How Poly Styrene Broke the Mold

Poly Styrene beams out from the screen, smile wide, braces cemented across her teeth. In most images of first-wave punk musicians, their eyes are filled with negativity and contempt. In footage from a new film, Styrene’s are bright with possibility.

The singer and creative force behind X-Ray Spex died from cancer in 2011, 34 years after her London band released its seismic first single, “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” The world is still catching up. A new documentary due Feb. 2 titled “Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché” — taken from one of her song titles that mixed self-aware humor and cultural critique — is the latest ambitious project to chronicle her story, following an oral history book and a roving exhibition of her visual art, both from 2019.

“My mum believed she was psychic,” Styrene’s daughter, Celeste Bell, who co-directed the film with Paul Sng, said in a video interview. “You can see that in her lyrics. She had this uncanny ability to predict what was going to happen.”

Perhaps Styrene saw the future by paying attention. She set dynamite to the patriarchy on “Oh Bondage Up Yours!,” and “Germfree Adolescents,” the band’s sole album released just months before its 1979 split, is filled with blazing anthems that address identity, consumer culture, environmental ruin, information overload and punk itself. (Its title track, a dubby postmodern love song, was her most successful single.) She wore Day-Glo colors and brought in saxophones and science fiction. She could sing cool hooks or turn her voice into a rocket. Over bionic riffs, her lyrics told rich stories, forming a folk music of her own creation. The effect was sonic Pop Art.

A biracial woman in a predominantly white scene, Styrene was not a typical punk. And “I Am a Cliché” is by no means a typical punk film. Bell, who was finishing a master’s degree in political philosophy in 2015 when she began to face her role as caretaker of Poly Styrene’s legacy, appears onscreen and narrates her mother’s complicated life — from teenage runaway to punk sensation to Hare Krishna, all while struggling with bipolar disorder, all before her mid-20s — through her perspective as the (frequently neglected) child of a totemic, explosive figure in punk history.

Was she a good mother? Not exactly. But while Bell poses the question and answers it early, she spends the duration of the film bearing out what her mother was always searching for in her lyrics — a complexity scaled large enough to show the truth.

The film’s timing is apt: Styrene’s influence on and relevance within culture keeps growing. Where her brash vision once seemed futuristic, it now feels shockingly attuned to reality. Artists from the vanguard of pop, like FKA twigs, and the heart of punk, like the New Orleans group Special Interest and the London trio Big Joanie, cite her as a formative inspiration. Her influence can also be traced through the still-emerging impact of the riot grrrl movement. It spans decades and generations.

The singer, songwriter and rapper Neneh Cherry, who appears in “I Am a Cliché,” said in an interview that she found her own voice by singing along to X-Ray Spex, and recalled listening to the band with her parents, the jazz musician Don and the textile artist Moki Cherry, who “absolutely got” Styrene’s fearlessness and honesty.

“When we used to listen to her, they would be like: That’s what we’re talking about,” Cherry said. She noted that it was singing along to her father’s piano playing and entering “a Poly place, tonally,” that her voice first emerged. “Inside of hers is how I found my own voice,” she explained. “I also started listening to her when I was at a space in my life where — I knew who I was, but I didn’t always know how to be who I was, or how to feel that great about it. Poly was and still is like medicine for me.”

The feminist punk icon Kathleen Hanna first heard X-Ray Spex in 1989 — the year before her band Bikini Kill formed in Olympia, Wash. — and was awed by the breadth of ideas in her writing.

“I was really blown away by the lyrics and how much there was a critique of capitalism,” she said in an interview, and how that extended, sometimes subtlety, to critiques of sexism and racism within punk. “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.”

STYRENE WAS BORN Marianne Joan Elliott-Said in 1957 to a Somali father and an English mother, who raised Styrene and her siblings alone in a Brixton council estate. In her teenage years, struck with art and rebellion, Styrene fled home to hitchhike to hippie music festivals, stoking an ecological consciousness she would bring to punk. She immersed herself in theater, fashion, poetry and music. A bookish autodidact who left school at 15, she gravitated toward philosophy, the occult, Freud and Jung. As a cinephile she favored the retrofuturism of “Barbarella.” Her rock idols were David Bowie and Marc Bolan. She loved soul and reggae, and Bell said she cited singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Joan Armatrading as huge inspirations.

Styrene’s first pre-punk single was a pop-reggae song called “Silly Billy” about teenage pregnancy. It was produced by a man 16 years her senior named Falcon Stuart who would become her boyfriend and the manager of X-Ray Spex. (Bell said she received conflicting stories about Stuart, who died in 2002, over the years, noting in the film: “Sometimes she’d say he was the love of her life; other times, that he’d ruined it.”)

When punk hit, Styrene, at 19, was galvanized. Enamored of the Sex Pistols — a previously unseen clip of Styrene dancing in the crowd at one of their gigs recurs in the film — she placed an ad in Melody Maker searching for “yung punx” to “stick it together,” and assembled a crew that included the bassist Paul Dean and, briefly, the saxophonist Lora Logic (until Styrene kicked her out).

