#8 Siouxsie & the Banshees - The Scream

 

'I always gravitated towards the city. I hated suburbia. Some people stick to their local town like Bromley. You could hang out there and feel pretty grown-up but I hated it. I thought it was small and narrow minded.

There was a trendy bar called Pip's or something , and I got Berlin to wear this dog collar, and I walked in with Berlin following me, and people's jaws just hit the tables. Later on if I'd done that I'd probably have been assaulted. But I walked in and ordered a bowl of water for him. It was hilarious, I got the bowl of water for my dog as well! People were scared!' ' Siouxsie

I have a colleague at work, round about the same age as me, who has pretty strong opinions about everything. For a Sunderland fan he's very black and white. He latched onto music in a serious way a lot earlier than I did. He saw some of the early punk and post punk bands first time round as he never tires of telling us ! The Damned, The Clash I think, Joy Division.

But he also knows what he doesn't like. He doesn't like pretentious. So the whole of the New York CBGB's scene are out, except The Ramones. The Doors is just crap sixth form poetry. Much of the Andy Warhol Factory is suspect though he may have time for some Velvet Underground. Bryan Ferry is a massive bellend. And Siouxsie & the Banshees are art school poseurs.

The dividing line of early English punk is probably between The Damned and Siouxsie & the Banshees It might be difficult to really like both because they represent such opposing worldviews .

'Seems like the sharpest people out of 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/ (Simon Reynolds)

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.' (Steve Severin) .

I know which side of the fence I'd have to put myself on. I have to say straight off that there's something about The Banshees and the Bromley Contingent they emerged from that makes me cringe. In many ways they represent all the petty churlishness, egotism, arrogance and savagery of adolescence and the playground. I can remember people (who have probably grown up perfectly ok), behaving like that at school.

But if the alternative is The Damned, I'd put myself in The Banshees camp every time. The Damned mean nothing to me really except for this which I understand. The Banshees, despite their snotty elitism represent a certain kind of undeniable courage for me. Confronting the society you find yourself in, transformation, deconstruction and reconstruction of identity. Immersion in art. Big themes! Pretentious ones in some eyes but to me important values. Sorry Steve. You can keep The Damned. The Banshees are better!

Even though they're not that often on my turntable now I find myself in my late forties, when they do find their way I'm still pretty impressed.

Siouxsie was the role model and icon for countless suburban teenage girls in the late seventies and early eighties. There was nobody else. Debbie Harry was not viable. They rouged and mascarad up and scared the living hell out of the boys in the playground at their comprehensives. This was their ultimate ambition!

 

Influences, influences! Has any band ever been influenced by so much stuff as Siouxsie & the Banshees?  Bowie, Roxy, T.Rex, Art, Deco, Art Nouveau, Gay Disco,  Andy Warhol's Factory, The Velvet Underground, Cabaret,  Fascism, suburbia, the train ride into London, the Swastika, the Nazis, childhood, The Beatles, The Stones, Altamont, Classical Music, psychedelia, drugs, sex, Modernism, dolls, early death of parents, Autism, Vorticism, fairground rides, pulp novels, The Stooges, prostitution, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, Aleistair Crowley, A Clockwork Orange, violence, the playground, Bauhaus, Can, Sparks, Horror Films, Clockwork Orange,  Janov's Primal Scream Therapy, expressionism, The Doors, J.G.Ballard, childhood abuse, John Cale, Don't Look Now, Rocky Horror Show, séances, The Night Porter, neighbours, The Damned (the film), Charles Manson,  CBGB's scene, Nico, Captain Scarlet, Motown, the occult, Modernist Paris, Louise Brooks, the Gay Scene, Captain Beefheart, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, Betty Boop, Lou Reed, Klimt, turn of century Austro-Hungary, Pre-Raphaelites, Jacobite dramatists, Johnny Rotten, the Bloomsbury Set. They absorbed it all and spat it out. In a way that was often difficult to recognise. But their ambition in itself was really pretty admirable.

 

It's slightly difficult to review a Siouxsie & the Banshees album without giving the impression that you've swallowed a dictionary and then proceeded to spit out all the most vivid adjectives therein out onto the printed page at random. Still. I'll give it a go...

 

The Scream to me sounds like The Banshees learning to play. It's really quite amateurish from the off. It's not as if there aren't any ideas there. The album is chock-a-block with them. But it's clear that the band needed John McGeogh and Budgie to come on board at some point as proper musicians and supplement the idea merchants Sioux and Severin to help them realise things. Guitar and drums don't really always seem fully realised on here, though they have their moments of course. They often seem like supporting instruments to the main players and the main course. The egos of Sioux and Severin. Well anyway. Hey, ho! Let's go.

