Poly Styrene

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Poly Styrene was the stage name of Marianne Joan Elliott-Said (1957 to 2011), the singer of the punk band X-Ray Spex. She was born in Bromley and grew up in Brixton, London, the daughter of a Scottish-Irish mother and a Somali father. As a teenager she was a hippie, and at fifteen she ran away from home to hitchhike from festival to festival. In 1976 she released the reggae single Silly Billy under her own name, Mari Elliott.

Music and breakthrough

After a Sex Pistols gig in an empty hall on Hastings Pier she placed an advertisement in the music papers for young punks who wanted to join forces. This is how X-Ray Spex came into being, and she took her stage name from the Yellow Pages. The band's debut was a single in 1977, and the album Germfree Adolescents followed. Billboard called her the prototype of modern feminist punk. She wore braces on her teeth, resisted the image of woman as sex object in the 1970s and wore striking clothes. Her voice was described as a bold, wailing cry.

Influence

After the band broke up in 1979 she made the solo album Translucence in 1980, calmer and jazzier. She released Flower Aeroplane in 2004 and Generation Indigo in 2011, shortly before her death from breast cancer in April 2011. In 1983 she joined the Hare Krishna movement. In 2023 Rolling Stone placed her at number 195 of the two hundred greatest singers of all time.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 1980Translucence
• 2004Flower Aeroplane
• 2011Generation Indigo