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Taken
with kind permission from Ged Babey's Punk Throwback retro-zine. 40 pages:
£1: nuff said! Email
him |
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Penetration
Coming up for Air ( Captain Oi 2001) originally Virgin
1979
Produced by Steve Lillywhite . Bonus tracks Danger Signs plus Stone Heroes and
Vision (live). Original artwork plus sleevenotes by Mark Brennan, photos and
fold-out poster insert Ideal Xmas present for Punk Throwbacks
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Purporting
to be a review ... a random selection of thoughts and opinions about Penetration
and this album. |
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There
is a brilliant bit of video footage of Penetration very early on in their short
career. They're playing live in Manchester I think and it was filmed for Granada's
So it Goes (Tony 'Factory records' Wilson's' show). I saw it as part of The
Way we Were a TV punk retrospective from the late eighties/early nineties.
The band are playing Don't Dictate and as it starts a "fan" or rather
twat at the front decides it's a really cool idea to shake up his bottle of
beer and spray ft at Pauline Murray as she starts the song. She gets soaked
with beer froth - in the face, in her hair and all down her black parachute
style bondage suit. She grabs the bottle tries to push it down to empty it but
she has to use one hand because she's still singing the mic in her other hand.
The twat continues shaking up the beer and trying to spray Pauline. She can't
get away from it because he is dead centre in front of the stage. She dances
round in a circle, gets soaked again, her eyes dart around looking for help
- you can see in her eyes the annoyance and defiance - I'm singing a song called
don't dictate - I'm being filmed - you're really pissing me off. Most other
punk singers would have a/. Kicked him in the face or b/. shouted fuck off you
twat into the microphone and aborted the song. Pauline carried on - there is
a moment of fleeting fragility where she looks like a caged animal trapped in
a hail of beer, but its soon over - retribution time. The camera pans slightly
and you see fists flying and the culprit on the receiving end - being dragged
away - hopefully for a good kicking.
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By
December 1977 Jon Savage had grown tired of punk but found Penetration ...had
remarkable freshness excitement invention within a form debased so quickly,
so deeply... they were adventurous... they had integrity .... Pauline's voice
truly distinctive, able to warm and chill at the same time. Penetrating yet
smooth, cuts to the marrow...
(taken from Penetration - The Future is Female chapter in Time Travel (Chatto
& Windus 1996)
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It
stopped being fun. That's why Pauline Murray gave it up, split up the band
- according to the sleeve notes to this re-issue. Penetration never sounded
like fun. They sounded like they were making great big statements about life,
love and society. OK, they were just songs but they were beautiful, poetic,
defiant, optimistic songs. |
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Consider
your destiny, you threw all your chances away...
Punk was about individualism- finding your own voice, following your own path,
expressing yourself - and Penetration did this but in doing so moved away from
the blueprint of Punk. Even though maybe they were guided in a certain direction
(professional, polished 'rock') they made a couple of monumental albums ...
They started off making one of the finest provincial punk demo tapes (now available
as the studio side of Race Against Time) - their debut album for Virgin eighteen
months later (Moving targets) was a bit of a hotchpotch -the story-so - far
and the original - demo songs polished up for a more 'Rock' audience (None the
less a great album - even though somewhat annoyingly for them no doubt the stand
out tracks were both covers of other peoples songs ; Buzzcocks Nostalgia
and Patti Smiths Free Money).