 

 

First song Pure (great title for your first song on your first album) is a short instrumental with Siouxsie's background drone acting as a fourth instrument. It starts with bass rising and falling, (bit of the experimentalism of Little Johnny Jewel there) then an oriental sounding guitar joining in, pounding drums and Siouxsie intoning.

 

It doesn't particularly go anywhere but is quite powerful still and would probably have made a fair impact on first playing back in '78 in suburban bedrooms. It's tribal. Much of what the Banshees do is tribal. I think it's a good way of understanding them. They're calling out. Establishing  the cult. You get the sense that it's everything to them that this is something new.

 

 

 

In listening to this I have to remember that I'm pretty much as far from the target listener for this as it's possible to be. I'm at least three times the fifteen year old that I should be to fully appreciate this. The Banshees are out to indoctrinate and draw you into their cult and I'm not remotely interested in that and frankly I imagine even if I were fifteen again they wouldn't have given me a second look anyway arch-elitists that they were. I have never worn make up and am not about to start now. I was more suited to R.E.M and the literate bloke bands. The Goth girls scared me. Still, onward.

 

Jigsaw Feeling is an archetypal Banshees title and now I've had a couple of beers and it's getting dark I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it and will put it on again when it's finished. Scything guitar, pounding Glitter drums. To be honest Severin's bass sounds great throughout. Even coming around to Mackay and Morris who infamously did a bunk mid-tour on the other two Banshees probably because it was unbearable to be with Sioux and Severin a moment longer.

 

 

 

The band quickly established a winning formula and rode it onwards and refined it and polished it as their musicianship improved over their next four albums. From that point on it was downhill for me. I lost interest with that silly Picasso cover for Hyena and when Siouxsie and the rest of the band went for full fancy dress like a po-faced Adam & the Ants.  As a colleague commented when I asked him his feelings on the band today. 'I never think much of any group who had to nick a song from The Beatles for their biggest hit'. Frankly this sounds pretty horrid to me now!

 

But Jigsaw Feeling is an early peak. It's fun. It's like a fairground ride, dipping and swerving. The Banshees do this stuff well. They admitted they swang between two basic moods, the gloomy arty album tracks and the glammy catchy three minute rollercoaster rides.

 

I have to say at this early stage I'm veering towards the latter in terms of personal preference. Not particularly looking forward to the slasher serial killer butcher song about  dismembering body parts coming up a couple of tracks along the line. Think I'll listen to Jigsaw Feeling again. 

 

 

Overground keeps the momentum going. It's a slow down in pace but has some of that Venus in Furs coiled intensity. Severin took his name from this Velvets song of course. Silly, self important fellow! I'm actually becoming a bigger fan of Mackay with every passing track because this song is his for me. Very simple technically, but his chords almost jangle. So far so good then!

 

 

So to the serial killer sing along song Carcass then. It's nasty and pretty grotty really but does the rollercoaster glam clapathon thing that the Banshees are so adept at to reasonable effect. But frankly if I'm after a serial killer song to cheer me up I generally go straight to Spinal Tap's Saucy Jack.

 

So next up another Beatles song. Oh dear! The fairground, faux-heavy metal one about violent unravelling, dislocation and distortion of senses. Fancy The Banshees choosing that ahead of I Want To Hold Your Hand! The one Charles Manson really liked instead, which let's face it is no recommendation and is probably the historical reference The Banshees like best about the song too and is what mainly drew them to choose to cover it.

 

Helter Skelter, as I've suggested already in talking about how The Banshees love a good rollercoaster is the Beatles song that best reflects their way of looking at things and song construction. Frankly, though I love The Beatles I don't like the original of this. I think it's Paul Mccartney just faking it. And the cover version here is just ugly. It's the real lowpoint on the album for me.

 

                                                 'Helter Skelter la, la, la, la, la, la.'

 

Oh Siouxsie, please at least try to sing. Time for bed and you must do better on the second side. Oh, and take off that swastika.

 

                                               'Ok, now stare moodily in different directions.'

 

Mirage at the start of Side Two is a bit of a crowd pleaser. One of The Banshees early singles.

 

'My limbs are like palm trees
swaying in no breeze
my body's an oasis
to drink from as you please'

 

The impression you get from lyrics like these is of suburban dread. Siouxsie has been very public about how she sees suburbia as violent, ugly territories. The lyrics of Mirage talk of unreality and illusion, and it makes me think of the mundane almost deadened nine to five conditioned existence and the deeply repressed sexual perversion that this can induce. Nice tune mind! I particularly like the flat, deadpan backing vocals (not sure if it's Severin or Mackay), which seem a prototype for a lot of songs from the first Elastica album. Those girls stole from everyone!

