stressors, led to her going to John Lydon’s place and shaving her head.
The following year, she quit X-Ray Spex to address her mental health. “I was in a really bad way. I was, like, lying in the road, like, hoping to get run over,” she said.
She was misdiagnosed as being schizophrenic, spending time in a mental hospital. Considering she was so critical to the group, it wasn’t surprising that the rest called it a day not long after.
Poly released a solo album — Translucence– in 1980 that sounded little like X-Ray Spex, more low-key and bearing her other influences as it has a certain late-night appeal. It was informed in part by the time she’d begun to spend with Hare Krishnas. She lived with the Krishnas from 1983 to 1988 and was a member of the faith the rest of her life.
Some of the others would take part in other musical projects, but they basically all disappeared from the limelight (Jet, for example, wound up working in corporate and public relations for the BBC until his 2004 death from cancer).
There was an attempted reunion (with Poly, Lora and Paul Dean) and a second album, Conscious Consumer, appeared in 1995. A mellower version of the band, it still had flashes familiar to anyone who heard the debut and appealing bits of new songcraft, like the lovely “Crystal Clear.”
Poly had to stop promoting the album when a fire engine hit her, fracturing her pelvis. The planned comeback trilogy of albums never happened, between Poly’s injuries and Lora’s departure after she and Poly clashed again.
Outside of a well-received one-off show at a packed Roundhouse in London in 2008, that was it for the group.
Poly eventually got energized by music again. She worked on a second solo album. She was also fighting breast cancer, which sadly spread to her lungs and spine. It claimed her life almost a month after the album, Generation Indigo, was released.
With more elements of electronic and dub, it was a departure, but it was still unmistakably Poly in vocals, lyrics and charisma. It wasn’t the first step in a welcome comeback it should have been, but a bittersweet reminder of what she’d done and how much more she could have.
For being such a small portion of her life, X-Ray Spex couldn’t help but loom large. As bright, vivid and fresh as Germfree Adolescents was in 1978, it remains so. Thanks to a perfect match of leader and message, with a band up to delivering it, there’s no doubt it’s still one of punk’s all-time best albums.
Marianne Elliott may be gone, but Germfree Adolescents has ensured Poly Styrene was anything but disposable.
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