Pauline Murray is the lead singer of influential band Penetration, which formed in 1976; the band tour again in November 2024. Pauline was inspired by the Sex Pistols, was a big fan, and formed her own band—named after a song by The Stooges. “Moving Targets” was an album released in 1978, seen as their classic release—and will be performed in full on this tour
The original band was only around for 3 years; they split in 1979 but then reformed in 2000. Pauline has released her own solo album too; “Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls” was released in 1980 and won a Top 25 placing in the UK Album Chart; she released the “Storm Clouds” album in 1989, and ‘Elemental’ in 2021. In 2023, she released a detailed and enlightening autobiography, “Life’s A Gamble,” and undertook the ‘Evening With’ tour that accompanied it. In “Life’s a Gamble,” she describes how she rose from a small northeastern English mining community to national prominence as the lead singer of Penetration and how she became a pivotal figure in the punk movement. Inspired by an early experience with the Sex Pistols, Pauline entered the punk scene at the age of eighteen. She describes how she performed with the top bands of the time, dealt with the pressures of the music business, defeated the post-punk scene with the Invisible Girls and set up her own recording studios in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.
Penetration, will embark on a UK tour taking in 5 major cities. This will be the first headline tour for the band, known for such classic singles as “Don’t Dictate,” “Firing Squad,” “Come Into The Open,” and “Beat Goes On,” since promoting their critically acclaimed 3rd album, “Resolution,” in 2015. The band will be performing their seminal debut album, “Moving Targets,” in full at all dates, along with other classics from their lengthy career.
With all this in mind and the chance to speak to some punk royalty, we were happy to grab a chat with Pauline Murray and go over some back history and speak about times ahead.
We began by asking about the section in Pauline’s book where she speaks of her childhood in a mining household in the North East (Ferryhill). We wondered if it was a musical household at all.
Pauline: My mother was very musical; it was a big family and her side was all musical. They sang, played piano and so forth. So the music side came from her side, not my fathers. When I was growing up and I was born in 1958, the radio was in the house but it wasn’t really playing much music; it wasn’t until the mid-sixties when we got a TV, and the whole sixties thing exploded with ‘Top of the Pops’ and the music came on the radio. I was about seven when The Beatles hit along with all those fantastic bands of the sixties, so it would have been then that I got into music. We never had a record player in the house so it was through TV and the Sixties sounds. Prior to that, it would be Cliff and Billy Fury. You heard it and saw it for the first time, so it was a great time for music.
Every time we read an article on Pauline (including our piece here on almost the first line—because that bit comes from the press release), it always mentions the Sex Pistols and Pauline going to see them in concert. But sometimes, sneaking in there somewhere, we notice she also saw Marc Bolan and T-Rex in concert. Now we love T-Rex here at the magazine so we wondered about her memories of that show.
Pauline- It was actually pretty horrendous! It was at the time when they were at their peak and attracting a teenyboppers crowd and I saw them at City Hall at the height of their fame (June 1972; they played there, editors note). It was just full of girls screaming, standing on the seats; you couldn’t hear anything and you couldn’t see anything. That was my experience of T-Rex live, the only time I saw them live, and it was mass hysteria.
That’s why The Beatles stopped live shows, of course; they couldn’t hear themselves play and Ringo noted they were becoming bad musicians as they couldn’t play properly.
Pauline: It was just girls screaming constantly; that was me at the right age. I caught the sixties as an eight-year old so too young. But I grabbed the seventies at the right age; I got the prog rock thing—Bowie, Roxy Music, Sparks. I feel I have been very lucky, as I got to see them all firsthand.
We had a brief chat over how much has changed, including the listening experience. With vinyl, you listened to a whole album, as you didn’t want to damage the album by lifting the needle up. Also, you would enjoy reading the inner sleeve, looking at the cover and so on. We have lost that today.
Pauline: Yes, it was an experience, as you had a record player. The needle would go on; the sound went out through speakers into your room. Now the earphones go on and it goes straight into your head; it actually filled the room and it became a wider sound.
This echoes some of what jazz artist Diana Panton was saying to us in her interview about how the music business failed to protect the artists from streaming, putting artists in a difficult position where everyone can make music in a back bedroom, but it is swamping the market without quality control.
Pauline: The artist has always been a content provider, but even more so now as they aren’t getting paid for it. In the past, the music business was run by the big companies and that was the only way for an artist to get through. You went through a record company; they had a department that would suggest producers, and that was the quality control to get the best from the artist. It was released, and the record shops were the only places where you could buy music. It was a physical thing, an item. But now, the artist can spend a lot of money recording an album, and when its put out, you can listen to the album without buying it. As soon as its released, you can go on YouTube or Spotify and hear it for free. You probably won’t buy it; it’s devalued it all to the point where it is discouraging for artists. It takes a long while to write the song, record it and put it out. But you put it out and it’s almost impossible to make money on it. But anyone can do it now, so the competition has grown too; there is nothing focused; it’s all over the place.
When did Pauline get her first deal? Was she having to sit in one of those record label offices full of men in suits?
