Review Summary: Behind his servile innocence, he plots and he schemes..
When sounding off the first classics that came to be of punk, especially ones led and forged by women,
Germfree Adolescents by X-Ray Spex stands as a bit of an oddity. Never as blatantly discordant as Crass, and musically much more muscular than The Slits, the Spex carved one near-perfect album of artful revolt, a rough and turbulent lament of social inequity in the metropolis. Vexed, stylishly raw and supremely agile, there isn’t a record like it out there.
Lead singer Poly Sterene, only nineteen at the time of the band’s first shows in the Covent Garden, quickly became the stylistic and principled epicentre of the Spex and briefly London’s punk scene, then only rising from infancy. Though she’d been infamously inspired to form the Spex after watching a Sex Pistols show, she’d applied Rotten’s giddy anarchy only to the music’s frenetic push, and her own abstract was far more pointed and articulate, setting down blueprints for future riot grrrls in the disgruntled impetus of iconic ‘77 single “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” that took a honed hatchet to both gender frames and consumer policies. Her vocal tics stand at the forefront of
Adolescents, a heady mix of f
ucked-off screams, toneless throttling and neurotic howls, that weren’t afraid to switch abruptly and drop something traditionally pretty into the fold.
Along with Jak Airport’s shape-shifting guitar, Lora Logic’s rowdy saxophone rounds off the Spex’ arsenal, setting off the LP properly, alternating between melodic fragments and utter unkeyed madness, and lifting
Adolescents far beyond standard forward momentum punk fare. Though she was booted from the band not long before the release of
Adolescents and still remains uncredited on the record’s original pressing liner notes, her playing style formed the very spine of X-Ray Spex’ euphoric fits. Logic would go on to form Essential Logic, a band that was as retroactively seminal to the scene, as women entered punk full tilt. That penchant for ideologic underdog-ism defined Logic’s later work as well, and she went on to lend her horn to just about every black sheep outfit of the underground scene, from The Raincoats, to Swell Maps and Red Krayola.
Germfree Adolescents erupts like a moralistic maelstrom, a fiery distillation of a highly-involved period, when stranded youth and socioeconomic politics ran into one another at full speed. Class warfare, sexism, ethical vacancy, a chronically-declining industry and the ensuing joblessness and ‘brain drain,’ and just about every other deficit that plagued urbanized living as Britain transitioned from the discontented Heath administration into the first Thatcher era, all get carbonized and spat out in the record’s every vitriolic line. In that, despite their sonic allegiances, the Spex would feel distanced from first-wave punks and ply closer to the Oi movement and skinhead ska, which championed the working class, all the while gnashing their teeth down against racial and gender divides and loss of identity.
Springing to life out of nowhere and then falling apart with just as little warning, X-Ray Spex and
Adolescents portray another patented moment of that first push, a short-lived collective that decried small incremental change, rather spinning a small storm and then imploding before most could pay heed.
