Longevity was by no means a part of punk’s DIY manifesto, however a handful of the bands it spawned achieved it regardless. The Jam and The Clash secured their legends after residing by intense, but finite five-year careers, whereas The Police hung round slightly longer and have become one of many greatest bands on the planet. However, one notable act sired by punk, Siouxsie And The Banshees, turned masters of reinvention all through a spectacular 20-year profession, throughout which they developed from a primitive art-punk outfit into one of many UK’s most fashionable, refined, and actually singular acts.
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The band’s early historical past is intrinsically linked with UK punk trailblazers, Sex Pistols. Effortlessly cool, charismatic vocalist Susan Ballion (aka Siouxsie Sioux) and bassist Steve Bailey (quickly renamed Steve Severin in homage to The Velvet Underground’s “Venus In Furs”) have been among the many so-called ‘Bromley Contingent’: a small clique of followers from the south London suburbs who attended the Pistols’ early reside exhibits after which adopted punk’s edict and fashioned a band of their very own.
Sioux and Severin famously made their reside debut (with Sid Vicious on drums and future Adam & The Ants guitarist Marco Pirroni) on the September 1976 punk competition at London’s 100 Club, the place they carried out a brutal rendition of the hymn “The Lord’s Prayer.” However, the Banshees’ profession actually took off after their traditional early line-up of Sioux, Severin, guitarist John McKay, and drummer Kenny Morris fell into place throughout 1977 – after which they set out on the trail that led them to compile one among alt-rock’s most enviable catalogs.
Post-punk pioneers
(Love In A Void; Hong Kong Garden; The Staircase (Mystery); Playground Twist)
Like many seminal acts galvanized by punk, Siouxsie And The Banshees initially discovered a wider viewers by BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who provided them a session earlier than they’d even signed a document deal. The band recorded the primary of 5 stellar Peel classes (later assembled for 2006’s Voices On Air: The Peel Sessions) throughout November 1977, and this shortly rewarded them with a lot wider publicity and an early entrance cowl with UK rock weekly, Sounds.
One of that first Peel session’s excessive factors, the aggressive “Love In A Void,” instantly turned heads (initially a B-side, the tune later reappeared on 1981’s Once Upon A Time: The Singles). That preliminary BBC publicity – together with an attention grabbing ‘Sign The Banshees’ graffiti marketing campaign in and round London – led to Polydor doing simply that early in 1978.
At this level, with punk morphing into New Wave, Siouxsie and firm’s future was not at all assured. Successful single would clearly assist the band’s trigger, and one among their latest songs, “Hong Kong Garden,” stood aside due to its catchy xylophone motif, performed by John McKay. Siouxsie was impressed to put in writing the lyric by her native Chinese takeaway – additionally known as Hong Kong Garden – however nobody was extra stunned than the Banshees when the tune soared to No. 7 within the UK charts.
“The [Sex] Pistols had “God Save The Queen” disallowed from being No. 1 within the UK, and there was an argument about how a lot punk rock can be tolerated within the charts,” Siouxsie recalled in a 2016 interview with Uncut. “But “Hong Kong Garden” was so accessible it opened the door for us.”
Further success adopted within the singles chart, with the Banshees’ subsequent two 45s: “The Staircase (Mystery)” and “Playground Twist,” additionally that includes within the UK Top 30 throughout 1979. Years later, each songs stay sinister, atmospheric, and elusive and acquired important acclaim upon launch. Impressed by their harsh, post-punk noise, the NME enthused in regards to the Banshees’ “maelstrom of whirling sound, punctuated by the ominous tolling of church bells, phased guitars, a surreal alto sax and the wail of Siouxsie’s voice,” earlier than concluding that “If Ingmar Bergman produced records, they might sound like this.”
Restless sonic innovators
(Red Light; Spellbound; Dazzle; Peek-A-Boo)
By the daybreak of the 80s, Siouxsie And The Banshees had established themselves as one of many UK’s most distinctive acts. Adding to the acclaim accrued by the early singles, their good, although intense 1978 debut, The Scream, went on to affect a bunch of future alt-rock superstars starting from Joy Division to Killing Joke and Soft Cell to The Cure.
The latter’s frontman Robert Smith was significantly enamored of the document. He informed Melody Maker in a 1983 interview, “When The Scream came out, I remember it was much slower than everybody thought it would be. It was like the forerunner of the Joy Division sound, it was just so big-sounding.”
Smith’s personal historical past quickly turned intertwined with the Banshees. When Kenny Morris and John McKay abruptly stop after an acrimonious dispute throughout the UK tour in assist of the second Banshees album, Join Hands, Smith deputized on guitar as The Cure have been additionally the tour’s assist act. He later joined them full-time for his or her sixth album, 1984’s Hyaena, however within the interim, the definitive Banshees line-up coalesced throughout the recording of their third album, Kaleidoscope, when Sioux and Severin teamed up with extremely versatile drummer, Budgie (previously of Liverpool’s Big In Japan and The Slits) and ex-Magazine guitarist John McGeoch.
