Celeste Bell, daughter of punk legend Poly Styrene, talks to Business Doc Europe about her great mum, and the documentary she felt compelled to make. Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché premieres at the Glasgow Film Festival this weekend.
“I always saw my mother as occupying these very different realms at the same time. I knew my mum was my mum but she was known to other people in very different ways,” Celeste Bell reflects on being the daughter of Poly Styrene (real name Marianne Joan Elliott-Said), the founder and lead singer of legendary punk band X-Ray Spex.
Together with fellow director Paul Sng, Bell has now made a revealing and very moving film about her mother. Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché premieres at the Glasgow Film Festival this weekend before being released in the UK in March by Modern Films. The documentary has also been selected for SSXW and has just been picked up for world sales by US outfit Utopia.
As the film reveals, Poly, who died in 2011 aged 53, was both a born performer and a sensitive and troubled soul, plagued by mental instability. The Anglo-Somali singer/songwriter was a pioneer in the male-dominated world of British punk, inspiring many followers. “I actually started singing because of her, to be completely honest,” Neneh Cherry admits in the film.
The other punks weren’t always welcoming. Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols locked Poly in a bathroom. John Lydon was haughty and stand-offish.
“I think it was the aggressiveness that was promoted,” Bell reflects on the cruelty and machismo her mother sometimes encountered. “I don’t think it was necessarily a problem with just punk. I think it’s a unique problem with British culture that comes from this idea that to be cool, you have to be nonchalant and [act like] you don’t care. Punk was an extreme version of that – a lot of blokes being very blokey and laddy. It was all about getting wasted, getting drunk, being cool and not giving a shit, not giving a fuck. If you’re somebody like my mum who was a very artistic, cultural and spiritual person, she was never going to fit into that environment.”
Poly may have been a punk but she loved Laura Ashley clothes. Throughout the X-Ray Spex period, she was living in a comfortable home in Fulham, not in a squat as some of her fans may have assumed. She enjoyed chintz and what her daughter calls “the countryside aesthetic.”
Bell has taken over the managing of her mother’s estate. She has written a book about her, ‘Day Glo! The Poly Styrene Story’, and put together an exhibition. Now comes the film.
“What was very surreal and weird but wonderful was interviewing people who knew my mum, or didn’t know her, but who were inspired by her,” she says. “I interviewed my own father which was odd but very intriguing.”
Based in Spain, Bell works as a teacher (her subjects include English language, English literature and philosophy). She is a singer too. although she hasn’t performed live for several years. The documentary includes footage of her on stage with her mother at the Roundhouse in London, yelling out the words to X-Ray Spex anthem ‘Oh Bondage Up Yours!’
Bell is now developing her filmmaking career and has a new project, Mr. Gorbachev and the Krishna Kids, about the Hare Krishna movement. She spent her early childhood in a Krishna commune in the Hertfordshire countryside.
“I was 6-months old when my mum joined so that was all I knew. It was just my reality,” she says of her idyllic early years with the Krishnas. “It was a very Utopian existence. There was singing and dancing and amazing food… I was surrounded by beauty everywhere – the natural beauty, the beauty of the clothes everyone was wearing and the smells.”
The country house had been given to the movement by George Harrison of The Beatles. “Sadly, I never met him. He was present in spirit if not form,” she jokes.
There was a dark side, though. Her mother had mental health issues. The community didn’t know how to deal with these. When Celeste was eight, she went to live with her grandmother in Brixton.
“It [Brixton] was a very different environment. It was a huge culture shock. You can’t imagine…it was like going from paradise to hell,” she laughs. She was sent to the local Church of England primary school in the middle of a council estate. The other kids didn’t know what to make of her and she didn’t know what to make of them. “On the first day of school, I got into a fight. I had never fought in my life. I had never even heard a swear word before.”
Bell acknowledges that the Krishna movement had its cultish aspects and once had a slightly sinister reputation thanks to its “overzealous” devotees. “But that was when it was very small. As it has grown, it has become much more established. But I am very sceptical that we can separate religion from cult anyway.”
Her film will focus on the experience of the children growing up in the Krishna and other similar movements.
Bell stays in touch with old members of her mother’s band. She understands why they didn’t do more to help her mother when Poly’s anxieties and mental instability rose to the surface. “It is hard enough to deal with mental illness when you’re suffering from it yourself. My mother had severe bi-polar disorder. She could be very, very difficult to deal with. Paul Dean and the other band members were just teenagers. So it would have been a very frightening experience, not knowing what to do, everything falling apart around them, their hopes and dreams being shattered because my mum was going to break up the band,” she muses. “They’re all lovely people. We have to remember they were kids in their teens and early twenties.”
Poly Styrene was one of the most powerful and idiosyncratic singers during the punk period. “Her first training was just shouting at her brothers and sisters in the school playground and being a gobby, loud, shouty kid,” Bell suggests. Only much later did Poly have singing lessons when she was in danger of damaging her vocal cords. “It’s a combination of natural born talent and training that enables you to take something and elevate it,” the director sums up the magic in her mum’s voice.
