Who Is Poly Styrene?
Screened online 25 - 29 November 2020 in collaboration with 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning
South London’s 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning – which hosted the first exhibition of Poly Styrene’s archives in 2019 – screened Arena’s Who is Poly Styrene?, directed by Ted Clisby. Commenting on this rare 1970s portrait of a mixed-race woman are, you can still watch filmmaker and daughter of Poly Styrene Celeste Bell, 2Tone vocalist and DJ Rhoda Dakar, Booker Prize winning author Bernardine Evaristo and feminist activist Chardine Taylor-Stone. You can also still enjoy new poems inspired by the film from two of the feistiest women in poetry, Zena Edwards and Salena Godden, and learn how to start your own personal writing journey with a masterclass from Irish author Geraldine Quigley.
Special Feature
For this last Your Local Arena of 2020, we're delighted to team up with London by Lockdown: a travel podcast, which explores the history of punk and women through the words of Poly Styrene, contemporary singer from the time Rhoda Dakar, and Poly's daughter Celeste Bell. Listen to the podcast here:
Craig Garrett is a London-based Australian audio producer, award-winning radio journalist, writer and editor. Craig has produced audio pieces for the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia, the Digital Writers’ Festival, the Queensland Poetry Festival, Vulcana Women’s Circus, Respect Inc., House Conspiracy and Noted Festival. Since moving to London in February 2020, Craig has been producing London by Lockdown, which featured poet Jay Bernard in Episode 4: “Exploring New Cross”.
YOUR LOCAL ARENA: RESPONDING TO Who is Poly Styrene?
Watch acclaimed author and professor Bernardine Evaristo, filmmaker and educator Celeste Bell, campaigner and Bodysnatchers vocalist Rhoda Dakar and Chardine Taylor-Stone, activist and musician, respond to the Arena film.
INSPIRED BY ARENA’S Who is Poly Styrene?: New Poetry by Zena Edwards and Salena Godden
Listen to and read specially commissioned poems inspired by the Who is Poly Styrene film from poets Zena Edwards and Salena Godden — who bring their links to south London and memories of Poly Styrene and the punk era into their new work.
Zena Edwards
‘Marianne’s Lens’
Salena Godden
‘Poem for Poly’
WRITING YOUR MEMOIR: A Masterclass from Geraldine Quigley
Taking Arena’s Who is Poly Styrene? as a starting point, explore how you can begin to craft your own memoir or life writing with author of the evocative novel Music Love Drugs War, Geraldine Quigley.
WHO IS POLY STYRENE?
Director: Ted Clisby; Film Editor: Robert Hargreaves; Series Producer: Anthony Wall (1979)
Listen to Lucy Hannah in conversation with Anthony Wall about the making of Who Is Poly Styrene?
Listen to Lucy Hannah in conversation with Lucy Davies, Director of 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning
Lucy Davies is the Director of 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, Brixton, where she has worked since 1999. Prior to this she lived in Kingston, Jamaica where she studied Fine Art and then taught at Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts. She was trained in painting at Slade School of Art and New York Studio School, USA and gained a PGCE in Art and Design at Goldsmiths College. She developed the Creative Learning programme at 198 in response to the needs of young people in the area and has been instrumental in the strategic development of the artistic programme by developing local, national and international partnerships and building relationships with artists, curators, and thinkers. Most recently Lucy has been responsible for leading the capital redevelopment of 198 which will be completed in 2021.
Listen to Lucy Hannah in conversation with Mattie Loyce, curator, creative producer and community organiser.
Mattie Loyce is an interdisciplinary arts curator, creative producer and community organiser from San Francisco. Throughout her career, she has worked to amplify the voices of people with marginalised identities, specifically artists of the African Diaspora, artists of colour, and queer artists. Mattie has worked across the United States, Brazil, the Caribbean and the UK. In 2014, she started a travelling art gallery titled Mission Gallery, which travelled the US and the UK. From 2018-2020, she curated and managed the artistic programme of 198 Contemporary and Learning. She is currently Programme Director for EngAGE, where she leads an artistic programme for homelessness-affected elderly residents of the Tenderloin neighbourhood
Poly Styrene was the perfect punk, from her Oxfam Shop wardrobe to her choice of name — a ‘lightweight, disposable product’ of no particular value. She had a preoccupation with the everyday imagery of adverts, brand names and logos, the banal visual tapestry of modern life: ‘I pulled my nylon curtains back as far as they would go and watched the world turn day-glo…’. She was something of a punk Warhol but with a phantasmagorical vision uniquely her own.
