X-Ray Spex

X-Ray Spex ranks among the standout English punk outfits of the late 1970s, yet the group’s recorded legacy, fronted by Poly Styrene, remains frustratingly brief. School friends Marion Elliot, who performed as Poly Styrene, and Susan Whitby, later known as saxophonist Lora Logic, assembled the band in 1976. Their arrival on the punk landscape was marked by the immediate impact of the feminist anthem “Oh Bondage, Up Yours,” widely regarded as one of the period’s landmark singles. Logic’s saxophone traced the melody with a half-tuned edge while Jak Airport’s guitar supplied a blanket of distorted chords; Styrene’s chorus delivery proved especially striking. Together with the earliest singles by the Sex Pistols and the Clash, the track stands as one of punk’s defining statements.

The band’s first album, Germ Free Adolescents, proved equally compelling even though “Oh Bondage, Up Yours” was absent from its original track listing, an omission later corrected on the 1993 compact-disc edition. With Logic having departed to start Essential Logic, replacement saxophonist Rudi Thompson maintained a comparably basic approach but held pitch more steadily. The material blended guitar-centered punk-pop with expressions of outrage and detachment, targeting the excesses of commercial culture and an increasingly manufactured environment. Rather than issuing direct critiques of political authority, Styrene’s lyrics often depicted submersion in corporate-crafted consumer illusions, thereby confronting the prevailing cultural climate from an oblique angle.

A prompt follow-up album never materialized. Instead, Poly Styrene issued her sole solo long-player, Translucence, which discarded the earlier band’s abrasive guitars in favor of a subdued, jazz-inflected sound that foreshadowed the later work of Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn in Everything But the Girl. Although the stylistic shift came as a surprise after Germ Free Adolescents, the record is widely admired, and Styrene’s vocals, while less volatile, remain frequently remarkable. Shortly after its release she withdrew from music altogether and entered a Hare Krishna community based in London. She returned in 1986 with the EP Gods and Goddesses. In late 2006 Sanctuary Records issued the two-disc anthology Let’s Submerge, which gathers virtually the entire recorded output of X-Ray Spex along with additional material. Poly Styrene passed away in her sleep on April 25, 2011, at the age of 53 following a struggle with breast cancer.