 

Perhaps I'm doing the album a misjustice by judging it morally but to actually stare this stuff in the face with all it's implications is pretty ghastly if you don't have a strong stomach and I don't really. Although punk was clearly wonderful in many respects a lot of its major participants weren't. Sioux and Severin never made any pretence to be anything other than vile. In fact they seemed to wear it as a badge of pride.

 

They saw society as a fake and a cover up and revelled in documenting all the vicious, violent perversions stewing under this ordered austere surface, single by single, album by album. In order to do so they had to be pitiless and frankly they both are. There's no light and shade because to be so would be a compromise and neither of them believed in that.

 

 

 

However, I'm not remotely interested in Manson or Crowley, the Nazis don't turn me on and I'm not the kind of person who reads pulp books on serial killers because I think evil should be denied rather than pored over because it can corrupt and debase and does. Sorry to be such a prude but there you go! 

 

So while there are moments that The Banshees can be a thrilling pop band and I find it really interesting to take a look at whey they emerged from I prefer to hold them at a distance. I think to a large degree this kind of violent, obsessive subculture has diminished since 1978 and I'm glad it has ! I think the world's a lot better although at the same time perhaps the general quality of this kind of music is not as good possibly as a direct result. Plenty would disagree.

 

 

In many ways next track Metal Postcard (also known at Mittageisen) is the most interesting song on here. It feels almost like penance on the band's part for the notorious Love in a Void line, ('too many Jews for my liking' Severin wrote it, silly nasty chap) which caused righteous and rightful wrath on many critics parts including the famous Julie Burchill NME Review. Siouxsie response to the slagging -'fat cow'. In some respects they seem made for each other. On top of all the prancing around in swastikas in the early days. The spin the band have done on it all since is pretty shoddy really and fails to convince.

 

Frankly they went for the symbols of fascism because much of their outlook on life was pretty fascist to my mind view. Lydon, a much deeper thinker, had little truck with them:

 

'Siouxsie Sioux was a nightmare when we went down to Paris. Silly girl, she wore practically nothing except swastikas and a see-through titless bra — in a former Nazi-occupied country  

 

 

The song is inspired and dedicated to John Heartfield a political and anti-Fascist artist associated with the Dadaist group whose work the Nazi's would have viewed as depraved, which he would have taken as a compliment. The collage above was inspired by Hermann Goring's comment "Iron always made a nation strong, butter and lard only made the people fat." The piece is entitled 'Hooray the butter is finished' and depicts a family sitting down to a meal of metal. It's a very efficient and effective piece of work in deconstructing the Nazi mindset.

 

At round about the same time as The Banshees released this Baader Meinhof group in Germany were similarly focussed on the Nazi legacy and were committing a range of violent and murderous acts. I'm not a big fan of theirs but somehow I understand where they came from to a greater extent than I do Siouxsie and the Banshees feeling entitled to corral Fascist symbols into their work in order to sell more records.

 

Nazi and Fascist symbolism are powerful weapons and they work and fitted well in the pop arena, (particularly in the 70's) which was all hero worship and the clashing of youth cults within a society which was violent and deeply turbulent itself. Metal Postcard is a great track in terms of what it does, creating an atmosphere and conveying an atmospheric and jarring melody and lyric.

 

But if I watch this video, which frankly I find rather gruesome, it makes me ask myself which side exactly the Banshees were on. Still, another great Glam stomp if none of that stuff bothers you. It wasn't a hit when it was released as a single. Frankly I'm not surprised. It doesn't do the rollercoaster thing of The Banshees big pop singles (love the video this is linked to, it highlights everything The Banshees did so well in their early days, much preferable to the one below which just makes me uneasy and feel that what Siouxsie really needs now is a damned good slap).

 

 

On to Nicotine Stain. Ah, addiction to something that is doing you irreparable harm. Most of us must recognise this at some level. The Banshees use their limited musical resources highly effectively here. We're back on the rollercoaster here. Some guitarwork that's highly reminiscent of what McGeogh was doing at a similar time for Magazine on Shot by Both Sides and The Light Pours Out of Me.

 

'Wallow in that ash bath
Soaking up the fumes
And see the nicotine stain
Start to spread.'

Lovely.

Suburban Relapse is something Siouxsie really understands and something she might have been fated for herself but for punk. It's about what goes on behind the curtains in the hinterland.

'I was washing up the dishes
Minding my own business
When my string snapped
I had a relapse...a suburban relapse.'

 

It gets the sense of suburban claustrophobia across very well. Nice saxophone on here which reflects the strong Roxy Music influence evident in much of their music. However, it's repetitive and limited in tone there's little musical variety on show here. It makes me feel I'm being nagged by a wife I stopped loving years ago and who frankly at some level deserves the breakdown she's going through because of all her mean pettiness over the years. Sorry, but there you are.

