Music biographies are all the range it seems with a host of household names vying for bookshop shelfspace alongside cult heroes with eager followings keen to discover more about their heroes.
Pauline Murray probably falls into the latter category – with Life’s a Gamble detailing the life of the iconic singer-songwriter and her journey from a small mining village in northeast England, through to gaining national recognition as the frontwoman of her band, Penetration.
The band which she fronted, it transpires, could have been on the cusp of much bigger things than a top 20 album and several singles which only troubled the lower reaches of the charts, being considered, perhaps, too “spiky” for daytime radio play.
However, and this will come as no great surprise, her overworked, underpaid, and generally ripped-off band disintegrated, exhausted, after a second long player.
The story doesn’t end there of course, Murray going on front the Invisible Girls – a band put together by Joy Division’s producer Martin Hannett which would also back punk poet John Cooper Clarke – and also work on projects with members of Durutti Column, Buzzcocks, and the Only Ones, before reforming Penetration in 2001.
The machinations of the music industry are covered in highly emotive detail, but this book isn’t merely a tale of showbiz success and failure.
Given that Murray grew up in a mining village in the 1970s, the decline of the coal industry and all the societal issues connected with that loom heavy over the first part of her story – her tiny hometown now wiped from the map.
It’s also notable how the author became a key member of the punk movement, a female-fronted act being a rare occurrence in the 1970s (a contemporary, Gaye Advert, describes the book asbeautifully written” and”down to earth“). This career path was inspired by the bands of the day such the Sex Pistols – two contrasting encounters with Sid Vicious are detailed in the book – while the volume’s large format allows for many archive photos to appear within its pages, including one where we can pick out a young Pauline in the throng at the front of one of the Pistols’ early shows.
As well as these memory-jogging images, Murray has combined her teenage diaries with her own more hazy memories, while there are handwritten lyric sheets and many press cuttings illustrating how important and revered Penetration were within the emerging punk scene.
We return to the words of The Adverts’ bassist Gaye Black, who will know the story of a female punk rocker better than most: “Pauline writes from the heart with no airs or graces… Essential reading!”
Pauline Murray’s band Penetration kick off a six-date UK tour, performing the band’s debut album ‘Moving Targets’ at Glasgow’s Garage on Wednesday November 13th before shows in Manchester, London, Birmingham and Brighton with support from fellow punk pioneers Essential Logic. More at paulinemurrayx.com.
This article originally appeared in the Shields Gazette.
Also chief newshound at Jockrock
- Weird Wave - 11 December 2024
- Rat Scabies - 10 December 2024
- The Wombles - 9 December 2024