My mind is like a plastic bag.
This is the distinctive voice of Polystyrene, a 1970s punk icon who tore onto the scene with Day Glo outfits, braces, and a mischievous smile.
I'm a poser and I don't care I like to make people stare.
Her band was called X Ray Specs, and she didn't subscribe to the normal punk uniform.
At the time, most of the punks were experimenting with this kind of like, leather and studs and the whole bondage aesthetic.
Whereas my mother wanted to do something playful and colorful and light.
And this is Polystyrene's daughter, Celeste Bell.
When I was a small child, my mother was really my world, and I just thought she was like a superhero.
She was just a remarkable person.
And so I was very much aware of that as a child, that my mother was really special.
But Polystyrene's world was complex.
She was a performer who struggled with the attention fame brought.
A woman fronting a punk band at a time when men normally took center stage, and who had a fascination with plastic but yearned for the natural world.
I'm Anu Anand, and you're listening to Outlook.
We're crossed entangled lines.
Celeste was born in the 1980s, not long after Polystyrene had left the punk scene.
She always knew about her mom's journey into music and fashion.
But after her mother's death in 2011, Celeste began sorting through her possessions, diaries, artwork, notebooks, to get to know that part of her life even better and to share her story with the world.
In her late teens, Polystyrene had a clothes stall in West London, near where a lot of young punks used to hang out.
It was like a covered market, and she started to sell a mix of secondhand clothing and shoes.