Pauline Murray Penetration Interview October 2024
Punk77 Interview with Pauline Murray from Penetration from October 2024. If you haven’t read it yet, check out her excellent autobiography Life’s A Gamble. I’ve reviewed that as well so see the links at the bottom.
Picture right Mick Mercer
Early days and clothes
We lived in Ferry Hill, an ex-mining village in the northeast which was in the middle of nowhere. I used to go and see bands all the time with my older boyfriend. The music papers were like your Bible and was where you found everything that was happening. We used to go to London and see bands like Cockney Rebel and Bruce Springsteen and check out the shops and it was there that we’d come across the shop SEX and the clothes it sold. So I’d already been out of the small village mentality.
I used to wear them on stage for a little while and what made them special was they were so different from everything else. I’ve never seen clothes like them and I’ve always been into fashion and stuff. McLaren & Westwood were very creative and it was the way they turned convention and ideas on their head. Clothes like the inside-out T-shirts and then the handmade prints on them and things attached. The jumpers that were knitted on great big needles with holes in them and the bondage trousers and parachute tops that were just really, really different at the time. We also did a lot of DIY clothes like shirts as well ourselves; it was very creative.
Wearing the clothes was just a rebellious act at the time. My parents were very supportive both of the band and me. All the neighbours would have a little laugh when the cowboy shirt went on the line. Mum would wash the parachute top when we got back and it would be stained with sick and spit! Horrible!
We were ahead of the curve up here so when punk bands like The Stranglers did come, we could ring them and get a support slot and stuff like that. We were involved right at the start of punk.
Penetration get going – sharks and more sharks & record labels in shark’s clothing
It was really early on when we’d just done a demo and cassette that we sent out to people. Somehow it ended up in Rui Costa hands and he produced a contract for a single. He was also in contact with the Roxy about appearing on that Live At The Roxy Club album. We’d only just got started and done a couple of gigs when he got in touch. We weren’t really part of it; it was all very London-oriented. There’s no way we were ready for it and we just didn’t really want to be on it. I have no regrets about it.
We’re talking about the time when a lot of those early punk bands were kicking down doors of what had gone before and there was a seismic shift. For Virgin it was Tubular Bells that had gone before and there was only the major labels in place. There wasn’t the independents in place yet so you had to go through them. Virgin saw all the stuff with the Sex Pistols being dumped and all that and they realised there was something with punk and signed them.
Photo Credit – Cindy Stern
Most bands were musos back then and we were just kids, so Virgin were probably a bit cautious. We did Don’t Dictate as a one off single and then they weren’t even that interested. I just don’t think they thought some of the punk bands were capable of taking things any further. It wasn’t really supposed to go any further; it was of the moment. It’s when the 7 inch single ruled. That was what it really was all about. There were quite a few signed to one-off singles like X Ray Spex and maybe they thought the bands only had one song in them. It was very much of the moment.
To be clear they didn’t just give you £100k. That was over 8 albums and that was soon spent on recording, advertising and all the other record company stuff and expenses. We got £25k for the first album. The royalties were an absolute disgrace. It was 8% among 5 of us so we would never pay off the advance and in fact we ended up owing Virgin money. Other Virgin bands had the same experience but that was the 70s. I don’t think you can get away with that sort of thing now.
Recording, losing band members and an eyebrow raising addition to the band as the band move on from punk
The recording of Danger Signs went really well. We used Mike Howlett (Gong) who was their in-house producer and was very well thought of. He used to do Van Morrison and stuff like that. Plus there was Mick Glossop, so we had a very good team who did bring the best out of the band. I think they made a really good job of the production.
We actually disagreed with the luminous vinyl idea when it was spoken about and expressed our concerns about the quality and all that. But they didn’t really take it on board; it was when it was all gimmicks. Once you’ve signed up, you can argue with them, but you get very tired of arguing eventually.
Our change in sound and look was very organic. When we first started off in that Don’t Dictate/Gary Chappell phase we’d never done it before; we were just young kids out there. Then he left and had to be replaced and we got Neile Floyd. But also by that time we were doing a hell of a lot of gigs which absolutely ups your game and we were improving all the time. On the writing side of it, Gary had gone, and we had to write with different members, so obviously things change there as well.
