This new exhibition spotlights the hidden history of women in punk music

In May 1978, X-Ray Spex frontwoman Poly Styrene was asked whether she was punk’s new sex symbol. “If anybody tried to make me one I’d shave my head tomorrow,” she retorted. A few weeks later, she shaved her head. Just 20 at the time, the X-Ray Spex frontwoman was mixed-race and working-class, with braces on her teeth. She wrote songs about consumerism, synthetic food and genetic engineering, all topics still relevant today, yet the newspapers mostly wrote about her appearance. 

“These women were really going against the stereotypes of what a female performer should look like or behave like,” says her daughter, the filmmaker and writer Celeste Bell. “And still, it was the same old attention on what they look like.” Bell is speaking just days before the opening of Up Yours! God Save The Queens, an exhibition that puts the women of punk at the centre of the story. It is the flagship event of a London-wide festival dedicated to Poly’s legacy, which runs from July to November 2026. Bell curates the show with Lauren Estelle Jones, co-founder of Art Barter and daughter of The Clash’s Mick Jones, and Vivien Goldman, the music writer known as “the professor of punk”. It opens at the new permanent home of the Museum of Youth Culture in Camden on 22 October.

“My mum was very much inspired by articles and things that she would read,” Bell explains. At the time, Britain was a country in visible decline with rising inflation and unemployment. The National Front was marching through working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods. Poly’s concerns, though, were often further ahead, focused on the overconsumption of plastic, the processed and the mass-produced. One song, “Genetic Engineering”, came from a Time magazine piece on how the new technology might revolutionise medicine. “She was a sponge. She would pick up bits of information, mainly from the media, from television, and then she created this whole imaginary, futuristic world.”

Bell describes the album Germfree Adolescents as almost a dystopian novel, with Poly Styrene as its main character. “It’s a very synthetic world where natural fibres have almost disappeared, everything’s plastic, we’re super advanced with technology and we have bionic humans,” she says. “Then it was very futuristic, a kind of fantasy. Now it feels like we’re on the precipice of all of that. I think it’s why it resonates with younger people today.”

Punk’s do-it-yourself ethic is now familiar, almost fashionable, but at the time it was born out of necessity. “We’re talking about a time of deep economic recession, and there was very little money to go around. Young people just had to do things for themselves because they didn’t have any alternative.” That meant taking what already existed and making it into something new. “Now it’s quite mainstream, but back then it was quite revolutionary” Bell continues. Jones, meanwhile, recalls how thrifting in charity shops still carried a stigma when she was a teenager, let alone in 1976. “It wasn’t cool like it is now,” she laughs. “But you find the best stuff. Why wouldn’t I go?” Most people in the scene came from anything but comfortable backgrounds, she adds, and the make-it-yourself rule applied to everything. “It wasn’t just the music. It was the visuals, the artwork, the fashion. Everything.”

This DIY spirit runs through the exhibition too. Spanning photography, including rarely seen prints of Siouxsie Sioux, Chrissie Hynde, Ari Up and Rhoda Dakar, it also includes paintings and drawings by first-wave punks who are now artists in their own right, such as Caroline Coon and Gina Birch. And ephemera, gathered by the curators going from house to house. The Slits’ Tessa Pollitt opened her home to the curators, and Palmolive sent boxes from the United States. Gaye Black of The Adverts has lent the suitcase she took on tour with The Damned, packed with postcards and personal keepsakes. Photographer Annette Weatherman’s hand-annotated prints sit beside unseen footage from Don Letts. From the Poly Styrene Archive comes the draft artwork for 1977 single “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” and the original poster for X-Ray Spex’s 1978 Roundhouse show.

The curators’ favourite parts of the exhibition are the small stories told across several loans. One punk-era Zandra Rhodes dress, lent by collector Philip Stevens, hangs near original Rhodes sketches from her foundation and Sheila Rock’s photograph of Debbie Harry wearing it. Penetration’s Pauline Murray has lent shirts she painted herself, shown with photographs of her performing in them. Sue Webster contributes jackets painted in homage to Siouxsie Sioux during lockdown at her Mole House. Alongside them is a film of the fashion show she staged there, with friends dressed as 25 different Siouxsies, imitating her distinctive punk look with wigs and makeup.

But why focus on the women of punk, and why now? Jones’s answer is simple. “There’s a lot of space given to the men, and you just don’t see that much given to the women,” she says. “So it’s really readdressing that balance.” There are men in the show too, mostly behind the camera, including photographers such as Bob Gruen, Ray Stevenson and David Corio, who chose at the time to put these women at the front of the frame. “It’s not to be exclusionary,” Jones says. “But the men are more in a supporting role. It’s just to put the women at the forefront. Girls in the front.” At the time, the women were often given smaller platforms, fewer record deals and thinner support networks than the men around them, and history has followed the money. “It’s about bringing them back into the light for that reason.”

Punk was always meant to be disposable. Poly chose her stage name because polystyrene is cheap and throwaway. The irony is that history nearly threw away the women who pioneered the genre too. God Save The Queens sets out to restore them to their rightful place as its authors. And, for Bell, the timing matters. Almost 50 years after her mother placed an ad in Melody Maker looking for bandmates, female performers are still judged on their appearance and looks. In 2026, female artists still need reminding, Bell says, that they can be taken seriously purely for their music, even if those barriers haven’t gone away.

Up Yours! God Save The Queens is showing at the Museum of Youth Culture Camden from today (October 22) until November 22. Grab tickets here.