250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 48 Siouxsie & The Banshees - Kaleidoscope

 

'                                             'We're looking through your windows.'

I didn't know. We none of us knew what an extraordinary time and place we were born into and experiencing. It only hits me passing the anniversaries and thinking back. Listening to the extraordinary  records that came out during those years  and letting them carry back like virtual persian carpets travelling in space and time back to those days and times . The past is a foreign country as they say. They do differently there. . . 

My family moved down to South West London in Spring of 1975 . We'd come back it Englsnd, to Nottingham three short years earlier, from Rhodesia where I was born. I call it Zimbabwe now because I found I want to leave the conversation whenever I meet someone who refers to use the colonial name.

Nottingham had been idyllic. For me at least. A tree lined primary school pathway lined with trees which I recall in constant blossom. Classes, schoolmates and experiences which I still remember with vivid clarity and rose tinted rhapsodic hue. Roald Dahl, and Glam. Kiddies Parties and first romance. The glow of happy childhood.

This continued in Richmond. The stop at the end of the district line which Virginia Woolf had considered the back of beyond but was actually a forty five minute underground ride from the very centre of London. There were seven of us. 

The evening we arrived in London we walked to a restaurant  in Richmond High Street and splashed out on a Chinese meal to celebrate the opening of a new chapter on our lives. Effectively now we were as good as Cockneys. Extras in a west End rendition of I'm Getting Married In The Morning, Consider Yourself, or Roll Out The Barrel.   

I had a couple of wonderful years of further idyll in Richmond. A walk up Church Road in Richmond. Past the squats and over the ride. Up Mount Ararat and left into Vineyard and the Infant Primary School. The scrum of a playground. Teeming classrooms. 

But in the Autumn if 1977 as Punk was hitting ten miles in to London my idyll  was rudely awakened by Secondary School reality. A bus ride to Petersham and Grey Court. Across the road from an estate which was harsher than nice middle class Richmond Hill. Fifth years with beards and apparent families. A whole new cauldron and a five year experience that was not frankly all to my liking. So I did the sensible thing. And kept my head down.

But now I look back and I'm glad I went to Grey Court. Rather than the train ride into London and Latymer Private School in Hammersmith which some of my classmates and their parents opted for. Partly because in the nostalgic glow fifty years on of the soundtrack we experienced between 1977 and 1982. Pop Music had been great in Britain since 1957. But I'm happy with the house  I was posted in.

The Happy House. Siouxsie & The Banshees..With The Cure the bands that I feel describes the experience of growing up in Suburban London better than any other. Before or indeed since. The childhood games. The rituals . The fear. Of mental homes and all kinds  The guitars..

Most of all The Make Up. The girls in the play ground at Grey Court went for the Sioux approach right across the board from memory. Perhaps they were scared themselves but it didn't come across. It was in itself inspiring and fantastic and  still is fifty years on.

In 1979 John McKay and Kenny Morris walked out on the band in the most dramatic circumstances imaginable and put a huge question mark over their long term plausibility. Bur Sioux, Severin and the management team held the line. Drafted in Robert Smith as an immediate replacement and then brought in two major league replacements in Budgie and John McGeoch.

Kaleidoscope is a holding, transitional  record. Some things work. Some don't. The best things I'd say are the singles Happy House and Christine which glow with nocturnal luminosity fifty five year later. Two of the greatest statements about madness ever to grace the Top Thirty. The rest takes me back to my teenage state. Not I imagine thinking about what was coming next. The state of grace that is 14.