Poison Girls - Hex

POISON GIRLS - HEX

Prior to the release of their début album, Poison Girls had released an 8 track, 12" EP entitled Hex; a joint venture between the Small Wonder label and the Poison Girls' own XNTrix label.

Laden with samples years before sampling became a popular device used by bands, the music was taut, angular and (as Mark E Smith would have it) totally wired; complimenting perfectly the edgy but very humane and heartfelt vocals of Vi Subversa. This was music born of Punk but departing from it and setting forth along its own chosen path, making and breaking its own rules along with everyone else's.

Lyrically, this was Vi Subversa coming from an entirely original (in terms of rock'n'roll, at least) position, that being of a forty-something mother suddenly given the freedom to express herself politically, as in the politics of everyday life. 

Starting off with the sound of a silent phone-call, on the opening track Old Tarts Song, Vi immediately puts herself in with good company: "Everybody has their price. Up yours!" she snarls. Just two years earlier, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex had more or less declared the same sentiment: "Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard but I think, 'Oh bondage, up yours!'"

Though generations apart, both Vi and Poly were coming from the same place and reading from the same page. "Identity! It's a crisis, can't you see?" sang Poly, whilst on the track Crisis, Vi asks "Is it safe to go out shopping, leave the kids outside the toilet? Water dripping on the carpet, leave the kids outside the local? Strangers tapping at the window, is it time to have a crisis? Is it normal? Is this normal? Is it just another day?"

"I'm lost," admits Vi. "So lost, just like you. No-one knows what the hell to do. Or where to go, or when or how or why or which, then or now. No-one knows cos no-one cares, we just look on with ice cold stares. We see the light but turn it out. We dare not act. We whisper our truth, we're afraid to shout. So no-one learns cos no-one shares. We nurse our burns, we hide our cares..." Whilst paying attention to her spoken words we suddenly realise we have entered a completely new song and landed in a completely different landscape, the kind of which for all her brilliance Poly Styrene never ventured.

The Bremen Song, featuring Eve Libertine from Crass as a backing vocalist, offers up proof if needed that Poison Girls were a highly original and fascinatingly curious band. Throwing up imagery of womankind depicted throughout history as witches and heretics burnt at the stake, Vi turns this depiction on its head and snatches it back from a position of victimhood to empowerment. The song is a work of pure feminist art.

On the track Political Love, Vi suggests that whether we realise it or not and whether we like it or not, love is always politicised. Whilst on Jump Mama Jump, Vi calls to "all the Punk mothers out there" and beseeches them to "come out of hiding". Better that than be Under The Doctor, being dealt "some mighty fine dope: Librium, Mogodon, Thorazine, Valium. Though they haven't got a pill called Hope".

"What I'm trying to say," confides Vi "Is you gotta be strong, cos nothing takes the pain away for long".

Hex closes with the song Reality Attack, being all staccato, piercing, fuzzbox guitars, ending with fellow band member Richard Famous urging that we "Attack reality! Attack reality!"; before being joined by the whole band shouting out "Attack! Attack! Attack!" over which Vi cries out "I am alone! I am alone! I am alone!" And then sudden silence.

What Poison Girls had created with their début 12" EP was not just a short collection of songs but a coherent whole, a complete piece of work. Any critic of music chancing upon it at the time of its release (and Small Wonder was by then a respected Independent label so critics should have been paying attention to what they were releasing) would have recognised something very unusual was going on, that a strange flower had suddenly blossomed. For some reason, however, Hex was studiously ignored. Poison Girls didn't fit in with anything, basically, and critics seemed to find this a problem.

Through their association with Crass, Poison Girls were labelled Anarcho Punk and if this was the cap that fitted then they were even more Anarcho Punk than Crass. Penny Rimbaud had produced Hex and as mentioned, Eve Libertine featured on one of the tracks; a few years later Hex would even be re-released on the Crass label. So, the Crass connection was an important one but in the end it was Poison Girls who were more important to Crass rather than the other way round for not only did they put the money up to pay for the recording of Stations Of The Crass but they also added a whole new, extended dimension and depth to the idea of Anarcho Punk.
Poison Girls were an inspirational phenomenon.