RIP Kenny Morris

One intriguing counterfactual in rock history is what would have happened if drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist John McKay had not quit Siouxsie and the Banshees at the start of a major tour - after an altercation at an LP  signing session in an Aberdeen record shop...

McKay & Morris broke their silence about their seemingly impulsive decision to leave a few months later, in December '79

In the counterfactual scenario, Morris & McKay stick around - and Budgie and John McGeoch do not join as their replacements...

And while you wouldn't want to have missed all the amazing music that the new line-up created - "Happy House", "Christine", all of Juju, all of A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, "Fireworks" etc - I wouldn't have minded an album or two more in the Scream / Join Hands mode.

The difference is like the switch between monochrome and Technicolor. 

In  "Concrete Pop", a 1986 piece written for Monitor, Chris Scott - who vastly preferred the first-phase Banshees - argued for the higher powers of the non-virtuoso and the untrained: 

"Now: the archetypal goth band, drone drone drone, texture texture texture, the sound of the sea. Then: the sound of people doing things to objects. Being a punk Siouxsie treated even her voice as an object, and more spectacularly than Rotten or Poly Styrene. The music was not just an atmosphere: it kept us aware of the presence of the instrument, the object and of the presence of the people manipulating the objects, communicating with us because we were kept aware that someone had made these noises for us. Each sound itself was like an object put there for our consideration. Buying that first LP was like finding a huge rusting metal thing in the street, bringing it home and putting it in the middle of your bedroom just because it looked so good. Buying a Banshees album today is like buying a settee. Or a carpet."

He also made an invidious contrast between the two drummers: Kenny Morris's "epochal battering" versus Budgie getting "his drumsticks specially made 200 at a time - rockstars are dead, eh""

When I interviewed Steve Severin he made some points compatible with the Chris Scott viewpoint: 

“When you listen to The Scream, you can hear the fingers on the strings, the effort that’s actually going into it. You get to the end of a track and you can hear Kenny breathing.” 

The sound-style emerged out of the combo of the performer's limitations and their active aversions. Severin again:

“It was a case of us knowing what we didn’t want, throwing out every cliché. Never having a guitar solo, never ending a song with a loud drum smash. At one point, Siouxsie just took away the hi-hat from Kenny Morris’s drum kit.” 

Here's a bit on Morris's approach to drumming from an interview done only a few years ago by Ellie O'Byrne:

His unorthodox, self-taught drumming style used almost no cymbals: he would turn his sticks round the better to belt his drum kit as hard as he possibly could. Siouxsie said he was like a marionette seated at his kit.

“I was really physical on the drums,” he says. “When I eventually got my own kit, it had to be practically specially built. I think it was ’78 before I even got that.”

“I had a Pearl Drum Kit with a special indestructible pedal. When most drummers use a ride cymbal, I didn’t want a ride. I’d have my high hat and a crash and an upside down Chinese cymbal. I would play time on the side drum, not the ride. When I got a riser, I made chalk marks where they had to drill holes and attach metal clasps to secure the cymbal stands.”

Still, as severe as the first-phase Banshees could be, the single were pop punchy. 

Things like this flange-ferocious beauty - a medium-size hit single

I pose that counterfactual query at the end of this review of a Deluxe Reissue of The Scream

Siouxsie and the Banshees

The Scream

Uncut, 2005

Knowing Siouxsie as Godmother of Goth, it’s easy to forget that the Banshees were originally regarded as exemplary postpunk vanguardists. Laceratingly angular, The Scream reminds you what an inclement listen the group was at the start.  Sure, there’s a couple of Scream tunes as catchy as “Hong Kong Garden” (which appears twice here on the alternate-versions-crammed second disc of BBC session and demos). “Mirage” is a cousin to “Public Image,” while the buzzsaw chord-drive of “Nicotine Stain” faintly resembles The Undertones, of all people. 

But one’s first and lasting impression of Scream is shaped by the album’s being book-ended by its least conventional tunes. Glinting and fractured, the opener “Pure” is an “instrumental” in the sense that Siouxsie’s voice is just an abstract, sculpted texture swooping across the stereo-field. Switching between serrated starkness and sax-laced grandeur, the final track “Switch” is closer to a song  but as structurally unorthodox as Roxy Music’s “If There Is Something”.

Glam’s an obvious reference point for the Banshees, but The Scream also draws from the moment when psychedelia turned dark: “Helter Skelter” is covered (surely as much for the Manson connection as for Beatles-love), guitarist John McKay’s flange resembles a Cold Wave update of  1967-style phasing, and the stringent stridency of Siouxsie’s singing channels Grace Slick. In songs like the autism-inspired “Jigsaw Feeling,” there’s even a vibe of mental disintegration that recalls bad trippy Jefferson Airplane tunes like “Two Heads.” 

Another crack-up song, “Suburban Relapse” always makes me think of that middle-aged housewife in every neighbourhood with badly applied make-up and a scary lost look in her eyes. Siouxsie’s suspicion not just of domesticity but of that other female cage, the body, comes through in the fear-of-flesh anthem “Metal Postcard,” whose exaltation of the inorganic and indestructible (“metal is tough, metal will sheen… metal will rule in my master-scheme”) seems at odds with the song’s inspiration, the anti-fascist collage artist John Heartfield.

Scream is another Banshees altogether from the lush seductions of Kaleidoscope and Dreamhouse.  McKay and drummer Kenny Morris infamously quit the group on the eve of the band’s first headlining tour, and their replacements--John McGeoch and Budgie--were far more musically proficient. Yet The Scream, along with early singles such as  ‘Staircase Mystery” and the best bits of Join Hands, does momentarily make you wonder about the alternate-universe path the original Banshees might have pursued if they’d stayed together and stayed monochrome ‘n’ minimal.

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From the O'Byrne interview, Morris's account of the breakup at the Aberdeen record shop LP signing session: 

“When we left the record shop, we went outside and went, ‘what are we going to do?’ So we went back to the hotel. Margaret Thatcher was staying there too, so security was everywhere: guys talking into their sleeves.”

They booked a taxi but, fearful of the rest of the band catching up with them, lied to the receptionist and said they were going to the train station when in fact they were headed to the airport.

The band did arrive, just as they were leaving.

“[Banshees manager] Nils came up to the taxi and reached in through the window, and started trying to strangle me,” Kenny says. “So I wound the window up on his arm. He fell to the floor and he was going, ‘I’ll see you never work again. I’ve invested 45,000 in this tour!’ and John was going, ‘have you? Whose money? Is that our money, Polydor’s money?’  Things had gotten that bad that we didn’t know.”

A film made by Kenny Morris, said to be an allegorical account of the break-up 

Kenny Morris interviewed by John Robb