This summer, as we all watched swathes of the planet on fire, Britain’s vocal nature punk, Chris Packham, pinned a video tweet in support of NoNewOil.com. He urged his 617,000 followers to demand from our political leaders “current and aspiring” policy-led action on climate breakdown. “It’s time for all of us to stand up,” he declared, “shout above the noise, and be counted.”
Shout above the noise. Packham watchers know that phrase: it’s the title of a song he wants played at his funeral, released by punk pioneers Penetration in 1979. Forty-four years later, the woman who wrote and sang the lyrics, Pauline Murray, is contemplating her impact on the famously teen punk Packham.
“It blows me away to think you can affect someone so deeply,” she says in her profound Durham accent. She knows all about Packham’s fandom, was interviewed by the revolutionary naturalist for his punk odyssey documentary Forever Punk (2019) who told her, whenever he’s down, he plays that song, “and it charges his battery right back up”. She gave him handwritten lyrics, a photo of which he tweeted, adding: “They’ll be in the box with me!”
Murray thinks about how punk changed, if not the world, then several generations of similarly insubordinate individuals who won’t give up on changing the world. “It’s an attitude,” she says. “People who were affected by punk, still are. It stays with you. You know when things are shit. You see things for what they are. It takes guts to say the things Chris Packham says, in his position of power. He’s targeted. And he is fearless.”
We’re in a retro-futuristic Italian restaurant opposite King’s Cross station where Murray has just alighted from her Newcastle home town. Lava lamps line the walls and the 65-year-old is as stylish as our surroundings: a black beret sits atop glam-white hair; she sports a silky cream blouse, black velvet jacket and drainpipe tartan trousers which could be Vivienne Westwood but are actually Primark. On the table between us lies a large-format, beautifully illustrated book, Life’s a Gamble, Murray’s autobiography told in a straightforward, unaffected manner, the compelling story of a shy, sensitive, creative kid growing up in a purpose-built coal mining village near Durham. By the mid-60s it had long been earmarked for “managed decline” and bulldozing, a controversial Labour council policy allowing mining settlements, as she writes, to be “actively killed”. Aged eight, with her breadwinner miner dad now unemployed and her home under threat, she became “introverted”, an outsider, aware of the power of external influences.
“I just thought adults were a bit stupid,” she remembers of the personal and community trauma. “Later on, with punk, which made you look at everything, I could see how everything is determined by politics locally, nationally, globally.”
As Murray’s attitude was forming, her family relocated into the larger Ferryhill village and she grew into a musically obsessive adolescent transfixed by Bowie. Soon she was a London gig-going regular with her teenage boyfriend, Peter (her husband at age 20). In 1976, everything changed: she turned 18, formed a band with local friends, and saw the Sex Pistols in Northallerton, that Yorkshire crucible of insurrection. Johnny Rotten changed her life: “His energy, his lyrics, the delivery.” The newly named Penetration joined what she calls “the cause. Bands all over the country, we all not only thought things were shit, but we provided an alternative vision of how to live.” Her gender felt irrelevant. “I never thought ‘I’m a woman fronting a band’,” she says. “It meant nothing to me. I’m a person. It’s not about being a man or a woman, it’s about what you do.”
Photograph: Ebet Roberts/Redferns
Penetration’s debut single, the pointedly titled Don’t Dictate, released on Virgin in 77, became a shout-along classic (“Don’t tell me what to do! / It’s my choice, I’ll take it, I’ll chance it”), showcasing their signature sound, a fuzzy, frenetic, guitar-driven blast of anti-authoritarian indignation. Criminally, it was never a hit. Unlike their peers X-Ray Spex and Buzzcocks, Penetration never achieved a chart breakthrough nor appeared on Top of the Pops, though an appearance on Granada TV’s So It Goes became notorious: a renegade punter who repeatedly flicked beer in Murray’s face was set upon by the crowd and ousted, an incident presenter Tony Wilson hailed as one of the show’s greatest moments. Despite two Top 40 albums, Moving Targets (1978) and Coming Up for Air (1979) they remained a “John Peel band” and a geographical novelty, outsiders who remained in their Ferryhill mining village with no interest in moving to London’s musical centre. An early Sounds headline made the most of it: “Anarchy in County Durham … It’s the Pits.”
Their gigs, meanwhile, were infamously incendiary, often erupting into riots that got Penetration banned from various venues. “They were fired up, angry, spitting,” says Murray. “You had to keep control and it got out of hand many times.” Like all punk bands, they were drenched by the dreaded gobbing. Sid Vicious once hitched a lift in their van, gobbed on the ceiling; weeks later, his crystallised spittle was memorialised, circled in black felt pen with the caption, “Sid’s Gob”. But otherwise, Murray barely hung out with punk’s other big names, and Life’s a Gamble is less about her famous peers than what it took for a 60s-raised, northern working-class girl to lead an autonomous creative life, and the toll of that very life, in a peripheral band, forever skint and on the road, coupled with rip-off business deals, naivety and the exploitation of a relentless touring schedule.