Both musicians stamped their authority on Kaleidoscope, 1981’s Juju, and ’82’s A Kiss In The Dreamhouse. Budgie’s ceaselessly ingenious method to his craft got here to the fore on Kaleidoscope’s “Red Light,” whereby the drummer employed the beat of a Roland drum machine and a digital camera shutter motor rewind to supply the tune’s revolutionary rhythm observe.
Budgie additionally confirmed off his tom-heavy rhythmic ability on Ju Ju’s legendary trailer hit, “Spellbound,” the place John McGeoch too got here into his personal. Instead of the anticipated guitar overload this dramatic tune would appear to require, McGeoch as a substitute set the scene by enjoying phased arpeggios and ingenious chord patterns earlier than propelling the tune ever onwards with some breathtaking 12-string acoustic guitar work.
“John McGeoch was my favorite guitarist of all time,” Siouxsie informed the UK’s The Independent in 2004. “He was into sound in an almost abstract way. I loved the way that I could say, ‘I want this to sound like a horse falling off a cliff,’ and he would know exactly what I meant. He was easily, without a shadow of a doubt, the most creative guitarist the Banshees ever had.”
Sadly, alcohol-related nervous exhaustion compelled McGeoch’s departure from the Banshees following A Kiss In The Dreamhouse. However, the band continued to collaborate with revolutionary musicians all through the rest of their profession. For instance, the emotive string association for 1984’s majestic, drum-driven hit single, “Dazzle,” was scored by Martin McCarrick, who would later turn into a full-time member of the band.
McCarrick was on board for an additional of the very best Banshees songs, 1988’s “Peek-A-Boo,” constructed on a loop in reverse of a brass half with drums the group had beforehand organized for a canopy of John Cale’s “Gun.” They then chosen totally different elements of that tape when performed backwards, modifying them and re-recording on prime of it, including a unique melody, plus accordion, discordant guitar, and a recent drum half from Budgie, making a tune which Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke described in an interview as “like nothing else on this planet…it sounded like the most current but most futuristic guitar-pop music I’ve ever heard.”
Cover stars
(Dear Prudence; Hall Of Mirrors; The Passenger; Strange Fruit)
Innovation remained the watchword all through Siouxsie and firm’s profession, however they didn’t simply try to problem themselves whereas writing their very own materials; in addition they had a expertise for working their inspirational magic on the songs they selected to cowl.
The Banshees demonstrated this potential early on by together with their radical cowl of The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” on The Scream, however went on to make a extra lasting affect after they returned to the Fab Four’s songbook for an excellent model of “The White Album” staple, “Dear Prudence.” Recorded by the Robert Smith-era line-up of the band, the Banshees’ superb, shimmering take of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s ode to Mia Farrow’s sister additionally featured a pleasant harpsichord half added by Smith’s sister, Janet – and it quickly discovered favor with the general public and shot to No. 3 within the UK within the Fall of 1983.
Buoyed up by the success of “Dear Prudence” and additional impressed by one other of their collective favorites, David Bowie’s Pin-Ups, Siouxsie and firm later determined to take the idea a stage additional by recording a complete album’s value of covers. Such an enterprise can usually be dangerous at finest, but 1987’s elegant Through The Looking Glass confirmed that the idea was in secure fingers with the Banshees.
Indeed, the document included a number of songs – not least the brass-enhanced model of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” and a motorik model of Kraftwerk’s “Hall Of Mirrors” paying homage to their Dusseldorf neighbors, Neu! – which have been praised by the songs’ unique writers. Thirty-five years later, each nonetheless sit comfortably among the many finest Banshees songs, and so does the band’s outstanding, New Orleans funeral march-styled remodeling of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”: a recording with such understated energy it moved the Los Angeles Times to recommend “only someone as serious and sensitive as Siouxsie could bring it off like this.”
Totems and taboos
(Suburban Relapse; Happy House; Arabian Knights; Obsession)
It’s definitely true that solely a singer with the eagerness and guile of Siouxsie Sioux may have recorded a dignified and ingenious reimagining of a tune equivalent to “Strange Fruit,” however then her spine-tingling studying of the Nineteen Thirties anti-racism commonplace was consistent with the braveness she displayed in tackling any variety of matters beforehand deemed taboo in mainstream pop.
