Siouxsie and the Banshees
The Scream: The Deluxe
Edition
Polydor/Universal
Uncut, 2005
by Simon Reynolds
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.
The Creatures : Demon Hunters
The Observer, 1990 by Simon Reynolds
From
her punk beginnings as style terrorist through her early Eighties reign as
godmother of 'Goth' to the almost motherly figure she now presents, Siouxsie's
career with her group The Banshees has seen her pass through a fascinating
array of personas. There has even been the occasional alter ego.
In
1981 she formed The Creatures with Banshees' drummer Budgie. Despite the
abrasive minimalism of their sound (just vocals and percussion), a contrast to
the lurid rock of The Banshees, The Creatures scored a series of hits ranging
from the bacchanalian 'Mad-Eyed Screamer' to their melodramatic cover of Mel
Torme's 'Right Now' in July 1983. Now, after six years of hibernation, Siouxsie
and Budgie have reactivated The Creatures.
Siouxsie
explains this latest extra-curricular excursion: "The Banshees carry a lot
of luggage in terms of what they mean to our audience, and it's difficult to
write in a spontaneous way for an established group format. Your ideas have to
be mediated through other people.
"With
The Creatures, things are less precious, so there's less at stake now."
The
Creatures' 1983 debut album, Feast, was recorded in Hawaii. For the follow-up, Boomerang
(just released), the duo once again fled the 'battery hen' schedules of London studios. They
transported a mobile studio to a ranch in rural Spain, just north of Cadiz.
"When
you're cut off, you react more instinctively. We recorded the album in the
heart of a rural community, with their age-old superstitions and their love of
the bullfight."
The
Creatures' single, 'Standing There', is a product of Siouxsie's mixed feelings
for Spanish culture. Her admiration for the flamboyance and female strength of
flamenco is countered by a disgust for bullfighting. "I see it as
glorified slaughter, I don't go along with the romanticisation of rural life.
If you look at country people's relation to nature, you can see that they're
almost at war with it, trying to make it do what they want it to."
Now
vegetarian, Siouxsie's conversion came "partly through touring, being
provided with backstage food and seeing all the day-to-day waste, the
bucketloads of chicken drumsticks." Giving up meat was just one facet of
"a whole cleansing and rethinking" of body and soul around 1985 that
involved also giving up smoking, cutting down on alcohol and taking up circuit
training. "Growing up and adolescence last way beyond your teens, and
after a while you find it frustrating that you can't harness your energies.
I've always wanted to be in control of myself."
Now
31, the new holistic Siouxsie seems odd when, in both the Banshees and The
Creatures, she has always been interested in people who can't control
themselves; the obsessive, the disturbed, the unbalanced. For a herbivore,
Siouxsie's music has strangely preyed on listeners' fears.
"I
think that's putting the aggression in the right channel, using it to create
rather than destroy. Everyone has demons. Unless they're allowed an outlet they
fester and eat away at your body."
For
over a decade, Siouxsie has been one of the few challenging female icons to
maintain a high profile in the pop mainstream. "I'd hate to be thought of
as a role model, but pop culture has always been geared to presenting one view of
the female – blonde, manipulated, pliable. Maybe my having black hair and being
like Beryl the Peril provides another archetype for people to use."
Siouxsie
seems to belong to the Gyn/Ecology school of feminism. Does she believe
that women have a monopoly on caring and men a monopoly on destruction?
"No,
but the male performer has been done to death. The female artists who are now
acquiring the kind of control and self-expression hitherto the preserve of men
are producing the only new music around. I think that the female is the
future because she's not violent or as territorial, as inclined towards
conflict that leads to either big-scale war or pub-room barracking. Man, in the
traditional sense, is like a dinosaur. A dying breed."
Q & A with STEVE SEVERIN (2003)
Seems like the sharpest people in the original punk scene
were making their excuses and leaving as early as the first months of 1977!
Didn't you yourself say something like it was all over when The Damned first
played?!
“That was kind of true. When The Damned played it was like
the first elements of the pantomime horse coming in. Punk was already getting
uniform and predictable. That whole brief period before people like the Damned
came along, before we even played-- it didn’t even have a name.”
Did you have a strong initial concept when you formed?
“The original Banshee idea was a pure musical democracy.
There was no lead instrument --not the voice, not the guitar, which usually
dominated. Everybody occupied their own space, melodically and rhythmically.
I’ve never seen the bass as a supporting instrument at all, I always think of
it as a driving instrument. That’s what very different about the early Banshees
stuff. You cannot sit there as a singer-songwriter with a guitar and play those
songs in a pub--it’s not buskable, because the instrumentation and the way it’s
played is crucial. A big inspiration for
that was Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, who I saw at the Royal Albert Hall in
the early Seventies. It blew me away. I’d never dreamed that instruments could
be played that way before."
One of the most interesting things about the Banshees is the
way you’ve excelled at being both a singles group and an albums band. Some of
the best work is the singles that weren't even on the albums. But the albums,
equally, have all been cohesive, unitary listening experiences.
“That would be the mixture of influences--liking people like
Cluster and Neu! and Can, but also loving T.Rex and a whole generation of good
singles. The two main people we all loved, Roxy Music and Bowie, did great singles and great albums. We saw the single as the calling card. Our first
single, the A-Side, "Hong
Kong Gardens",
was the most commercial song we’d written to date, but the B-Side,
"Voices", was the strangest piece of music we'd written to
date."
The Banshees never had any truck with that side of punk
which was about ordinary blokes getting onstage. The side that related maybe to
Stiff Records and pub rock.
