I actually met her once. It was at the 2008 Love Music Hate Racism carnival in London’s Victoria Park, where she performed Oh Bondage Up Yours! I was reporting on the event for Socialist Worker and managed to get an interview with her backstage. Or at least I thought I did. When I looked at my notes I found my “interview” consisted almost entirely of me gabbling excitedly about how great she was, and how great this all was, and how great everything was… with Poly politely smiling assent every now and then. I have a tendency to get somewhat starstruck on these occasions. And loquacious. Most unprofessional, I know.

I think what specifically prompted my embarrassing overenthusiasm was the discovery a few weeks previously of this extraordinary video of what is to my mind X-Ray Spex’s finest song, Identity:

Part of the video’s fascination lies in its fleeting glimpses of a lost world (London’s derelict docklands just prior to its Thatcherite makeover), part in the sheer profusion of signifiers and details (including a decidedly sinister Mickey Mouse). But mostly it’s about Poly: how she looks, how she moves, how she sounds. She seems at once dainty with her careful stepping back and forth dance, yet at the same time elemental, a whirling dervish with a voice strung somewhere between primal scream with hypnotic incantatory chant. At one point she stands before a brick wall emblazoned with a stark message: “Fight back!”

The presence of this call-to-arms should caution against a common critical take on X-Ray Spex that declares them to be “postmodern punks”, looking forwards to a feminised and plasticised 1980s world of consumerism and identity politics, in contrast to the supposedly straightforwardly masculine mode of insurrectionary 1970s politics. Of course there is something to this reading: to contemporary eyes X-Ray Spex’s concerns seem startlingly prophetic while the rebel rock stances of, say, The Clash seem dated if not downright risible.

But it that all there is to it? To my mind the “postmodern” reading of X-Ray Spex fails to acknowledge quite how politicised the band were (playing the 1978 Rock Against Racism carnival being one obvious reference point here). Their songs were vicious and immanent critiques of the politics to come, not satires from a safe distance or detatched ironic commentary.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the lyrics to Identity, which couldn’t be further away from a “postmodern” celebration of identity politics. From the word go identity is posed as a crisis, a crisis that we don’t want to acknowledge (“can’t you see?”). The mirror is a site of traumatic alienation rather than soothing narcissism (“when you see yourself / does it make you scream?”). We don’t recognise ourselves, hence our desperate turn to mediated fantasies (“do you see yourself on the TV screen? do you see yourself in a magazine?”). If anything this looks beyond the mass pop culture of the 1980s and foreshadows the last decade’s paradoxical rise of the “reality” celebrity.

But the song’s harshest lines are in the final verse, where the traumatising mirror becomes the means for a  violent suicidal gesture (“when you look in the mirror / do you smash it quick? / do you take the glass / and slash your wrists?). Yet even this desperate final attempt at authenticity turns out to be thoroughly and inescapably mediated (“did you do it for fame? / did you do it in a fit? / did you do it before you read about it?”). Far from valorising identity, this song is about shattering it. It neither endorses postmodern identity politics nor berates it from a moralistic perspective. Instead it detonates it from within: a nihilist critique of postmodernity, a tiger’s leap into the past.

see also: Robin from It’s Her Factory discussing Plastic Bag and Oh Bondage Up Yours!

update: an article on Poly I wrote for Socialist Worker