Penetration punk Pauline Murray brings her Life's a Gamble book tour to The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea

Hailing from County Durham in the north-east, they were a long way from punk's epicentre in London.

But the band’s members had been music fans first and foremost, watching early shows by The Sex Pistols and soon playing themselves at the soon-to-be-legendary The Roxy in 1977, alongside bands like Generation X and Warsaw (who later became Joy Division).

They released the classic single Don’t Dictate and two top 40 albums, Moving Targets and Coming Up For Air in quick succession. By 1979, with Pauline still only 21, the band had burnt out and split.

Thankfully that wasn’t the end of the story. Pauline went on to record another cult classic album with The Invisible Girls before moving behind the scenes to set up Polestar, a recording/rehearsal studio. Penetration reformed in 2001 eventually recording a new album, Resolution in 2015.

Pauline has now released her autobiography Life’s A Gamble: Penetration, The Invisible Girls and Other Stories, which takes the story from her childhood in a mining village through to the present day.

Written largely from memory with help from a diary she kept through 1978 and a few friendly sources, it also contains a wealth of photos, cuttings and other artefacts from the time. It is a beautiful looking book and a fascinating read.

Murray is heading on tour to promote the book where she’ll be reading extracts, taking questions and playing a few songs.

As she explains in the book’s introduction, Murray only began writing her life story as something for her children.

However her friends Russ Bestley and Paul Harvey got wind of what she was writing.

“They'd been trying to get me to do this for ages,” she recalls “they'd seen a draft of something I'd done ages ago. Russ approached Omnibus about me doing an autobiography and then word came back saying: ‘Yes, we want to do it.’ So I was like: ‘Oh my god!’ And I had to do it...”

Russ, who is from Portsmouth, is also a designer and academic who has written extensively on punk. He helped put the book together. Pauline had a lot of material she’d kept over the years, but getting clearances to use all of the photos they wanted to include was another matter.

“I think I signed the contract in November ’21, and I started writing it properly in January ’22. I finished the first draft after eight months. I didn't know the process of writing a book at all – I had no idea. I even Googled: 'How to write an autobiography', I didn't know where to start!

“It took three months of editing, then the photos took another three months. I had these great photos from (acclaimed music photographer) Pennie Smith, but she was really hard to track down, or other people were charging too much for the photos – we had a really small budget for it, so we had to be quite creative with all of that as well, using posters and cuttings. We wanted to make that side of it chronological so the pictures tell the story as well as the writing.”

Among the photos there’s a brilliant shot of The Sex Pistols playing at Leeds Poly in December 1976 – sourced through Getty Images. Pauline is clearly visible in the crowd.

“It was only fairly recently that someone showed me that, and I thought that it was me at the front and then my son went: “No, there's you, there!” I thought it was amazing that a photo like that existed.

“We had to really juggle things over those three months to get those photos sorted. (Music photographer) Paul Slattery came to the rescue at the very end, we only had about two weeks to go and he had loads of photos from the early days which he let us use.”

It’s a problem with many autobiographies that the opening chapter(s) on the subjects’ childhood tends to be rather dull. However, Murray sketches her early days alongside the social history of the time – ending with her home for her first 10 years, Waterhouses, being wiped literally off the map – the residents were forced to move out and the village erased. It was important for Murray to tell this aspect of her story.

“It was quite a formative time, and obviously when you're a child you don't really know what's going on, you're just living your life. It changed my life because then we moved to a totally different place where I didn't know anybody, so it was important, and I did want to include my ancestors as well. I wanted to tell their story too.”

Through her teens music assumes a greater importance as she starts to follow bands around – eventually making that transition from fan to performer.

“The punk spirit gave you the bravado, you know? It gave you a little bit of oomph. It was the energy of the punk thing that drove you to get on that stage and it allowed you to be an amateur because that was what being a punk was all about. It was more about being brave enough to just get on there, but I used to go and see a lot of bands and I was always right at the front, so it was only one step away, really, to go on that stage.

