To celebrate Siouxsie Sioux's birthday today, here's a classic piece from the Uncut archives on the Making Of... the Banshees' debut, "Hong Kong Garden". This originally appeared in Uncut Take 132. You could be forgiven for thinking that the local Chinese restaurant is a pretty innocuous subject fo...
KENNY MORRIS
Drummer, co-writer
There were four people in a band who could not be more compatible, who were absolutely perfect – the four of us. I thought at the time that our best song was “Love In A Void” and that it should be the first single, but our manager decided on “Hong Kong Garden” because the very first few seconds that you hear on the radio or driving in a car, you’re hooked straight away. Everybody loved it. That was a good decision by Nils Stevenson, because much of our music was very dark and this was a way of bringing people in to listen to our album.
I remember we played the Roundhouse [July 23,1978]. We’d only recently signed to Polydor, but “Hong Kong Garden” had been broadcast on the John Peel show. We went to the Roundhouse and there were absolutely hundreds and hundreds of people there. I said to John McKay, “Who are all these people?” They were there to see Siouxsie And The Banshees. All of a sudden, there it was, No 7 in the charts. We were catapulted into the big time. Big concerts. You never had to have a penny in your pocket. Wherever you went, people would throw anything at you, whatever you wanted.
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