The band signed with Virgin for the classic “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” — its opening declaration, “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard/But I think, oh bondage, up yours!” became feminist punk scripture — before moving to EMI for “Germfree Adolescents.” (Styrene was an uncredited producer on the album, Bell said.) The LP took them to “Top of the Pops” and the BBC, which broadcast a television documentary called “Who Is Poly Styrene?” where the singer famously described that she picked her stage name because it is plastic and disposable: “That’s what pop stars are meant to mean, therefore I thought I might as well send it up.”

The early BBC film and “I Am a Cliché” both depict Styrene’s mental health struggles, which the pressures of fame exacerbated. In 1978, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia; she was in a psychiatric hospital the first time she saw herself singing on television. Bell believes her mother’s condition was worsened by the media’s sexist scrutiny of her body as well as the destabilizing nihilism in punk.

“A lot of people think X-Ray Spex were a lot more underground than they were. But my mum did have that brush with celebrity,” Bell said. “There is a kind of fame where you can never escape from it, and that was the kind of attention that my mum had, even though it didn’t last very long. It didn’t last very long because she got out.”

Styrene went on to release the gentle, tabla-flecked solo album “Translucence” in 1981, and, around then, met the musician Adrian Bell. They married three months later and she gave birth to Bell. Not long after, Styrene eschewed the material world she had observed in her songs by joining the Hare Krishna movement and moving with her daughter to Bhaktivedanta Manor, a country house George Harrison had donated to the group in 1973. But her mental health struggles persisted. She left the temple, and Bell, then 8, went to live with her grandmother.

Bell said her mother never had a steady job after X-Ray Spex. She lived off meager royalties, continuing to write and release music. Heartbreakingly, in the film, Bell recalls her mother saying “being broke and famous is the worst of both worlds.”

By the early 2000s, Bell and her mother had reconciled. Styrene moved to seaside Hastings, which energized her, and she began to write a retrospective diary of her punk past. (Excerpts are threaded throughout the film.) Styrene had recently recorded a new solo album, “Generation Indigo,” when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Bell said her mother believed in reincarnation, viewing death as “the next great adventure.”

“My mum didn’t have an easy life,” she said. “She had a lot of barriers to break through as a mixed race woman, but she did, and she did it on her own terms. She took the DIY ethic and really lived it.”

In her diary, Styrene called herself “an ordinary tough kid from an ordinary tough street.” Her daughter said that she fought back when other children mocked her appearance: “She was always getting beat up. She’d been chased down the street by skinheads.”

Styrene explored her heritage directly in early poems, which led to intersectional statements on tracks like “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” — an indictment of the bondage aesthetic in punk fashion, which she loathed, as much as a liberationist rallying cry. She asked, presciently, in the X-Ray Spex song “Identity”:

When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?
Do you see yourself on the TV screen?
Do you see yourself in the magazine?
When you see yourself, does it make you scream?

WHEN HANNA FOUND Styrene, her forebear’s influence was musical as well as philosophical. “She could do a vulnerable high-pitched voice and also a loud bellow,” she said. “She used the roundness in her voice, the piercing in her voice. There’s not a fear of pop music with Poly.”

For Alli Logout, the vocalist for Special Interest, Styrene was thrilling proof that a person of color had helped invent punk while critiquing it; that vulnerability can exist in chaos; and that punk can be incisive but fun.

“My original exploration with music in general was a sadness that I didn’t see any Black bodies occupying that space,” Logout, who uses they/them pronouns, said of their earliest experiences headbanging at metal shows in their small Texas town. But leafing through a stolen book on punk history, “I remember very clearly seeing a picture of Poly Styrene and her braces and being like, what?” Watching a live “Bondage” video, “I felt the otherness that she encapsulated by just being fully herself. Whenever I heard that song, I knew that it was the attitude that I have to present myself in every single day.”

Beginning in middle school, the singer-songwriter Shamir felt such a connection to X-Ray Spex that by the fall of 2016, he decided to get Styrene’s face tattooed on his thigh. “Poly was one of the main influences on me to keep the spirit of punk alive as a Black person,” he said in an interview. “She’s constantly staring at me when I wake up in the morning.”

“So much of the time, what’s considered punk to everyone else is rage, but I don’t think anyone would categorize her as rageful,” he noted, saying Styrene communicated via different emotions. “I learned from that in a lot of ways.” He added, “You’re always going to be in the margins, but that doesn’t mean you have to be quiet. A lot of times we have to be the loudest in order to be heard slightly.”

As Bell organized her mother’s archive, she was struck by the intensity of her process, uncovering many drafts of a single set of lyrics, or a mixed-media collage, like a piece that layered various forms of contraception packaging atop feminist comic strips to explore the nature of modern relationships. (Styrene created all of the band’s art herself.) “She walked away at the height of their popularity,” she said. It’s a decision Bell finds gives the film a hopeful message: “She could have made a lot more money, but she prioritized her health and her spiritual longings over fame and success.”

Ultimately, Bell said with conviction, “All my mum wanted, musically and artistically, was to be taken seriously.”