"I didn't worry, but I didn't know if I could sing or not – I didn't think: 'Ooh, can I sing?’ I just got up and did it.”

Reflecting on the path her life took from that point she says: “We were in a tiny little village, we weren't even in a city. I don't know how we did it, I think we just did it on pure spirit – get up and do it – it was just an adventure, really. It wasn't a ‘career’ or anything.

“Punk was a life-changing thing. And I think it was for a lot of people, it turned them in a different direction. I probably wouldn't have even ever sung had it not been for the inspiration of a movement like punk. It gained momentum and you were in the thick of it!”

By the time Penetration’s debut album arrived, they already moving on from the three-chord head-down charge typical of many of their peers.

”Our original guitarist, Danny Chaplin – he was a good guitarist but he left the band quite early on when we were doing that ‘punk’ kind of stuff, like Don't Dictate and Firing Squad. Those two singles were very much in that punk zone. Then when we added Neale (Floyd) we got a different type of songwriter, and then when we added Fred (Purser), putting his technical type of playing, it made it more musical and took it away from punk – it gave it more depth.

“When we did that album, we were working with Mike Howlett and Mick Glossop, two producers who brought the best out of the band, and we did the best we could. I think that's why it made such a big success. We changed the lineup and we were pushing our own envelope, if you like. We weren't afraid to do stuff because part of the punk-thing was about being brave and we weren't thinking, ‘ooh, this isn't punk enough’. We were just doing what we thought the songs needed and took it up another notch. It all happened in a very short space of time.”

When Penetration imploded, Murray says: “We had no plans, most of the stuff was done on the hoof. I didn't even think about what I was going to do next when Penetration split, I just thought, ‘thank God it's over, I need a rest’.

“But I didn't really have a rest, I moved on and went in a different direction with The Invisible Girls and that was me and Rob (Blamire – Penetration bassist and also by now Murray’s partner) starting to write again, but we never had any plans. We did it all on instinct.”

While there was the occasional single in the 1980s as part of various projects, Murray stepped away from performing.

In 2001 the band reformed for a few shows but Murray had no intention of recording a new album.

“I was busy in my life, I had kids and all that and a business to run, I didn't really want to commit to an album. We'd put out a couple of singles through Damaged Goods and then Rob was really keen to do an album, but I was really reticent about doing it.

"The main reason was that I didn't think we could come up with something that would not better our past, but at least stand up to it. We did those two albums and the band had split, so those two albums were always in their place."

However they launched an online crowdfunding campaign through the now defunct Pledge platform, and the hunger for a new Penetration album bowled them over. The resulting album Resolution was released in 2015.

"I thought it would be really difficult after 36 years to come up with something we could call a Penetration album. But we did rise to the challenge and when we launched that campaign the orders started to roll in.

“I was really surprised and I thought, ‘Oh my god, we've got to do this now!’ Half of it was already written, half of it wasn't, but we rose to the occasion and tried to link things to the past and bring it through all of those years of not doing it. I think we did a really good job with it but we haven't done another one yet!”

In the past decade Murray has added solo shows to her bow. In 2013 she was approached to do perform a couple of songs solo on a bill other female punk luminaries.

“I didn’t really commit to it, but then I saw I was on the poster so I had to do it, and it's really opened up another door for me because it had been years since I'd played a guitar. I learned a few songs for that and it opened it all up for me to sit there on my own and play an acoustic guitar. I quite liked it because I didn't have all of the noise and you could set your own pace.

“From that I started to write songs and then I did what became the Elemental album (her 2021 solo album) – they are very different to Penetration.

“It was terrifying when I first did it – I was trembling before that first gig from head to foot, because you're so exposed, there's nowhere to hide. There's no one else from the band moving about and doing stuff, but when you're sat on your own it's a totally different thing. It's a good discipline, in a way.

“The more I do it, the more I've got used to it. This tour now, it's for the book so it's a different kind of thing, I've not done anything like this before."

An Evening With Pauline Murray is at The Wedgewood Rooms is on Monday, doors 7.30pm. Tickets £20. Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.