 

 

Which leaves us with Switch, the album's longest and final track. Switch is a great name for a Banshees song. It describes a lot of what is going on in their music and their mindset. They're wanting to change minds, not just opinions. It works for me for the course of individual songs but then the track finishes I look around me and nothing has really changed. Still this is atmospheric. There's an effective gear change half way through and then it shifts again to full tilt. It doesn't seem overlong. I can hear the influence of Roxy here again. The lyrics are rather tiresome. Too much Crowley and occult.

 

'People walk something blows up
And even talk won’t come down
People listen scattered muscles twitch
Then they halt too late to switch.
(they’re dying to switch)'

 

Sorry Siouxsie, but they're not. The switch you're talking about is a teenage one of kohl eyes, braided hair, nail varnish and mascara. It's a few years of teenage rebellion before people decide that they want to be like other people. Because that's not such a terrible thing to aspire to and become. It's possible to grow older retain and refine your individuality and remain yourself without dancing off full pelt to the underworld looking like a member of the supporting chorus of Cats!

The band's finest moment for me...

Pretty soon the group became the cult they wanted to be. After the initial run of thrilling singles and solid albums (for the record I think JuJu is their best along with this) they became something of a parody of themselves. Not something, by the end I think they were a complete parody of themselves. They became a teenage cliché. .Expressing their individuality by dressing the same as their legion of followers.

They spawned Goth, surely more than any other band. If they said they weren't Goth they should have stopped dressing like that. They inspired thousands but for me they lost along the way what had made them special. Their connection to suburbia and their ability to express the sheer excitement of the city. Their connection with the real.

They made their statement and won't be forgotten. Siouxsie is undeniably a one off icon. However, for me after being with them for the week it's taken to write the review there's something stunted and unsatisfactory about them at least Sioux and Severin's posturing, (much of the music still stands up). As if they're more like what they're tying to critique than they're willing to admit. Somehow it's all a bit of a pose! Burchill's comment about Sioux's horrid Chiselhurst-climber's accent is not a million miles from the mark.

Maybe my colleague Steve was right after all. Though I'm not willing to start listening to The Damned. There you go, done and dusted and I didn't mention the word Teutonic once. Oops!

 

Post Script: Here's the other side of the coin. A response to this from a big time and early Banshees fan Mr Drayton.

 

'Yikes, nail that bitch! Personally I think you're coming at it from the wrong angle. This album wasn't made with the future in mind, it was made from circumstance and ambition, very much of it's moment.

The last of the gang to sign, it took an age for the Banshees to make a record, and they made it falling and tumbling, full of error and chaos. They were learning how to play, they were learning how to write. Yes they improved once Budgie and Robert Smith/John McGeogh got stuck in, but nothing could beat that original blueprint.

I saw them twice pre-split, Kenny Morris was mesmerising as a drummer, a little beautiful, a little dangerous. Siouxsie was just splendid. She had no truck with the oiks who came to grab and gob, walking off when the spittle landed. More importantly though she was doing it her way, unbound in the same way Patti Smith, Poly Styrene, Gaye Advert and The Slits did. It was Siouxsie who coldly stood the pissed Bill Grundy down bringing the Filth and The Fury.

She did want her cake and eat it though - on balance using anti fascist imagery for the sleeve of Metal Postcard (why did they put that out as a single?) doesn't really negate 'too many Jews for my liking', no matter what the excuse. The use of the swastika was meant to provoke, not promote, but maybe, in hindsight (Sid careering round the Jewish quarter emblazoned with one) very much a stupid insult.

For me, it's almost impossible to unstick history from this album. It was hugely important to me, to friendships, to fuck you parents. It was, and still, in places, a beast. It's a blueprint for many jenny-come-latelys, both sonically and image-wise. Live, these songs were just one solid adrenalin rush, drums and barbed wires, pinned down by Severin's simple bass. The recording captures some of their spirit, not all though.

A couple of very important points. Gets, ladder, climbs high horse. The Banshees did not invent goth. They inhabited its hinterland, but in no way are the responsible for The Sisters of Mercy or The March Violets.

Secondly, your mate can take a hike with his Beatles/hit singles comment. They weren't the first band to rely on some solid songwriting to make a splash in the mainstream, they won't be the last. It's a fucking great version as well, so stick that in your hat and smoke it.

So, in summation, you're completely wrong and I'm right because I was there and I lived the Banshees. I had (and still have) 5 t-shirts, 23 badges, autographs, books, records, cd's and vhs tape of Once Upon A Time. And one of Budgies drumsticks. Saw them 13 times, man and boy.
Oh, they were never vile. They were never nasty. Po-faced maybe, but they swung and they swooped. They were beautiful.'

Cheers Mr.D. 'Jenny come latelys'. Like it! But I think you'll find I'm right!