Pauline Murray

It’s been a long while. It was more than 44 years ago that I last saw Pauline Murray when she brought her punk band Penetration to play the Locarno in April 1979. Now age 65, she is promoting her autobiography and playing some acoustic songs from her fragmented career. It was good to catch up with her again at Rough Trade in Bristol. What a great way to spend a couple of hours, listening to Pauline talk about the genesis of the band Penetration, it’s brief existence, and her life afterwards. It was quite a sad story at times, but she came across as a tough and resilient person with many talents. She’s had an interesting and varied life. Pauline appeared a bit nervous as she started her talk, and she told us how chaotic the first few events on her book launch tour became when she tried to include readings from the book to recount incidents from her life story. She said she could never find the right page, and so - apart from one short and beautifully written passage - she left the book alone in her Bristol show, instead drawing on memory to talk us through the events of those heady punk days of the late 1970s. “It’s all in the book”, she often said in her soft North-Eastern accent. She got so involved as she started to remember details that she may have lost track of time, and after 40 minutes of what was scheduled as an hour long talk she was politely advised of the time by her road manager. “Oh heck, I’d better get a move on” replied Pauline, and the later years were covered with slightly more haste. After a short interval Pauline returned to answer questions from the small but enthusiastic audience, before finishing the evening with a book signing session and chat with whoever wanted to stay on. The book, titled ‘Life’s A Gamble’, is a beautiful object, full of photographs and memorabilia that illustrate the life story and is, I am sure (although I haven’t read it), an absorbing chronicle of the times. That the show tended to be a little chaotic and improvised reflected some of the spirit and anarchy of the punk movement, and I got the impression that she remains a punk at heart even though she never got stuck in that era. Today she can still be seen sporting a black beret and stacked black boots but her outfit, a brilliant yellow silk blouse with tie and waistcoat, is far removed from the grungy punk uniform of the late 70s. Pauline was never one to stand still and her musical journey swiftly moved on from punk to more complex and melodic material in the 1980s and beyond. The evening was punctuated with six songs from across the years that Pauline performed to her acoustic guitar, opening with a cover of Bowie’s ‘Andy Warhol’ and closing with ‘Shadow In My Mind’ off her recent solo album ‘Elemental’. In keeping with the impromptu nature of the evening, she fumbled and forgot the words to a couple of her own songs but like a true professional she carried on regardless. It mattered not one jot, and her simple rendition of those beautiful songs revealed that her voice has lost nothing of it strength and clarity over the years.

Fabulous