Pauline: We started the band at the end of 1976 and we were out doing gigs by 1977; we had never been in a band and were 19, maybe 20 years old and the whole punk thing had just gone out there. We didn’t ever plan to have a career in the recording industry, but once we got out there and progressed, we got a one-off single from Virgin called “Don’t Dictate” that came out at the back end of 1977. But after that, no one was overly keen to sign us and we were out there doing live shows all the time; we were getting big crowds moving from club level up to the university circuit and even higher than that. But still, no one was interested in signing us; Virgin initially showed no more interest. Then they came to see us at the Marquee as we added an extra member as they suggested we needed one, and they came there to the Marquee and said they would sign us. The deal was one we were so keen to sign as we wanted our music out there and we were not protected at all. Even now that deal has its repercussions, we have absolutely no power over our back catalogue; people can just take, license and release it without our permission. In fact, that has just happened with a double CD of our first two albums coming out, and they didn’t even bother to tell us that they were doing it. So the artists are being totally disrespected now; we are the content provider, it is that way now, it is just…
We heard a podcast with Annabella Lwin of Bow Wow Wow and it was shocking hearing about how she was essentially abused as a child of only 13 or 14 by the business at that time. There was no protection at all.
Pauline: Did you know that I had a book out last year? I am sure that what Annabella would be saying is the same old story of how artists were so ripped off. The seventies were notorious for it.
Speaking to one of the original creators of British punk gives the chance to ask whether Pauline would agree with us in thinking that the original energy and angst of punk became tamed by the ‘establishment.’ After a few years, punk became a tourist postcard in London with pictures of punks under a “Welcome to London” banner. An ‘Eat the Rich’ slogan was great, as long as you bought the T-shirt to go with it.
Pauline: What happened when it first started with bands like ourselves… With the early punk scene, we were pretty rebellious, anti-establishment, and all that. Bands were making music, but the only route through was via the major record companies. The independents didn’t really exist; there was no independent network as such. You had to go through majors, and what they did was to suck it all in, take the energy and control it, so they were able to control what went back out there. So that’s what happened, and punk became the cliche of the Mohican thing, and it became boiled down to its lowest common denominator, the studded jackets and the uniform. But it was never that at the start. It was an attitude to start with, trying to do things in a different way; young people being creative, making new fashions and sounds. It was inspiring initially, but when it all got sucked in and the media got hold of it, the safety pins in people’s faces and so forth, then they took control of it because they could. They used the energy and the creativity of it, pulled it all in and then changed the narrative.
One of our favourite tracks from Penetration was “Beat Goes On,” which we saw had a 2015 date on it, but perhaps was earlier and reworked? It was a fine piece of modern melodic punk, we thought.
Pauline: That was from our last album in 2015; that’s not from our previous incarnation. We recorded an album in 2015, a brand new album, the third Penetration album with 20 odd years from the last one, so that was us sounding as we do now, with new songs.
One review of the “Life’s A Gamble” book described it as written by a woman who had never lost her punk vision. Although punk attitude is a common phrase, punk vision seemed more interesting. What would Pauline see that as?
Pauline: It’s how you see the world and I have always seen the world differently from many. All the way through when I wrote songs, I saw where things were going. My lyrics may be subtle but they look forward. But today it’s so hard to have that vision with everything negative that seems to be going on. It’s like it’s the end of the vision. For instance, when I did the “Invisible Girls” album, there were lyrics like “the seas are a desert field we asked ourselves who drained the water…” I wrote that in 1980 and now you look at the world and all those things you warned people about are just unfolding. It is a strange world now; whether its the technology, are we having our heads messed with? We no longer know what is real. The whole false news thing, I am from a generation where you believed in the truth and the news came on and you believed it. I dislike lies, but now you look at things and it is blatant lying. But how can people not see it? Perhaps people cannot bear the truth; it’s too much responsibility to think.
In “Life’s A Gamble,” Pauline refers to the black dog of depression that she suffered with in the past. We always see music as both a great unifier and a means to cope with mental health; it’s a release. We link this to the fact that Pauline has a music studio in the heart of Byker, a deprived area in inner Newcastle. How does the studio fit within the community?
Pauline: I started the business as a rehearsal studio in 1990, Polestar Studios (link here). Originally it was in a different location, an area called the Ouseburn, which was quite deprived when I rented the premises, but now it is more middle-class with the cafes and all that. I moved to this studio in 2010 in Byker. It was a derelict building when we took it over and we moved here because we got the place for a good price. But it had no water, gas, or electricity! We felt we could get the building and then sink or swim, so we moved the rehearsal studios into it and we have different bands and artists coming into the units all the time. But COVID hit us hard and we had to close rehearsals for a time—almost a year and a half. But now its a recording studio that my son runs. As for the community, I set up a choir called the Byker community choir and that was really good, as I do believe music brings people together and beats stress. It was A Cappella; I would choose uplifting songs and some people had never sung, so it was great. I ran that for around five years.
And to finish on the tour!
Pauline: It is five shows spread around the country (poster information above) and they have been booked for months. We wanted to go out; no one controls us now. If we want to get out there and have a promoter behind us, then we are good to go! We decided to do the album “Moving Targets” in its entirety and we have only done it once, ever, and that was at the hundred club in 2007 and we recorded a rehearsal at the time in the other studio, and we found the tapes for that, mixed it all and we have that coming out as a limited edition vinyl. So we will have that with the tour, “Moving Targets” in its entirety and some other tracks added that we want to do, one from the last album.
And with that, we drew matters to a close— great talk with one of the greats from the early punk scene. Get out and check on the tour!
We hope you liked the feature, dear reader! If you did, please check out the other pages of the magazine; we have many great features, merchandise, editorials and even poetry! We work hard for you, and if you want to show some appreciation and support what we do, then do use the Support Us link below! Always appreciated.
You can stream music from Penetration here
Penetration band website here
By Mark C Chambers
and
Benny (the Ball) Benson
