There’s a great bit in the Siouxsie And The Banshees live film Nocturne which captures some of the band’s unique quality. They’re playing at London’s Albert Hall, and the film has quite a lot of fun with the idea that while the venue is very posh, the people attending the show are rather scruffy.
Sure enough, the crowd are unruly. The Banshees, though, are all dignity, thriving on the novelty and drawing strength from the unexpected context. As you’ll read in this latest Ultimate Music Guide, that’s very much been the case through the band’s history. Having been in at the arguable start of punk in 1976, the band avoided the stampede to emerge finally emerge in 1978 with their early musical limitations hardened into a jagged ethos.
No-one seems to have called it post-punk then, but their scorched earth policy and surprise hit single “Hong Kong Garden” proved to be the foundation of an enduring career. Guided principally by the Siouxsie/Severin aesthetic, the band embraced and outlived its impressive guitarists – John McKay, John McGeogh, Jon Klein, even fleetingly Johnny Marr – to restart itself with a new proposition whenever they chose. No wonder the Banshees embraced side-projects like The Glove and The Creatures. They craved the freshness and the challenge.
In one of the classic encounters you’ll find in this magazine, Siouxsie herself hints at why this might be, and where the fan of interesting music might go if they wanted to hear more. In a 1989 Creatures interview, Siouxsie talks about her current musical enthusiasms. She likes Bjork, Sinead O’Connor, Michelle Shocked and Kate Bush.
“I really like women,” she tells Steve Sutherland. “I think women are the future. I’m more interested, musically in what women ore doing than men. I think the new female singers are much more exciting. The girl hasn’t started yet, but the man’s dead because, what he’s doing… it’s all been said before.”
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