Keen to point out that robust, impartial ladies ought to certainly be seen and heard within the fashionable world, Siouxsie was among the many first artists to sort out home violence in a lyric (“I’m sorry that I hit you, but my string just snapped!”) on The Scream’s “Suburban Relapse.” Having set a precedent, Siouxsie then returned to an identical subject on Kaleidoscope’s first single, “Happy House.” This time, although, her colleagues married her lyric to a deceptively bouncy and upbeat accompaniment, performing because the Trojan horse to get Siouxsie’s nightmarish, but brilliantly-observed lyric about abuse and psychological sickness (“To forget ourselves and pretend all’s well/There is no hell”) into the UK Top 40 the place it will definitely peaked at No. 17.
Siouxsie continued to spotlight points primarily affecting ladies all through the Banshees’ profession. Living as much as its title, their 1981 hit “Arabian Knights”’ darkish, brooding vibe was matched by an particularly visceral lyric in regards to the exploitation of ladies within the Middle East (“Veiled behind screens/Kept as your baby machine”), whereas the chilling “Obsession” (from A Kiss In The Dreamhouse) associated to Siouxsie’s personal expertise with the wayward habits of her former companion and supervisor, Nils Stevenson.
Comparing Stevenson’s jealous actions to the plot in Clint Eastwood’s suspense-fuelled movie Play Misty For Me, Siouxsie associated a telling portrait of obsessive habits within the tune’s lyric (“I broke into your room, I broke down in my room/ Touched your belongings there, and left a lock of my hair”) and she or he even offered the desolate-sounding tune’s rhythm by stamping on Budgie’s drum riser to replicate the feeling of being shadowed by a stalker.
Drawn to the darkish facet
(Melt!; Cities In Dust; Halloween; Night Shift)
Siouxsie has usually distanced herself from the time period “goth.” “‘Juju’ had a strong identity, which the goth bands that came in our wake tried to mimic, but they simply ended up diluting it,” she wrote within the sleeve notes for the album’s 2006 reissue. Yet there’s little question she remodeled the position of a feminine frontwoman into one thing highly effective, mysterious, and dominant. She might have been ambivalent about “goth” as a motion, however her fascination for the supernatural and the darker facet of movie and literature usually bled into the Banshees’ finest songs.
One of the best moments in Kiss In The Dreamhouse, the majestic “Melt!” is an effective illustration, because it evoked the spirit of nineteenth Century French poet Charles Baudelaire. Siouxsie’s graphic vignettes, equivalent to “Handcuffed in lace, blood and sperm/Swimming in poison, gasping in the fragrance,” brilliantly evokes the heady temptations offered by intercourse and opium – among the many decadent topics explored in depth in Baudelaire’s first (and most well-known) quantity of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers Of Evil).
Elsewhere, the Banshees’ Tinderbox-era hit “Cities In Dust” recalled Mario Bonnard and Sergio Leone’s The Last Days Of Pompeii, with its wealthy, but visceral imagery (“Hot and burning in your nostrils/ Pouring down your gaping mouth/ Your molten bodies, blanket of cinders”) evoking the ultimate hours of the ill-fated Roman metropolis destroyed by a volcanic eruption. The tune’s cinematic qualities have since seduced quite a few administrators too, permitting “Cities In Dust” to look within the soundtrack to movies together with Out Of Bounds, Grosse Point Blank, and the 2017 spy film, Atomic Blonde.
Yet it’s to Siouxsie’s credit score that she additionally introduced a equally filmic high quality to songs written about real-life occasions. As its title suggests, Juju’s “Halloween” is a brilliantly evocative portrayal of All Souls Night (“The night is still and the frost it bites my face/I wear my silence like a mask and murmur like a ghost/’Trick or treat, trick or treat, the bitter and the sweet”) and likewise an (unspecified) homicide most foul.
On the identical album’s “Night Shift,” she ups the ante even additional, with arguably her most chilling lyric of all (“Only at night time/ I see you In darkness, I feel you/ A bride by my side/I’m inside many brides” ): a no-holds-barred treatise on the crimes and motivations of Peter Sutcliffe (aka The Yorkshire Ripper) who was convicted of murdering 13 ladies between 1975 and 1980.
As such examples present, Siouxsie And The Banshees have been by no means for the faint-hearted. Though definitely not devoid of magnificence, a lot of their music was darkish and intense – and created within the pursuit of inventive endeavor quite than industrial achieve. Yet this singular method to the craft ensures they exert an affect on successive generations of left-field pop stars.
“When we were growing up, Siouxsie And The Banshees were the best at making great pop music with really heavy topics,” Primal Scream frontman and lifelong fan Bobby Gillespie informed Vogue in a 2016 interview.
“They were getting in the charts with such subversive songs, like “Happy House.” That received into the Top 20, and it was about psychological hospitals! The Banshees have been moving into pop magazines and on TV, and so they have been getting performed on daytime radio. They have been so subversive. They have been outsiders bringing outsider topics to the mainstream, and so they have been simply good.”