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But otherwise, Murray barely hung out with punk’s other big names, and Life’s a Gamble is less about her famous peers than what it took for a 60s-raised, northern working-class girl to lead an autonomous creative life, and the toll of that very life, in a peripheral band, forever skint and on the road, coupled with rip-off business deals, naivety and the exploitation of a relentless touring schedule.Īfter three years of punishing effort, Penetration split up.

Sid Vicious once hitched a lift in their van, gobbed on the ceiling weeks later, his crystallised spittle was memorialised, circled in black felt pen with the caption, “Sid’s Gob”. “You had to keep control and it got out of hand many times.” Like all punk bands, they were drenched by the dreaded gobbing. “They were fired up, angry, spitting,” says Murray. Their gigs, meanwhile, were infamously incendiary, often erupting into riots that got Penetration banned from various venues. An early Sounds headline made the most of it: “Anarchy in County Durham … It’s the Pits.”

Despite two Top 40 albums, Moving Targets (1978) and Coming Up for Air (1979) they remained a “John Peel band” and a geographical novelty, outsiders who remained in their Ferryhill mining village with no interest in moving to London’s musical centre. Unlike their peers X-Ray Spex and Buzzcocks, Penetration never achieved a chart breakthrough nor appeared on Top of the Pops, though an appearance on Granada TV’s So It Goes became notorious: a renegade punter who repeatedly flicked beer in Murray’s face was set upon by the crowd and ousted, an incident presenter Tony Wilson hailed as one of the show’s greatest moments. Penetration’s debut single, the pointedly titled Don’t Dictate, released on Virgin in 77, became a shout-along classic (“Don’t tell me what to do! / It’s my choice, I’ll take it, I’ll chance it”), showcasing their signature sound, a fuzzy, frenetic, guitar-driven blast of anti-authoritarian indignation. ‘I never thought “I’m a woman fronting a band”’ … Pauline Murray performing with Penetration in 1979. It’s not about being a man or a woman, it’s about what you do.”

“I never thought ‘I’m a woman fronting a band’,” she says.

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Bands all over the country, we all not only thought things were shit, but we provided an alternative vision of how to live.” Her gender felt irrelevant. Johnny Rotten changed her life: “His energy, his lyrics, the delivery.” The newly named Penetration joined what she calls “the cause. In 1976, everything changed: she turned 18, formed a band with local friends, and saw the Sex Pistols in Northallerton, that Yorkshire crucible of insurrection. Soon she was a London gig-going regular with her teenage boyfriend, Peter (her husband at age 20). “Later on, with punk, which made you look at everything, I could see how everything is determined by politics locally, nationally, globally.”Īs Murray’s attitude was forming, her family relocated into the larger Ferryhill village and she grew into a musically obsessive adolescent transfixed by Bowie. “I just thought adults were a bit stupid,” she remembers of the personal and community trauma. Aged eight, with her breadwinner miner dad now unemployed and her home under threat, she became “introverted”, an outsider, aware of the power of external influences. By the mid-60s it had long been earmarked for “managed decline” and bulldozing, a controversial Labour council policy allowing mining settlements, as she writes, to be “actively killed”. On the table between us lies a large-format, beautifully illustrated book, Life’s a Gamble, Murray’s autobiography told in a straightforward, unaffected manner, the compelling story of a shy, sensitive, creative kid growing up in a purpose-built coal mining village near Durham. Lava lamps line the walls and the 65-year-old is as stylish as our surroundings: a black beret sits atop glam-white hair she sports a silky cream blouse, black velvet jacket and drainpipe tartan trousers which could be Vivienne Westwood but are actually Primark. We’re in a retro-futuristic Italian restaurant opposite King’s Cross station where Murray has just alighted from her Newcastle home town. It takes guts to say the things Chris Packham says, in his position of power. “People who were affected by punk, still are. Murray thinks about how punk changed, if not the world, then several generations of similarly insubordinate individuals who won’t give up on changing the world. Pauline Murray performs with Penetration at the Roundhouse in London in 1978.

Road to nowhere lyrics