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They
suck you in and spit you out without a thought or feeling. Then vanish without
trace into oblivion - but they leave their poison... |
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Penetration
were never an ordinarily ramalama punk band. They were more muso/metal but in
a good way... incorporating musicianship and romanticism / optimism into their
music and songs in addition to punkismo and attitude. Coming Up for Air was
arguably their finest hour but at the same time the furthest they got away from
the accepted definition of punk. Penetration were not dumb, obnoxious, raging
... they were thoughtful, had an energy born of anger and boredom, a questioning
nature- but not necessarily all the answers. Pauline Murray's songs dealt with
unspecific foes or dilemmas and were not literal ... they were more about thoughts
and feelings rather than events. |
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Take
me away, she hears herself say, have I the nerve to run away from it all, she
is the slave... |
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They
covered various perspectives - most of them female unsurprisingly; the housewife
/ post- natal depressive of She is the Slave. The Hooray Henrietta of
Party's Over. Murray had as distinctive a 'voice' as Poly Styrene or
Siouxsie but she was somehow more warm, more human ...more emotional. She was
also more accessibly cute and punk-girl-next-door I admit - which partly accounts
for my (and others') teenage infatuation with Murray and Penetration. Musically
Penetration were more polished steel than heavy metal, they seemed to desperately
want to be American and hip like Television or the Patti Smith group - but they
still had a Buzzcockian pop sensibility, a bit of a literary and philosophical
bent. They wanted to be Rock, Pop, Punk, cool, hip, heavy and soft, light and
shade.., they wanted too much in a way - but better to be overambitious than
under-achievers. This album though still sounds fantastic to me. A beautiful
clean-cut, sound -soaring, cutting guitars, a lot of rhythmic variety, tunes,
hooks and multi-tracked vocals. It's the songs though -each one counts. Coming
Up for Air is a complete album -a seamless whole -almost a concept album but
without the connotations that implies -together with Secondhand Daylight &
a Different Kind of Tension it's a great Northern Post-Punk-Rock album, with
a defiant charm, a world-weary anger but glimmers of hope and self confidence. |
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Whenever I do this (reviewing stuff, writing about music, I listen to the
songs a lot, jot down lines and thoughts -dissect the songs, pick out bits
of lyrics which I think are cool or profound, loaded with meaning or just
plain pertinent or say more than what they intended in the first place. Reading
back some of the lines from this album, they look crap on paper, isolated
and cold - without the music and that voice. . they sound a bit paranoid and
like something out of a Geri Halliwell self-help book .... Examples rejected
for this piece ... but re-inserted for demystification purposes / a sense
of balance.
Don't let them win, don't let them drag you in...
You must exercise your strength of will
See what I mean? But In context they sound(ed) inspiring, powerful, empowering
...and they still do ...but in a quaint old-fashioned way. That said -compared
to the whine-y whingeing self-pity of some of todays bands (Radiohead? REM?
various Emo/Lo-fi bands? insert name of your most-hated up-their-own arse
band) Penetration still sound inspirational.
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Whenever
anyone writes about Penetration it is almost obligatory to put in something
to the effect that they (or more particularly Pauline Murray) were hugely influenced
by Patti Smith. As if it was some kind of bad thing. it is a fact I suppose,
but only in the same way as the Pistols were influenced by the Stooges. They
didn't actually sound anything like them ?they were just an influence. With
Penetration it was as if; a hard-rocking band with a sensitive female poet singing?
It's been done! -Patti Smith Group -we can't have another one of those. Penetration
were NOT a rip-off of PSG -they covered one of her songs and they dug her shit
(if you knowarrlmean mean).. Besides, Pauline was nowhere near as craggy-looking
and hairy as Patti (I'm not dissing Ms Smith, its just the troof). |
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I
have this really stupid memory of listening to the 7-inch single version of
Don't Dictate at Ebos' (my old school friends house in Tottenham, it was just
after he'd moved up to London -it was my first and last visit for whatever reason
-you loose touch y'know). The song finished and the stylus hit the run-out groove
and lifted off the plastic.
"Did you hear that bit at the end, after the music finishes?" said
Ebo nonchalantly.
"No" I hadn't. What bit at the end? Ebo knew I taped most of my stuff
off the radio or he taped it for me -playing singles was a novelty for me. I
put it on again from the beginning -'Penetrating voices going round' my head..."
what a classic song? Two minutes of female punk assertiveness later .... as
it reached the closing seconds I listened intently
"It's really quiet ..." said Ebo -whose real name was Ian -I don't
know how he acquired the nickname. I turned the volume up. The song faded away
to nothing.
Nothing.
"Didn't you hear it?" 'No!"
"She whispers [in a hushed voice] Ian... I love you."
"Bastard".
I told you it was a stupid story. What a sucker. Somehow whenever I hear Penetration
I always think of it
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