On 29 March 1978, Marlene Marder leapt into her new existence. She was watching punk band Kleenex’s first show, at Zurich’s Club Hey, when their guitarist and only male member declined to return for the encore. For him, the late Marder wrote in her diary, “Kleenex was a bit of weekend fun”. But for Marder, Kleenex offered a more profound form of liberation. She told bassist Klaudia Schifferle and drummer Lislot Ha that she knew the chords and climbed on stage.
The moment marks punk’s Jahr null in what may seem like the least punk place imaginable: Switzerland. Like British punks X-Ray Spex, Kleenex named themselves after a disposable object, acknowledging an increasingly pervasive consumer culture (ironically, they later had to change their name to Liliput after a threat from producers Kimberly-Clark). If Poly Styrene’s lyrics subverted advertising-speak to warn of its insidious creep, Regula Sing launched Kleenex beyond commodification by singing in various languages, including gleeful nonsense words she invented – “Hexa-pod, hell-cat, helter-skelter, hop-scotch!” – to express the women’s joys, challenges, desires. Their sound was a hungry puckish splatter: John Peel’s endorsement landed them on Rough Trade, whose founder Geoff Travis was struck by their joyousness, a contrast to angry British punk. “They were unashamedly, primitively brilliant,” he says. “The way they chanted their vocals was not like anything else.”
