Sarnia de la Maré FRSA Author, Musician, Artist

Penelope Fairlie had never faltered. 'Faltering is for amateurs and the mentally ill', she would say.  At fifty-two, she was the embodiment of composure. That rare breed of Englishwoman who moved through life as if time itself obeyed her schedule. She was a beacon of virtue and as disappointing as a soggy digestive, though no one would ever tell her due to her ability to petrify anyone within her orbit, even other people's dogs in Hyde Park. She lived in a tall, ordered house in Belgravia with her husband, Charles, a respected tax barrister, and their Pomeranian, Bertie, whose coiffure was definitely worse than his bark, styled by an expensive personal dog groomer from Hampstead. There were no children, a fate that had become a new normal many years before. If one dared to asked Judge Penelope Fairlie when she last felt the surge of a carnal wave, she would probably tell you it was when she saw Julio Iglesias in concert for her twenty-first birthday Charles Fairlie was a ...

  Chapter Two: London Calling If New York was a dirty prayer, London was the reply — shouted through a ripped speaker and a mouth full of safety pins. By the mid-seventies, Britain was broke, bored, and spoiling for a fight. You could smell revolution on the bus queues and in the dole offices. The youth didn’t just want music; they wanted a detonator. Into this walked the women of British punk — armed with sneers, art-school intellect, and a taste for self-destruction that doubled as self-invention. Poly Styrene, Siouxsie Sioux, Gaye Advert — they weren’t echoing New York’s noise so much as localising it. They took the downtown poetry and made it spit with a London accent. Where Manhattan had art galleries and amphetamines, Britain had bin strikes and boredom. Punk here was uglier, funnier, and more political. The girls didn’t need to look pretty — they looked like a warning. In London, fashion wasn’t decoration — it was a declaration of war. The women of punk wore their politic...

Berlin learned to make art from its woulds. By the late 1970s, the city was a collage of ghosts and scaffolding — half-rubble, half-rehearsal space. The Wall sliced through its heart like a bad scar, dividing not just politics but psychology. Yet in that crack, something began to grow: a scene that turned desolation into theatre. Squats became studios, bunkers became nightclubs, and every abandoned factory echoed with the clatter of typewriters and drum machines. Electricity was borrowed, paint was stolen, and rules were optional. The air smelled of damp concrete and hairspray — a mix that could either kill you or inspire you, depending on the night. Women like Nina Hagen , Gudrun Gut , and the members of Malaria! took punk’s raw nerve and wired it into performance art. They didn’t want to imitate London’s fury or New York’s poetry; they wanted to reinvent the body itself — to turn sound into gesture, movement into manifesto. In Berlin, punk wasn’t a style; it was a survival mechan...