ESSENTIAL LOGIC

Somebody wrote in with a link to a 2003 Lora Logic interview which I read with a mixture of minor discomfort and wistful curiosity. Her answers don't seem all that forthcoming so I've added a few notes for your post-punk delectation.

'the manager for X-Ray Spex liked the idea of having another woman in the band...'
OK, so he's a manager that liked the idea of having a rebellious 15-year-old girl in the band. Enough said.

'I grew up really fast. I was extremely naïve at first and was exploited by the management'
'they even used all the sax parts I worked out for the album (Germ Free Adolescents) with a new player...'
She certainly learned about the machinations of the music industry fast because when I joined the band, the previous guitarist who'd written most of the repertoire (other than the sax parts and lyrics) had his work misappropriated, and then the two songs that I wrote the music for on the Beat Rhythm News album suffered the same fate.

'it transcended labels and boundaries: that was really part of the punk spirit...'
'Punk' must be about the most untranscendental label of all time.

'I always saw that as my service to Krishna and share that but nothing really came out...'
I'm not sure if Hinduism works like that.

'I had an arranged marriage from the temple around '84 and we've been together ever since then...'
Wow.

By the way, don't be fooled by my sarcasm as it's not intended to be bitchy - I always liked Lora, and I'm genuinely happy for her if things have worked out well with her family; there's just so much Alice In Wonderland irony in that whole Rough Trade feminism/politics thing of which she was a part. And to a lesser extent I was too. How the business was run and how that would evolve, the relationships there, the nature of some of their employees, and of course the super-prudish Talibanesque censorship. I mean let's not forget the origin of the place's fucking name. And there's a kind of charm in it all that I, for my naïve part at that time, didn't really appreciate fully. Many of her simple answers in this interview neatly encapsulate those wild contradictions.