354. X-Ray Spex, "Germfree Adolescents"

 


Imagine going to see the Sex Pistols in Hastings on your 19th birthday and immediately putting an ad in Melody Maker looking for "young punx who want to stick it together" and forming a band and then one year later putting out one of the finest punk albums ever made.  This actually happened to Poly Styrene, the young woman who fronted this band and whose voice I am still trying to process.  Friends, there are very few records as powerful and immediate and raw as this one.

I think I heard this album once or twice before, probably in high school at my friend who had graduated a year before me's apartment, a slightly seedy and run-down affair that was of course a magnet for the 40-drinking, Camel unfiltered-smoking, ripped jeans wearing crowd that I associated with at the time.  Ah, the fond memories of leaving high school, grabbing a Big Gulp of 7-Up, hitting up the liquor store that was known to sell to the underage, getting a half-pint of Seagrams 7, emptying out half the Big Gulp, pouring the Seagrams in, and heading over to my friend's place to listen to records and try to make out with punk girls and smoke cigarettes until it got so late that I had to go even though my Dad didn't really wait up for me or anything.  This album feels like those days.

I really can't believe I haven't listened to it since then.  One of the very rare Pitchfork 10's, this album is punk, sure, but suffused with so much musical intelligence and melody and verve that it makes most punk just sound simple.  Plus, how many punk bands had a saxophonist?  (The 15-year-old dynamo Lora Logic, who left the band fairly early on after ego clashes with Styrene.)  Here's a great example of all of it working together:

The title track is unlike anything else on the album, a synth-driven ballad that paints a nightmarish portrait of a girl so terrified by advertising convincing her that she's beset by parasites that she "cleans her teeth ten times a day."  "Her phobia is infection, she needs one to survive," Styrene sings. "It's her built-in protection, without fear she'd give up and die."  If anything, the terrified mind she portrays has only become more prevalent since 1978, not less.  Their highest-charting song (it hit #19), it's a jam:

As punk bands do, they broke up and reunited and went through lineup changes.  There was a final show at the Roundhouse in London in 2008 that must have been a scene.  Sadly, Poly died of cancer in 2011.

Anyway, I regret sleeping on this record for the last 30 years.  Don't be like me.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Yes, probably higher than 354.

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