X Ray Spex - Interview with Poly Styrene Part 3

  by John Clarkson

published: 16 / 9 / 2005

intro

In the third and final part of our interview with Poly Styrene, the front woman with influential 70's punks, she chats to John Clarkson about her new solo album and first record in almost a decade 'Flower Aeroplane'

PB : ‘Flower Aeroplane’ has just come out. You have self-released it on your own X| Ray Spex label. Why did you decide to put it out on X Ray Spex rather than another label ? Was it because of your bad experiences in the past ? PS : X Ray Spex was always my name. I made up that name and I did the logo for it. When I fell out with that woman, Ellie, and the band they fought me for both the logo and for my name. One of the ways for me to establish that it was my name was to set up a website www.xrayspex.com and to start releasing records through it. That way I could try and do a good PR job on it and also launch something new from it. I did the website largely because of my daughter. She wanted me to do it. She had been looking around the web and she told me that there was all this rubbish out there and all this speculation about me. I was being portrayed as this real bad girl. There were four letters words on everything and it just wasn’t my personality at all. My daughter said to me “Do you own one ?”, so it was like her idea that I did it. PB : How old is your daughter ? PS : She’s 23 now. At the time she was in her first year at university. She said that there were all these people on-line and they were all speculating what my lyrics meant. She would go into chat rooms and she said that they would be saying this means that. She said that was why I should do one, and so, therefore, I did it. PB : Why did you decide to call the album ‘Flower Aeroplane’ ? PS ; Well, if you type in flower aeroplane as I did the other day on Google, the first thing you get is my album and my website, and then if you scroll down the page a bit something comes up about and Rama and Sita, and how eventually Rama won the Battle of Lanka and took Sita back on a flower aeroplane. A flower aeroplane is something that in Krishna consciousness is like a celestial aeroplane. If you have been successful in serving Krishna and your Guru then at the time of death you wait for this beautiful flower aeroplane and then you get taken up by the Vishnu Dhuta to go back to the spiritual world. One day there was a lady in the temple and she was talking about how there were some men and they had a Mercedes and they were trying to chat her up. I can’t remember exactly what the scenario was, but she said “Oh no, I would much rather wait for my flower aeroplane” (Laughs). I thought that was really funny. The way she said that it just sparked a sort of chord with me and so I just decided to call it ‘Flower Aeroplane.’ PB : How long did the album take to record ? You said that you started on it before ‘Conscious Consumer’. PS : ‘Flower Aeroplane’ was done over a series of years. There are eight new tracks, and five from ‘Translucence’. It was a monetary thing really. I couldn’t afford to record a whole load of new songs because every time I record I have to pay people and it was getting quite expensive. A lot them were just done as demos for record companies. Sony had the last one, ‘Earth Mantra’, and it cost me over a grand to do that and they kept turning around to me and saying “Bear with us ! Bear with us ! We’re busy with a boy band.” It went on like that for two years and then they finally they decided not to do it. I got fed up with that kind of treatment and so I just ended up putting it out myself. It was recorded over a long period of time. My original guru had become disillusioned with the Krishna movement and went back to the USA. I met this other guru, a Bengali , and because I didn’t have anyone to help me with my spiritual life he became my spiritual advisor for a little time. After I got knocked over by the fire engine he wrote a letter to me and said in it “You know Krishna is protecting you. What more proof do you need ? You didn’t get killed by the fire engine.” He told me then “I want you to use all your talents to glorify Krishna” and so I wrote a few of the last songs for it like ‘Beautiful’ during that period. ‘Spring’ is a Bengali song, an ancient one, and I did that at that time as well. I also did the Maha mantra which appears at the very end of the album then. I had a very small amount of money at the time, but I used to go every week or every month and try to record a new demo. It was always within my budget of what I could afford to do, and that is one reason why it took so long. PB : You now live on St Leonard’s on Sea. How long have you been there ? PS : I have been there for a year now. My Mum lives there. It’s her home town. My grandfather retired here. My Mum lived in London but she couldn’t wait to come back home and retired back there eight years ago maybe. My Mum is quite old now and I wanted to be close to her. None of her other children have, but I am one of those who like to stick close to my Mum a bit and so I moved to St Leonard’s a year ago PB : Do you work ? PS I was involved in film finance but I got a bit fed up with that. I have been writing a couple of film story ideas, but at the moment I have been mainly concentrating on setting up a new music label called Fair Music. You know how you have fair trade, fair chocolate and things like that. The aim of Fair Music is to provide fair music contracts to the artists on its roster, because at the moment contracts are not really fair to artists. You could still make a decent living out of music , even if you were selling just a few thousand copies rather than millions, so that’s what that is. I have a friend called Zillah Ashcroft, who used to be in Rubella Ballet, and she went back to university and she became a film director and she’s going to become one of my partners in Fair Music. We’re going to get funding for it. She’s just made a documentary called ‘She’s a Punk Rocker’, which is going to be shown at the New York Film Festival. I helped her out with it by providing some new and archive footage and interviews and the Festival organisers have said that we can go and play there as well as showing the film. PB : You have made a note on ‘Flower Aeroplane’ that another album ‘The Best of the Best of Poly Styrene’ will be coming out shortly. When is that liable to be released ? PS : It is all ready. It is all solo music, rather than X Ray Spex. It is a compilation. There is some stuff from the ‘Gods and Goddesses’ CD on there, and also lots of previously released material. I would like to maybe put one new track on it. I have recorded a lot of music over the years and I separated them into two albums, one of which was ‘Flower Aeroplane’. The more upbeat stuff is ‘The Best of the Best of Poly Styrene.’ I will do it providing I sell a lot of ‘Flower Aeroplane’ because obviously I have got to manufacture it myself, which can be quite expensive. I am hoping that I will be able to release it sooner rather than later. PB : You have obviously come a very long way since X Ray Spex and ‘Germ Free Adolescents’. PS : I think I have as a person and as an artist. I have control of my art now, much more than I did. When I was in X Ray Spex, I was very young and because I was in a relationship with my manager I kept thinking “I’ll let him do that. We’ll let him do that”. It didn’t work out letting him deal with it and I lost a lot of money as well. I learnt a lot from that. Just because it was a relationship I kept thinking “It is okay. I can trust him” and he would say “Just sign this” and I would sign it. I didn’t know what I was doing. I had to really get beyond that and on top of things. PB : It sounds like you have done so. PS : I have. Life is one big learning curve, isn’t it ? PB : Thank you for your time.

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