Identity

Marianne Joan Elliott-Said grew up in south London. She left home at fifteen. By the summer of 1976 she was making her way along the south coast of England when she went to see the Sex Pistols play near Hastings. She started writing songs the next morning. She named herself Poly Styrene. She recruited musicians and called the band X-Ray Spex. The lineup included a saxophone player named Lora Logic. Punk did not use saxophones. That was the point.

“Oh Bondage Up Yours!” came out on Virgin Records in 1977. The follow-up was “Identity” on EMI International, catalog INT 563. The song is about consumer identity. About a world that assembles the self from products and images rather than anything underneath. “Identity is the crisis you can’t see.” Lora Logic had left the band by then. The saxophone part was played by Steve Rudi Thomson. The B-side was “Let’s Submerge.” The song reached number 24 in the United Kingdom and spent ten weeks on the chart.

The album Germfree Adolescents followed in November 1978. X-Ray Spex disbanded in 1979. Poly Styrene spent much of the 1980s outside the music industry. She reunited the band in 1995 and again in 2008. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in early 2011 and completed a second solo album. She died on April 25, 2011. Her album was released the same day. Released July 1978. She had turned twenty-one years old three weeks before.