British punk rock pioneer Poly Styrene died Monday in England after a battle with breast cancer. She was 53 years old.
In February, Poly Styrene, whose real name was Marion Elliott-Said, announced she was battling metastasizing breast cancer, which at the time had spread to her spine and lungs.
A statement on the singer’s official website and Twitter feed said Tuesday that “the beautiful Poly Styrene, who has been a true fighter, won her battle on Monday evening to go to higher places.”
The braces-wearing singer who belted out “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard but I think oh bondage, up yours!” with the band X-Ray Spex in 1977, paved the way for other women in the male-dominated punk rock movement, and she was often cited as a precursor of the 1990s “riot grrrl” movement.
“I don’t think people realize — or remember — exactly how unusual, and downright threatening it was at the time for a woman to front a band,” Karen Mann, former guitarist for Greensboro-based all-female garage rock/punk rock band Chew Toy, said. “[T]he fact that she was a pudgy kid with braces just made her all the more real.”
Mann described Poly Styrene as “a punk icon” and “an inspiration to me personally when I was playing music.”
Reese McHenry, front woman for Durham-based garage rock trio The Dirty Little Heaters, vividly recalls the day she discovered X-Ray Spex and Poly Styrene. A day she says, in her eyes, “broadened all the rules of what humans could and couldn’t do.”
“I was nine in 1982 and had a ne’er-do-well middle school friend who had a nose ring. She was the talk of the town — people pointed and laughed at her,” McHenry explained.
“One day, in the bedroom of the foster home we shared, she put on the record ‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’ without a word,” she recalled. “The aggressive tone of the spoken words, the crazy horns, the sing-song melody and the heavy music rendered me frozen.
“I stared at the record player with my mouth open the entire song; it was as if someone had shown me this great thing called air,” McHenry said. “I was so flabbergasted.”
McHenry said she came across an image of the braces-wearing front woman a few days later, and again she was rendered speechless.
“She had braces! She did not look white! She was wild looking with a saucy mouth!” she said. ”The B-side [to 'Oh Bondage, Up Yours!'] was a song called ‘I’m a Cliché. ‘”
“I learned what punk rock, bondage and a cliché were in one day,” McHenry explained.
X-Ray Spex released just one album, 1978′s Germ Free Adolescents, but its aggressively catchy single “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” became an enduring punk anthem.
Poly Styrene later said the song — a gleeful nonconformist shout-out — was inspired by the iconic bondage trousers designed by Vivienne Westwood.
“I know I’ll probably be remembered for ‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’” she told BBC’s Radio 6 Music in March. “I’d like to be remembered for something a bit more spiritual.”
Poly Styrene later joined the Hare Krishna movement and released several solo albums — the most recent, Generation Indigo, saw a U.S. release Tuesday, April 26.
“Poly Styrene never stopped exciting us with her incisive world-view, amazing wit, and her adventurous sound,” PR and marketing firm Girlie Action said in a statement. “It is impossible to imagine what modern music would be like without her incalculable contributions but it’s probably not worth imagining a world that never had Poly Styrene in it.”
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