On Three More Punk Graces: Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, and Helen of Troy

The Three Punk Graces II: Poly, Siouxsie & Helen of Troy

(SA/2025) 

 

 

I. 

 

The Greeks famously have had their Charites, but punk mythology has given us our very own version of the Three Graces: Jordan, Soo Catwoman, and Vivienne Westwood [1]. 

 

In fact, I would argue that those who came of age not in ancient Athens, but London in the mid-late 1970s, were doubly blessed. 

 

For I can easily name at least three other astonishing women who may not have personified Classical notions of charm, beauty, and elegance, but certainly embodied forms of radical alterity [2]: Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, and Helen of Troy ...   

 

 

II.

 

Not only was Siouxsie lead singer, lyricist and frontwoman of her own very successful band - Siouxsie and the Banshees - but she was a key member of that ultra-hip and ultra-loyal group of fans who followed the Sex Pistols in the very early days and became known as the Bromley Contingent [3].

 

In fact, having never really been much of a Banshees fan - I liked some of the early songs, but only ever bought one single and one album by them - it's Siouxsie's devotion to the Sex Pistols that really makes me feel a good deal of affection for her. 

 

Because of her later career as a performer who experimented with various styles of music - and her association with what is known as goth [4] - many commentators forget just how close she was to Rotten and company and how brilliantly she embodied the pervy punk aesthetic being promoted by McLaren and Westwood; quickly becoming notorious on the London club scene for her SEX inspired outfits (often wearing a cupless black bra, for example, with matching swastika armband).     

 

In September 1976, Siouxsie performed a short (mostly improvised) set on stage at the 100 Club Punk Special (an event organised by Malcolm McLaren); Marco Pirroni was on guitar, Steve Severin on bass, and Sid Vicious on drums.   

 

And then, in December '76, she and three other members of the Bromley Contingent accompanied the Sex Pistols to Thames TV where they were being interviewed by Bill Grundy for the Today programme .... and, well, everyone knows what happened (Go on - you've got another five seconds, say something outrageous ... etc.) [5]. 

 

Now, whilst Grundy was absolutely the cause of his own downfall, it has to be said that if Siouxsie hadn't of pretended that she'd always wanted to meet him, then, well, who knows how things might have turned out. 

 

But she said what she said, and thus unwittingly instigated what became known as the Bill Grundy Incident which, in turn, triggered a full media meltdown and moral panic; the Daily Mirror famously putting a picture of her on the cover of one edition (Friday, December 3, 1976) along with the headline: Siouxsie's a punk shocker.    

 

Funny enough, after all this tabloid fuss, Siouxsie began to distance herself from the scene and stopped following the Sex Pistols after the gig at Notre Dame Hall (London) at the end of December '76, preferring to focus her energy on her own career as a singer and songwriter, releasing her first single with the Banshees in August 1978 [6]. 

 

 

III. 

 

Punk was never really about the music and, to the extent that it was about the music, it was best suited to the singles format rather than the album. 

 

However, that's not to say there weren't great punk albums and one of these is Germ Free Adolescents (EMI, 1978) by X-Ray Spex; a group fronted by the uniquely talented singer-songwriter Poly Styrene.  

 

Poly was unarguably one of the most distinctive sounding and looking individuals to have come out of the punk movement [7] and is widely recognised (along with members of the Slits) as a seminal influence on the underground feminist movement known as riot grrrl in the 1990s.   

 

Funny enough, whilst never a member of the Bromley Contingent, Poly was born in the town, but grew up in Brixton; the biracial child of a Scottish mother and a Somali father.    

 

At fifteen, she ran away from home and hit what remained of the hippie trail, hitch-hiking across the country from one music festival to another and trying to scrape a living as an alternative fashion designer and pop-reggae singer. 

 

But then, on her nineteenth birthday (3 July, 1976), she saw the Sex Pistols playing at the Pier Pavilion in Hastings and had her punk epiphany; forming her own punk band, X-Ray Spex, soon afterwards and taking the punk-sounding name Poly Styrene (one that reflected her obsession with the synthetic world of plastics and consumer culture that had boomed in the post-War era).   

 

The band released their debut single - 'Oh Bondage Up Yours!' - in September 1977 and although it was not a hit at the time (in part due to the fact that the BBC banned it), it is now (rightly) regarded as significant a punk anthem as 'Anarchy in the U. K.' by the Sex Pistols or 'White Riot' by the Clash. 

 

After this, no one ever again intoned the idea of little girls being seen and not heard (in the music business at least, if not wider society): click here to play [8]. 

 

Miss Styrene left the band in mid-1979 and whilst, to be honest, I was not interested in her later life and career, I was saddenned to hear that she died in April 2011 (aged 53) from metastatic breast cancer.  

 

 

IV.

 

Finally, we come to Helen Wellington Lloyd (née Mininberg), or, as she is better known by lovers of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), Helen of Troy; one of the most committed members of the Sex Pistols' entourage and very much part of the inner circle around the band, being a longtime friend (and, briefly, a lover) of Malcolm McLaren [9]. 

 

If anyone embodied what I termed earlier in this post radical alterity, then Helen was it; if only due to her achondroplasia - a rare inherited form of dwarfism - which obliged her to confront the ridicule and discrimination that came her way from those of regular stature [10]. 

 

Punk not only provided her with a more accepting community of creative like-minded individuals, but an identity that allowed her as a little person to openly declare her defiance of and contempt for normies (or those she called plebs) with their conventional notions of beauty, for example.  

