One of the most innovative acts to emerge from the British punk movement, Penetration embark on a five-city tour this November taking in Brighton (Concorde 2, Monday, November 18).
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Lovely this
00:06afternoon to speak to Pauline Murray in Newcastle, my favourite city, and fabulous to hear that
00:11you are heading back down south for a date with penetration, the punk band which began
00:171976. Fantastic that after breaks you're back on the road, first headline tour for a while,
00:24and goodness, punk is nearly, very nearly 50 years ago. You are still a punk inside,
00:31what does that mean? That means that I still have the same sort of attitude, I still don't
00:38like things that are unfair, I still don't like authority, I don't like establishment,
00:48I don't like corruption and lies, you know, to me, you know, punk's the thing that's inside
00:55of you, it's not something that you go, I'm a punk and I have, you know, all the punk
01:01uniform, it's not about that, and it's not just about music, it's about the way you go
01:06through life. And that's why, as you were saying, punk was such a big sea change, wasn't
01:11it? Yeah. What was it setting out to do, do you think, looking back? Well, it was,
01:20I think, you know, it was a youth movement, we were all very young, we're all at the right
01:24sort of age, we all had a lot of energy, we're in the late 70s, there was a lot of crap going
01:31on even then. And I think, you know, with the Sex Pistols, and when it all started,
01:41I saw them, you know, very early on. And I just think it was really inspiring, and how
01:51the sea change came. Before that, the music in the 70s was, people were virtuosos, they
02:01were very good at playing their instruments. All the prop bands, you know, you'd go to
02:06a gig, and then you'd get a 10 minute drum solo, and then get the guitarist, shown how
02:11good he was. And at that point, you never would have thought, sat in that audience that
02:16you could ever be in a band, it seemed something that you had to be like, professional, and
02:23you had to pay your dues and all the rest of it. But seeing the Pistols, which I did
02:28when I was, you know, in 1976. It was just the ratitude, it was their energy, it was
02:37the spirit of it, it was the anger, it was all of those things. And basically, sort of
02:50affiliated yourself with it, you know, thought, ah, this is, this is speaking to me, you know,
02:55this is, and I'm a young person, and this is our world. We can, we can go forward, we
03:02can draw a line on the past.
03:05So given that, is being in the band in 2024, very different to being in the band in 1976?
03:12Well, yeah, yeah. Because 1976, you'd never been in a band before, you'd never done it
03:17before. You didn't even know that you could sing or anything, you just picked up that
03:21microphone and shouted down it. And most of the band had barely learnt to play, you know.
03:28But as the time went by, we got better and better, we did more and more gigs. And got to
03:35a point, you know, where we were very proficient, and we were able to make our first
03:39album, which was a massive learning curve to get to that. So it was a lot, it was exciting
03:49at the time, because there was a lot going on, there was lots of other bands that you
03:53were playing with. Everybody had this thing that, you know, sort of wanting to change
03:59the world, wanting to get out there, wanting to get on. And then I think once 1980 hit,
04:07I mean, our band split in 79. And then I did the Invisible Girls thing, which was very
04:13different. But I think the punk bands really struggled through the 80s and 90s, people
04:19didn't want to know about it. Now, doing it now, because when we first reformed, I never
04:27wanted to reform, I just thought, I don't know if I could sing those songs that I sang when
04:32I was a 20 year old, you know, I don't know if it would sit right. But once I tried it,
04:40I thought, well, actually, these songs are still relevant. The things that I'm talking about
04:45still going on in the present day, you know. So it's not as exciting, because it's not a
04:54lot going around it, you're very much on your own out there, all the bands are out there
04:59on their own with many other bands. And for us, you know, we just want to deliver a good show,
05:06we want to interpret the songs, you know, to what they should be, we don't want to change them and
05:19get everyone clapping along and elongate bits, you know, we just want to deliver those songs
05:25as they were recorded. And thankfully, we're still able to do that physically.
05:32Fantastic. We're good luck with the tour and lovely to speak to you. Thank you.
05:40Okay, cheers and thank you. Bye.