Behind the pogoing, the safety pins and the couldn’t give a monkey’s attitude, punk was fundamentally satirical. By definition it had a limited life, it was consciously built not to last. Its purpose seemed to be to strike a match to demonstrate that there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. Purists will argue that it all came to an end when The Sex Pistols broke up in 1978. Poly’s punk career pretty much fits that trajectory.
She played her raucous part in punk. Director Ted Clisby captured that, but went further and revealed the fascinating, sensitive young woman behind the punk persona. Forty years on, the film remains one of the highlights of the Arena archive and an invaluable record of both Poly and the time. It’s safe to say that punk was utterly despised in all quarters but its own. I was the rock critic for The Morning Star from 1974 to 1978, a period bisected by the arrival of punk, I wrote this piece in March 1977:
‘They want to associate us with violence. It’s the only way they can slag us off. It makes us out to be just crude, ignorant and loutish. Which means we aren’t a threat to them.’ Johnny Rotten, lead singer with The Sex Pistols, talking to Caroline Coon in the Melody Maker. The interview was published before the celebrated encounter with Bill Grundy on Thames TV’s Today but Rotten’s words supply an apt commentary on the incident.
Who would have thought rock could still shock on such a grand scale? All the reports homed in on ears and noses adorned with safety pins, punk hatred, especially their hatred of older bands such as The Stones, obscene behaviour, The Sex Pistols’ musical incompetence and so on. The more interesting and significant issues were tucked away — the fact that this is a group that has come from the dole queue, claiming to draw its inspiration from the conditions that put them there.
Most reports insisted that Anarchy In The UK was rubbish. Technically the playing is simple, which only makes it similar to plenty of records that make the radio playlists but the energy of the delivery and the attitude behind the lyrics make it very different.
So far at least, punk rock is not a mass phenomenon — for one thing the fashions that go with it are too bizarre for most young people but several bands have adopted a ‘political’ stance.
They use their songs to protest against the frustrations and conditions that afflict working class youth and they do it with a specific reference that is new. White Riot, a song by The Clash refers to the disturbances at last year’s Notting Hill Carnival. It’s not racially motivated, it’s an exasperated demand for a white riot to react against the situation in which ‘All the power is in the hands/of those rich enough to buy it’.
Honesty is valued above musical complexity and the style need only be simple, which makes it easy to form a group — shades of the skiffle era. Moreover, punk bands say they hate the hype and the glamour with which rock is saturated. So, if they’re successful, won’t they begin to contribute to the same syndrome? How will they keep in contact with their fans? Won’t they become cut off from the conditions that make their music? What happens when they get older? Will it last? Should it last?
There are plenty of obvious criticisms but they can’t be expected to cut any ice with the punks, any more than jokes about protest singers with Rolls Royces used to impress Bob Dylan fans. The validity of such jibes was less important than the fact that the protests were being made — and received, on an unprecedented scale.
Punk may have burned briefly, but its impact on art, culture and even politics has been massive. Some of its pioneers, The Clash, Paul Weller, have gone on to have great careers; others were like shooting stars, they shone brightly and were gone. Like the Pistols, as a punk, Poly was one of those and, like The Pistols, she was the very epitome of punk.
Anthony Wall
15 November 2020
Biographies
Responding to the film
Born in 1980s London, Celeste Bell spent a part of her childhood with her mother, punk-icon Poly Styrene, in George Harrison’s Hare Krishna commune in Hertfordshire, and her adolescence in Brixton, south London. She was a teacher in Madrid, where she also fronted ska-punk band Debutant Disco, and then completed a Masters in Political Philosophy in Barcelona. After Poly Styrene passed away in 2011, Celeste became the custodian and manager of her mother’s estate and archive, and has worked to document her life and work. The book, Day Glo: The Poly Styrene Story (Omnibus Press, 2019) was co-authored by Zoe Howe. The documentary film I Am A Clichè, which Celeste is co-directing alongside Paul Sng, is in production. In 2019, Celeste co-curated the first exhibition of the Poly Styrene archive, titled Identity: A Poly Styrene Retrospective, with curator Mattie Loyce at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning. Celeste continues to work as an educator and is developing a book and television project on new religious movements.
