Although never held in quite the same lofty esteem as The Sex Pistols or The Clash, X-RAY SPEX were every bit as much the epitome of Punk's first wave in London.
For starters, they had a gobby – but sharp and streetwise – girl singer in Poly Styrene. She had a voice pitched somewhere between John Lydon's caustic whine and a wailing banshee getting pissed on a weekend and favoured day-glo splashes of colour and clothes from charity shops rather than the regulation punk gear while her band played an acceptable, sometimes inspired variation on Ramones-y ramalama – punctuated by rudimentary sax - which threatened to shift serious amounts of units for about 18 months.
They only made the one proper album before Poly wandered off to make an anaemic solo album ('Talk In Toytown') and then jack it in to hook up with the Hare Krishnas for a while. Recently, though, X-Ray Spex reformed to play sold-out shows in London, so Sanctuary's deluxe 2CD edition of said debut album 'Germ Free Adolescents' is nicely timed.
In truth, though, the second CD is pretty hit and miss, comprising mainly poorly-recorded demos and live takes and it falls firmly on the 'confirmed fans only' side of the fence. The first CD, though, is still pretty cool, coupling the album with its' attendant hit singles and B-sides and sounding riotously spunky to this day.
The highlights are all here of course. Driven by Poly's spirited yowling, 'Oh! Bondage Up Yours!' sounds like a filthy nursery rhyme on heat. 'The Day The World Turned Dayglo' found them on TOTP for the first time and its' boisterous chorus still can't fail and the full-throttle 'Identity' also crashed into the Top 30 like a rhino on crystal meth.
Even outside of the singles, tracks like 'Art-I-Ficial', 'Obsessed With You' – with its' madcap snake-charmer sax solo – and the fantastically carefree 'I am a cliché' are fast, furious and enormous fun. Yes, the relentless Ramones-style riff variants can get rather interchangeable, but on the odd occasion they slip into a poppier groove ('Warrior in Woolworths', for example) they're convincing and I also defy you not to clap along to 'I Can't Do Anything”s deranged celebration of utter uselessness.
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Ironically, their crowning glory is still probably 'Germ Free Adolescents' itself. This bizarre, Howard Hughes-style celebration of sterility set to a gorgeous vibrato motif made it into the Top 20 and it's the one place where they prove just how interesting they could be (and could have been) when they slowed it down a bit. 'Highly Inflammable' is the other place some gentle experimentalism seeps in (in this case a gentle wash of synth) and once again it's gets its' foot into what could have been a door to the future for Poly & co.
The album's exerted its' influence over the years. Although she's had less impact than Siouxsie Sioux, Riot Grrl stars such as Bikini Kill wouldn't have sounded the way they did if it wasn't for Poly Styrene and you can also hear echoes of her in more recent, irrepressible girl-fronted bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Be Your Own Pet. It may not be up there with 'Never Mind The Bollocks' or 'The Clash', but 'Germ Free Adolescents' remains one of Punk's enduring touchstones.
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