“Oh no, we hated
that. I never understood where that do-it-yourself ethic came from. It was so
patently obvious that not everybody could do it. You had to have a modicum of
talent. And an original idea. But for one moment the floodgates came open and
everybody had their five minutes, put their single out, and then disappeared
back to what they were destined to do in the first place. It was so diverse at
the beginning, under the umbrella term 'punk' you had Wire, Buzzcocks,
Throbbing Gristle, This Heat… They were so obviously not using the Ramones as
an identikit for what they were doing.
"Wire and Buzzcocks were the two bands that we felt
somewhat kindred spirits with at the time. They seemed to share this naivete
about song structure. Wire especially, every song seemed to have a different
format to it just to make it different. What they shared with us was the fact
that the concept was more important than the ability--you can hear both bands
really striving to get to the level of being strong enough to put across their
ideas. But the writing is strong enough that you can get away with it. One of
the things I still do to this day is, I never practise. Never have. I like
being stretched. If I know how to play too well, I get lazy. "
My friend Chris Scott wrote a piece on incompetencefor this music
fanzine we did called Monitor and he talked about Scream-era Banshees and how
you could hear humans struggling with their musical instruments, and how that
physicality created a thing-iness in the music, like the sounds were objects
being grappled with strenuously. Whereas later on, when the more conventionally
accomplished John McGeoch and Budgie replaced John Mackay and Kenny Morris, the
Banshees became more about "atmosphere". (Like "a sofa" is how Chris put it, and
it wasn't intended as a compliment).
“The physicality was
very important to us then… We grew up
playing live, there wasn’t a kindergarten period where we were learning to play
Clapton riffs in our bedrooms. So we were struggling, trying to find a way of
mastering the instrument to make your ideas come across. With the first album we’d been playing those
songs for two years and so there was one way of doing them, playing live in the
studio. It was only later when we had more time to explore the studio that we
started writing songs in the studio, based around some of the sounds we could
create in the studio. But the first two albums, The Scream and Join Hands, are
live, physical albums."
By the time we get to 1982 and A Kiss In the Dreamhouse,
it's almost like a totally different band. That album is very much a studio-confection,
lushly textured and voluptuous-sounding, a world away from the cold, stark
severity of Scream and Join Hands.
“Just better drugs!”
Oh, had you all plunged into a psychedelics phase?
“My psychedelics phase had been over by about thirteen years
or something! But Siouxsie and Robert Smith were doing quite a bit. They were
discovering it for the first time. Kiss
was a lot about me and McGeoch thinking about the Beatles and The Stones circa
Beggar’s Banquet. We'd done Juju and that had been so focused, and now we were
onto our "second album" as that incarnation of the band, so we could
do anything. The whole record started with the lyric for ‘Cascade’. I wrote this poem and then honed it down to a
lyric, and I felt really odd about it, like, 'Is Sioux going to sing this?"
The lyrics with their imagery of moisture suggest that you
were consciously proposing the melting of the Ice Queen.
“I was aware that we were moving on. Not so much changing
the image but tapping into things that were already there but not exposed. Kiss came out of a mixture of things--I
was reading late 19th Century decadent stuff like Baudelaire and Huysman's Against Nature. But also Ballard's The Unlimited Dream Company, where the
imagery is very lush, sensual, and exotic. That decadence and sensuality
corresponded with everybody else feeling the same way in terms of
instrumentation. Like, 'why not try some flute here?' We were playing with other people's
expectations of what the Banshees were. And also tapping into an English heritage
of whimsical psychedelia-- Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett. 'Green Fingers' is quintessentially
English psychedelia, it's not American or kandy-kolored.
"A Kiss in the
Dreamhouse, it was a strange time really because we felt we had complete
creative freedom. We just felt we could do anything and get away with it. Mike
Hedges, the producer, owned the studio so we could pretty much go in and stay
there as long as we wanted. So we pretty much wrote it all in the studio. We
were also, in the background, getting divorced from our first manager. So it
felt like there were no constraints of any kind, in terms of where we felt the
band should be going. We kind of felt the audience would go with us wherever we
went."
Mike Hedges had a good 1982--as well as Kiss, he produced The Associates's Sulk, another psychedelia-tinged
fiesta of sensual delirium. An important
figure?
"Yes, Mike was one of those engineer/producers who had
tons and tons of ideas, and open to experiment."
"Painted Bird" could almost be a purpose-built
anthem for the emergent Goth Nation as represented by a hefty contingent of the Banshees audience--all about
using style and flamboyance to "confound that dowdy flock".
“I don’t think Siouxsie meant it like that--it’s one of the
few songs that directly taken from a source, Jerzy Kozinki's book of the same
name. But yes, you can read that into the song, and 'Fireworks' similarly can
be read as a manifesto."
What did you think of the whole Goth movement?
"It's very obvious why as a phenomenon it wasn't
something we really wanted to get attached to. And a lot of Goth purists
wouldn’t put us in their pantheon of Goth gods, simply because we’re too
diverse musically. Goth was reacting much more to the way Siouxsie looked. To me, what people nowadays call Goth is someone
like Marilyn Manson. I can see why he’s a very necessary force in the world. I can’t stand his music but I think he’s
articulate, intelligent, and I think Middle America
needs him. England
and Europe don't need him, but there is a
point in every thirteen year old’s life when they need someone like that to
latch onto. For me it was Bowie.
A much more intriguing proposition, because there was so much more ambiguity.
The other thing about Bowie,
on account of him being such a culture vulture, was that you'd find out about
other stuff through him. Burroughs, or the Velvet Underground and The Stooges.
And that was because he was stealing from them! I didn't know anything about
Iggy and the Stooges until Bowie
mentioned them. He was totally educational. But I can imagine if I was 12 today I might be a Marilyn Manson fanatic. I could possibly
be quite evangelical about it. I mean, what are the alternatives? Travis?!?”