South London resident Rhoda Dakar began her career as lead vocalist with all female 2Tone band, The Bodysnatchers. She also recorded with both The Specials and Madness. A respected DJ, Rhoda toured last year in Mexico, USA, Europe and the UK. Her last ‘singing’ gigs this year were in Australia. A recent collaboration with the Dub Pistols, ‘Stand Together’, with a US civil rights themed video, was coincidentally released in June at the height of the Black Lives Matter worldwide protests. Bagging her first sync, ‘Welcome To My Themepark’ appears on the closing titles of award-winning short, Goodnight London, currently available on Amazon Prime. Rhoda has a radio show, Pork Pie & Mash Up, broadcast on Totally Wired Radio on the first Monday of the month; whilst her most recent sleeve notes were for Trojan Records’ release, Love Is All I Bring. Still a campaigner and local activist, she is variously a patron, an ambassador, a Chair and an NHS governor.
Bernardine Evaristo won the Booker Prize 2019 with her eighth book, Girl, Woman, Other, the first black woman and Black British person to do so. In 2020 she was also the first woman of colour to top the UK paperback fiction chart, holding the top spot for five weeks. Her writing spans poetry, verse fiction, essays and literary criticism. She has won many awards and honours including an MBE in 2009. A longstanding arts’ activist, she co-founded Britain’s first black women’s theatre company, Theatre of Black Women, in 1982, and many other inclusion projects since including Spread the Word, The Complete Works and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. www.bevaristo.com
Chardine Taylor-Stone is an award-winning feminist activist. She is vice chair of the Musician’s Union Equalities committee, co-founder of Socialists of Colour and drummer in Black feminist punk band Big Joanie. Chardine was also the founder of Black Girl’s Picnic, a movement in collective self-care for Black women and girls, and Stop Rainbow Racism, which worked to stop racist performances in LGBTQI venues. In 2017 she facilitated and guided the writing of the Women’s March London principles alongside other Black feminist women. Chardine is currently working on her first book, Sold Out: How Black Feminism Lost its Soul, a critical analysis of neoliberal influence on Black Feminist practice, to be published by Cassava Republic press in 2021. She is also studying a Qualifying Law Master’s degree at Birkbeck, University of London.
Commissioned poets
Photo credit: Antonio Olmos
Raised in Tottenham and now based in south London, Zena Edwards has become known as one the most unique voices of performance poetry to come out of the capital. She is published in several anthologies including Dance the Guns to Silence (flippedeye publishing). Her passions include writing poems, articles and blogs on social and environmental issues, race and power. She has been mentoring young and emerging artists in professional artists development and creative campaigning for social justice since 2010. As a multidisciplinary collaborator, Zena has worked with internationally acclaimed choreographer and dancer Akram Khan (Xenos), visual artist Theaster Gates (Soul Manufacturing Company) and radical filmmaker Fahim Alam (Riots Reframed) and The Last Poets.
Salena Godden is a poet, author, activist and broadcaster. Born in the UK of Jamaican-Irish heritage, her books include literary childhood memoir Springfield Road (Unbound). She is the author of well-known powerful comic and political poetry anthems ‘My Tits Are More Feminist Than your Tits’ and ‘Can't Be Bovvered’. Her latest publication is Pessimism Is For Lightweights - 13 pieces of Courage and Resistance (Rough Trade Books, 2018). The poem ‘Pessimism is for Lightweights’ was a pubic poetry art piece displayed outside the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol for eighteen months; it is now on permanent display at the Peoples History Museum in Manchester. Her latest album, LIVEwire (Nymphs and Thugs), was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. Salena’s short film, Is There Anybody Out There? (The Back of the internet) was commissioned by Google Arts and Culture/BBC Arts for their 2019 Rhyme and Reason season. Mrs Death Misses Death, Salena’s debut novel, will be published in 2021.
Masterclass
Geraldine Quigley is an alumni of the Penguin Random House WriteNow scheme, which seeks to address the lack of diversity in publishing. As a result of this success, her first novel, Music Love Drugs War, was published by Fig Tree in 2019 and is available now as a Penguin paperback. Through her work, Geraldine strives to reflect the realities faced by working-class families and the shortened opportunities available to them in a society that sees them as inherently second class. Music Love Drugs War explores the lives of teenagers in Derry during the 1981 hunger strike, as they and their families face the difficult questions that situation throws at them. Geraldine continues to write and is currently writing her second novel, while working full-time from home in her role as an employee of Axa Insurance. She has been married to John for thirty-five years and they have three children and one grandchild.