     

Helen, a talented art student, was not just a pretty face, however; she it was who first came up with the idea of the Sex Pistols using the ransom note style typography for promotional materials (an idea enthusiastically taken up by Jamie Reid); and she it was who famously featured alongside McLaren in the Swindle, including the famous 'You Need Hands' dance sequence set in Highgate Cemetery - click here - surely one of the most touching scenes in British cinematic history.  

  

Again, as with Siouxsie and Poly Styrene, I'm not too interested in what happened to Helen post-punk; she sold her extensive collection of Sex Pistols' memorabilia at Sotheby's (London) in 2001 - which included Rotten's 'Anarchy' shirt (as designed by McLaren and Westwood in 1976) - and then, it's believed, she returned home to South Africa. 

 

Obviously, one wishes her well (if she's still alive) - and obviously, dead or alive, she continues to play an active role in my own imagination.   

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post published on 25 August 2025 in which I discuss this trio of figures who were so central to the British punk revolution: click here.  

 

[2] By radical alterity I refer to Baudrillard's understanding of otherness as it appears throughout his work; i.e., as something that is in danger of extinction today, but which might still possibly pose a challenge to the arrogance and narcissism of a closed culture when it is invested with force by a movement such as punk. 

      For me, the three figures discussed here are perfect examples of those Peter York once described as the Peculiars; individuals who are proud not to fit in or subscribe to a model of universal understanding to be alien and abnormal, as well as sexy, stylish and subversive. 

 

[3] The name was coined by the music journalist Caroline Coon in September 1976 and, despite the fact that several members of the Bromely Contingent weren't actually from this Greater London suburb (located ten miles southeast of the capital), the name was catchy and convenient enough to stick. 

      Core members included: Siouxsie, Steve Severin, Billy Idol, Simon Barker, Debbie Juvenile, Tracie O'Keefe, Simone Thomas, and Bertie Marshall (Soo Catwoman was often associated with them, but was never considered part of the group by other members or, indeed, by herself).    

      Siouxsie and Steve Severin first saw the Sex Pistols play in London in February 1976 and, after chatting to members of the band afterwards, they immediately became devotees.  

 

[4] Siouxsie often expressed her displeasure with this association and felt the term goth - like punk before it - was ultimately reductive and one used by journalists to oversimplify and categorise work they didn't understand.    

 

[5] For those readers who aren't familiar with the details of the Bill Grundy incident, let me briefly summarise: After Queen cancelled their appearance on the live television show Today show at the last minute, the Sex Pistols were offered the spot in order to promote their debut single, 'Anarchy in the U.K.', and explain what punk rock was all about. 

      Things started badly and quickly got worse when it was clear that Grundy was hostile and dismissive of the band and that the latter - particularly guitarist Steve Jones - were not prepared to take his bullshit, nor listen to his creepy sexual innuendo when speaking to Siouxsie. Suggesting to her that they might 'meet afterwards' triggered Jones into calling him a 'dirty sod' and a 'dirty old man'. 

      Stupidly, Grundy then challenged Jones to 'say something outrageous' - which he did; calling Grundy a 'dirty bastard' and a 'dirty fucker'. Grundy responded, 'What a clever boy! to which Jones hilariously replied, 'What a fucking rotter!'

      Predictably, the phone lines to the Thames switchboard lit up and the national press had a field day. Grundy was suspended by Thames and his career effectively ended. The Sex Pistols were fired shortly afterwards by their record label EMI and were now branded as public enemies. The interview - click here - has become one of the most requested TV clips of all time. 

 

[6] Siouxsie and the Banshees, 'Hong Kong Garden' (Polydor Records, 1978): click here. This debut single reached number 7 in the UK chart.  

 

[7] In many ways, Poly is as a uniquely-looking and uniquely-sounding character as Johnny Rotten and both must rank as amongst the most unconventional - but charismatic - performers in rock history. In order to appreciate this fact, here she is singing perhaps my favourite X-Ray Spex song, 'Identity', which was released as the band's third single (on EMI) in July 1978: click here. 

 

[8] It should be noted that the song is not simply a feminist rejection of male sexual oppression as some imagine; rather, as one critic points out, it's also 'an indictment of consumer culture, denouncing the blind impulses of the mainstream shopper', as the lines: Chain store, chain smoke, I consume you all / Chain gang, chain mail, I don't think at all! make clear. 

      See Lauraine Leblanc, Pretty in Punk: Girls' Gender Resistance in a Boys' Subculture (Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 45-46.    

[9] Helen met McLaren on enrolment day at Goldsmiths College, in 1969. Later, through her connection with Malcolm she became a regular on the early London punk scene, where she felt happy and secure surrounded by freaks like her who liked to dress up and mess up: 

      'For the first time I didn't try and merge into the background. I wanted people to look at me with my chains, safety-pins, foxtail and black eyes. For once being a dwarf didn't matter.' - Helen, quoted by Stephen Colegrave and Chris Sullivan in Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001), and cited on the page dedicated to her on the Punk77 website: click here. 

 

[10] I'm conscious of the fact that one must be wary of going too far in this; that too often well-intentioned depictions of dwarfs in books or films, for example, suggest that they are not simply people of reduced stature, but individuals who have special (almost magical) powers and status due to their condition. Unfortunately, that's not the case and idealising little people is just as bad ultimately as devaluing, denigrating, or disparaging them due to their size.   

      Those interested in working to create a more inclusive society for those with dwarfism might like to visit the websites of Little People UK (co-founded by the actor Warwick Davis) - click here - and the Restricted Growth Association (RGA) - click here.