Tony Earnshaw:Farewell to Poly Styrene, a punk star who shone and then grew older

Did you ever dream about a place you never really recall being to before? A place that maybe only exists in your imagination? Some place far away, half-remembered when you wake up? When you were there, though, you knew the language. You knew your way around. That was the ’60s. No. It wasn’t that either. It was just ’66 and early ’67. That’s all it was.”
By The Newsroom
Published 29th Apr 2011, 09:24 BST

Peter Fonda’s lines in The Limey, as the fading record producer Terry Valentine, represent one of my favourite movie quotes. They came to mind this week when the death was announced of Poly Styrene, former lead singer with punk band X-Ray Spex.

Ah, punk rock. Forever engraved on the collective psyche, courtesy of Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious and an appearance on a notorious television show with a long-forgotten host whose career nose-dived when he goaded the Sex Pistols (without Vicious, who had yet to join) to “Say something outrageous”.

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Yet the nihilistic era of punk rock – just 26 months – was over almost before it had begun. Poly Styrene, alias Marianne Elliot Said, who died this week of breast cancer at the age of 53, enjoyed a brief flirtation with a form of stardom before internal ructions over money caused her band to split.

By virtue of its own anarchism and attitude of self-destruction, punk rock was never going to make old bones. As a concept it was redundant within two years. And unlike jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll and country, it has not worn well.

Today, punk is the museum piece of contemporary music. The days of the Sex Pistols stumbling out of a limousine to sign a contract outside Buckingham Palace seem hazy and remote – “half-remembered” as Fonda observes in The Limey.

Even visual records are rare. Derek Jarman’s Jubilee was a fantastical portrait of an apocalyptic punk England. Julien Temple documented the Sex Pistols’ demise in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and, later, The Filth and the Fury. And that’s where tragic Poly Styrene resides: as a footnote in musical history.

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History has not been kind to the punks. Sid Vicious, dead at 21 with a syringe in his arm, was lucky. He lived fast and died young.

Whether he left behind a beautiful corpse (in the words of James Dean, who also didn’t) is another matter.

At 55 Johnny Rotten resembles a living picture of Dorian Gray. Billy Idol, also 55, sold out long ago, but at least he isn’t flogging Country Life butter.

Sometimes survival isn’t victory.

Related topics:James DeanBilly Idol