As far as the image went we didn’t sit down and say we must change. It was organic again. In the early punk days I would have cropped hair and all the rest of it. But if you’re doing loads of gigs, you don’t have time to do your hair; you just do what you can do with it and it went from there.
Getting Fred Purser in was just by chance as he was somebody we knew who lived very close by. We needed to find another guitarist, so that wasn’t premeditated. But you know, people have their own ideas of what they think is. What? And. The organic and it changed the sound and it made what it was. If we’d done that album with just Neil it would have been very different. If people didn’t like it, it was their own small mindedness of what they thought punk should be like. From our point of view it added a different dimension to our music. And that’s the way it is. It was very organic. It wasn’t like old magnetic.
He wasn’t massively heavy metal like people think he was; he was quite an intricate guitar player. No it wasn’t punk and no it wasn’t a three chord bash, but we’d already done that.
Getting Fred in happened very quickly. Virgin did say they thought we needed another member and we did think keyboards, but we had about a week find someone and someone suggested him. We tried him out. We didn’t deliberate too much. We just did it, you know. Neil has a lot of issues, you know? But he wasn’t in the band from day one. When he joined the band, all the hard graft was done; he joined a band that was up and running.
The name as a hindrance
Punk77 – The name Penetration came from Iggy Pop’s seminal Raw Power album and at the time like The Slits sounded suitably punky with a slight sexual connotation/edge. It’s conjecture but it arguably held the band back as their music became more populist. While Virgin was having hits with The Ruts, Skids and Members it’s hard to fathom how Penetration wasn’t.
I did start to think it was that because I don’t think we ever got played on Radio One except for John Peel. Nowadays you can get away with more but in the late 70’s it was a different world and the name Penetration and what people expected of the name creatively, really be quite claustrophobic. So you know. You can’t really get away from it.
Tours & Tours – another record and then burnout and then split
We went to America on one of Ian Copeland’s (brother of Miles and Stewart) tours he put together. As we were arriving Squeeze or someone like that was just finishing. It was five people crammed in a van driving thousands of miles for five weeks and it was really intense. You can’t concentrate on writing songs while you’re in that mode.
You sat in a van for hours on end and then it was straight back from that tour to start to record our second album. I think if we’d been given three months after we got back we’d have carried on but we were exhausted and put straight into a studio with a half-written album. No one sat us down and talked to us about it. No one said to us, it would calm down. You’ve done all this work. You’re up to this point now and take a bit of time out. No one said that and it just was relentless. We didn’t know what was coming next.
We all thought that the second album wasn’t up to scratch. There are some really good tracks on it, but if we’d have had a bit longer I think we could have had all good tracks on it. It’s a much more mature sound because we’d started to get better at what we did. But Come Into The Open is my favourite of all the Penetration songs we wrote.
But by the second album I think we had different views by then and Neil said he wanted to leave. I just thought this was not what I wanted to do. So yeah, it’s all too much let’s stop.
It was a really quick end. You may as well have a quick end if you can’t see a way forward. We had had enough of it. It was physical and mental and you just can’t go on. If I had dragged it on for another five years I wouldn’t have done the Invisible Girls album.
I wouldn’t change the experience of anything that happened because it was an amazing thing to do but I also wouldn’t have wanted to be trapped in that forever, you know.
Aftermath
After we split I didn’t want to play again as Penetration; it didn’t bother me. I did the Invisible Girls album, then a solo album then we lost the record deal and I walked away from it all. I think it was Robert who suggested let’s put the band together. We tried to put the original band back together. Fred couldn’t do it and Neil was messing about and we ended up with different people.
We were really happy with Resolution. It was quite terrifying to do a new album after all those years. I think it does sound like a continuation, even though there were like 36 years since we did the last one. But the album incorporated some elements of continuity that referred to the past. Very subtle things like Fred was originally in the band and we did quite a bit of recording in his recording studio and he played a solo on The Beat Goes On so that was another one.
After this tour (November 2024) we’ll be going back into the studio to demo some new songs with a view to new recordings.
Penetration are on a very short tour now through November so don’t miss them playing the whole of the Moving Targets album and check out Pauline’s autobiography – Life’s A Gamble.
TalkPunk
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