After three years of punishing effort, Penetration split up. “I felt,” writes Murray, “angry, sad, exhausted, confused, relieved, frightened, disappointed, betrayed, exploited, financially broke, jaded and old at 21 years of age.” Then, she fell in love with Penetration’s bassist, Robert Blamire, and was soon divorced from Peter. Her early 80s were chaotic but productive, creating music with Blamire and shape-shifting collective the Invisible Girls, featuring a host of Mancunian mavericks, from producer Martin Hannett (a new acquaintance, who’d put them up in his Didsbury flat), to guitarist Vini Reilly to Buzzcocks drummer John Maher. But at 23 she had a breakdown.
“I didn’t know what it meant,” she says, in an era where mental health struggles were still taboo. “But I cried and shook from head to foot, all the time. It was all aspects of life. Leaving me husband, nowhere to live, no money, new relationship. And the music business is very unreal, there’s expectation, you’re criticised, rejected. You’ve got to be really strong; I was up to a point and then just let go.”
She deemed herself “a burden”, developed suicidal thoughts. Mercifully, in the mirror one day, “I had a word with meself,” she says. “‘Are you gonna do this, or not? No, I’m not.’” After years of a debilitating, touring lifestyle, living on “Greggs cheese and onion pasties, Cadbury’s Smash, Findus cod in butter sauce in a bag, sweets and cigarettes”, she says she saved her sanity through healthy eating. Full recovery, she adds, “took years”.
If there’s a thread through Life’s a Gamble it’s of struggle and stress, of fighting through poverty, turmoil and bad luck. Murray is an unexpectedly delicate character with lifelong anxiety, her childhood shyness still detectable today through her sincerity and warmth. In a 1979 NME cover story with Paul Morley, she confessed she was a glass-half-empty personality. “Pessimistic,” she nods. “But without the struggle and stress I might not have done anything. Struggle and stress is what propels you to get out of the struggle and stress, do you know what I mean? I’m a high-functioning depressi–” She stops. “I’m high-functioning.”
In 1990, done with the precarious musician’s life, Murray hustled for funding to create her own business, the band rehearsal studios Polestar in Newcastle, alongside bringing up two kids with Blamire. Penetration reformed in 2001 and today they’re regulars on the heritage punk circuit. “This time the external struggle and stress wasn’t there,” she says, of this surely perilous endeavour. “There wasn’t a manager, record companies, there weren’t fans, even. We were obscure! It felt real. I was willing to have a go.”
Polestar is now a recording studio hub in the Byker area, where local young bands call themselves “post-punk, there’s waves still out there”, she says. Perhaps it’s understandable: Polestar is situated near Shields Road, voted Britain’s worst high street twice: a street in non-managed decline, graffitied and shuttered, strewn with litter and lost souls, not so different to the 1970s. “It’s desperate,” sighs Murray, “people at 8am drinking cans, people off their heads, drugs, poverty, begging outside supermarkets.”
Murray remains politically sceptical, deeming most people in power “liars, Boris Johnson and all that crew, they’re criminals who need locking up”. Not that she has any answers. “There’s not enough of us,” she decides, of her fellow insubordinates. “It’s when the man in the street goes ‘I’ve had enough’ that things change. But they’re all out their heads, stressed, too busy worrying about bills. The people in charge know exactly what they’re doing, it works, they’ve being doing it for thousands of years!”
The attitude, then, has definitely stayed with her. “But if you can live your life by your principles,” she adds, “by what you will and won’t do, it’s all you can do. Like Chris Packham does.”
There’s an early scene in Life’s a Gamble, where the eight-year-old Murray is sitting in a lilac tree in Ferryhill, staring down into a valley. She sees a car crash, and when the scene disperses, scampers down to investigate. There, she picks up tiny pebbles of shattered windscreen glass, carefully stores them in a suede pouch and pretends they’re diamonds. There’s something very punk, I tell her, about that. She laughs out loud. “Something beautiful in the aftermath of a car crash,” she hoots. “For all I’m glass half-empty, my actions are all positives. I’ve taken all sorts of gambles. And I’ve done alright. I’m not mega-rich, I’m not mega well-known. But I’ve done well in doing things my way. When, and how, I want to do it.”
She surveys her handsome book cover, an image of the young Murray in a ripped woollen jumper and black beret, staring straight ahead with smoky panda eyes. “I look quite defiant,” she declares, winningly. “I do! And I’ve started wearing a beret again. But the hair’s white now, that’s real white. I dyed it black me whole life, and this is a lot less hassle.” Where some would see decay, perhaps, she sees freedom. Still finding, after all these years, the diamonds in the car crash of life.
• Life’s a Gamble by Pauline Murray is published by Omnibus Press on 14 September. Pauline is on a UK book-signing tour now: details
• This article was amended on 14 September 2023 to more accurately reflect the era of Pauline’s upbringing.
