Defying Gravity. Jordan’. Story is the autobiography of Jordan Mooney, not a musician but a shop assistant. And what a shop. Jordan, as she was always known throughout the late-70s punk era only by her first name, worked for the SEX boutique run by-Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood at 430 Kings Road, London, from 1975-1981. Her radical approach to hair, make-up and, especially, clothes made her punk s primary pin-up, a fleshy Twiggy for the blank generation. Dayglo: The Poly Styrene Story is a biography of the late Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, a singer and songwriter whose band X-Ray Spex were amongst the most endearing and imaginative of British punk s golden era.
Dayglo, written by Poly s daughter Celeste Bell with the music biographer Zoe Howe, is a detailed examination of her mothers life. The girl who would be Poly fled a Brixton council estate aged 15 to hitch around the UK. Aged 18, she evolved into not simply a bandleader but, as Billboard described her, the “archetype for the modern-day feminist punk”. Wearing dental braces, she stood against the image of the typical sex object female of 1970s rock stars, sported a gaudy dayglo wardrobe, and was of mixed race.
Billboard added that she was, “one of the least conventional frontpersons in rock history, male or female”. Yet mental health problems plagued Poly and she left X-Ray Spex in 1979 for an often difficult adult life, occasionally reforming the band for one-off concerts before dying of cancer in 2011, aged 53. It is Poly s life in and out of Spex that the authors detail, using her diaries, artwork and interviews alongside Celeste s memories of a very unconventional childhood. Dayglo is a wide-ranging biography of a genuine maverick.