ANOTHER HERO
t took me 40 years to find my voice and I’m not going to let a bunch of narrow-minded 15-year-old bigots take it away from me now!” Vi Subversa told me in 1980, out at Poison Girls’ punk-hippy commune in a decaying rural squat near Epping, Essex. “On occasions the message has come from the audience that we’re too old,” she added – drummer Lance D’Boyle and (second of nine!) bassist Bernhardt Rebours being of her generation, only guitarist Richard Famous was in his twenties. Vice versa from the moment she walked on-stage, raddled, grizzled, straggled, dumpy, though not averse to sequins, her look, her very existence rebelled against preconception. In her forties at the time, it seems she never told a journalist how her earlier life shaped her – when she was Frances Sokolov, daughter of East European Jewish parents, a ceramics student, then (probably) married with two children, Daniel (born 1964, later rocking as Pete Fender) and Gemma (1967, later Gem Stone). But, come 1975 in Brighton when Poison Girls played their first gig, she
After all the Poison Girls uproar, Vi Subversa died in her sleep on February 19.
was ready to express it all. As in Real Woman: “When it comes to reality/I’ve only just begun.” With the band unpunkishly deferring to her voice and words, she delivered a coarse-grained Sprechgesang, in timbre and verbal agility combining Ian Dury with smoky Parisian-cellar cabaret. Mainly, however, she applied the sandpaper to gender and sexism issues: “I don’t want to be like my mother/Hang behind/ Fall behind/Wait on all the others” (Old Tart’s Song); “State control and rock and roll are run by clever men” (State Control). She liked a dollop of sauce too: “I’m not a lemon/ So squeeze your own instead” (Real Woman). But she could reach down even deeper and stand your hair on end – with Bremen Song, a howl of pain for the Holocaust (sometimes violently interrupted at gigs by National Front skinheads) or the magnificent love song for all mortal beings, Promenade Immortelle: “Strong we are strong with wave upon wave/Of change after change/Strong with the strength of the dreams that we made/That fall and fade.”