THE BIG INTERVIEW
Siouxsie pseud?
In the Seventies she led the Bromley contingent out of suburbia and into
every parent's nightmare. Nowadays she's more into gardening, Emily
Dickinson and her cats. Nigel Williamson enters the weird world of
Siouxsie Sioux.
There is an obvious hubris about interviewers claiming
an affinity with their subjects, but Siouxsie Sioux and I genuinely have
a lot in common. You see, we both grew up in Bromley, Kent, a
stultifyingly conservative suburb of lace curtains and manicured lawns,
which arguably left us both scarred for life. We are of similar age -
Siouxsie is 41 - and 20 years ago we inevitably knew the same people and
frequented the same pubs. We didn't go to the same school but I am still
in touch with at least three old friends who have stories to tell of the
young Susan Dallion in the playground of her Chislehurst primary school.
Yet there was one defining moment when our paths diverged. Back in late
1975 or early 1976, we found ourselves at the same gig at the local art
college. It was one of the very first performances by the Sex Pistols.
Siouxsie and her mates decided it was the most exciting thing they had
ever heard and went away to become the famous Bromley contingent, the
first organised followers of what would soon be known as the "punk
explosion". My mates and I, on the other hand, thought it was the
most appalling racket and shuffled off in our Afghan coats to roll
another spliff and return to our Grateful Dead albums. All these years
on, I still wonder which of us was right. Sometime later in September
1977, I found myself sharing the same ferry back from Holland with
Siouxsie and her band, the Banshees, returning from a gig in Amsterdam.
I spent the entire voyage hiding from them. She rocks with laughter at
the memory. "Ha! You thought all those evil punks were going to
kick the s**t out of you, didn't you?"
We are having lunch in an Indian café in London's
Covent Garden to talk about Siouxsie's more recent re-emergence with The
Creatures, the band she ran for years with her husband Budgie as a side
project but which, since the Banshees disbanded in 1996, has become the
main attraction.
The Creatures play adventurous art rock built around
Siouxsie's extraordinary voice and drummer Budgie's battery of
percussion. After a toe-in-the-water EP during the summer and a couple
of low-key live dates, they have just released the single, Second Floor,
trailing a new album, Anima Animus, due out in March.
Siouxsie seems wonderfully tranquil, one of those
fortunate women who at 41 look better than they ever have - her skin
soft and glowing. She is tall and slender, still dresses in black and
she turns heads as we walk up Endell Street. Budgie appears almost as
arresting with his peroxide-dyed hair. In the café, a sitar player
drones pleasantly in the background (he turns out to be the owner) and
someone takes a flash picture. Neither of them blinks and I am not sure
if they even noticed.
I have been warned by their publicist not to dwell on
the past. I don't need to, for within five minutes Siouxsie is
complaining about how she misses the "spontaneity" and the
"altruism" of the early days. "You're talking about the
past," Budgie admonishes, but she ignores him.
"You have to make sense of the past to make sense
of the future," she says. "Unless you learn from what made you
dissatisfied in the first place, you end up in the same old routine.
It's not easy cleaning out the cobwebs to start all over again. You
can't sweep 20 years away completely."
Indeed you cannot, especially if those years have made
you something close to a legend. Siouxsie first achieved notoriety when
she appeared with the Sex Pistols on an early evening television chat
show in December 1976. The band played up to their drunken, foul-mouthed
image and guaranteed tabloid headlines the next morning with a string of
four-letter words. But it was Siouxsie who caught the eye in her
Clockwork Orange make-up, black leather and fishnets, her hair teased
into an electrical storm. She flirted with presenter Bill Grundy who,
too self-satisfied to detect her mocking scorn, proceeded to ask her for
a date on air. At that stage we had no idea what else she could do, but
it was obvious she had something.
My early recollections of Banshees gigs are that the
band couldn't play and Siouxsie could not sing. She made some silly
mistakes: sporting a swastika on stage ("childish" she now
admits). The band was turned down by six record companies and, with punk
fast running out of steam, they looked to have missed the boat. Yet by
the time they were eventually signed by Polydor and their debut album,
The Scream appeared in 1978, they had somehow moved beyond the punk
thrash ethic to create an arresting collection of dark, angular songs
full of strange rhythms and musical abstractions. Punk gave way to Goth
and Siouxsie became its female icon on songs such as Halloween and
Voodoo Dolly. Thousands copied her look and they still turn up at her
concerts dressed like extras from the Addams Family. She swiftly grew
out of it, and today denounces Goth as "pantomime". But she
continued making intelligent, challenging music, both with the Banshees
and The Creatures, the avant-garde off-shoot she and Budgie first
launched in 1983.
Two years ago the Banshees finally called it a day.
Siouxsie had already decided it was time to do something else and the
disgust at the cynical reunion of her old friends the Sex Pistols
hastened the decision. Disillusioned with the record industry, Siouxsie
and Budgie retreated to their house in a village outside Toulouse,
France.
"The music industry was so grinding," she
says. "There was no room for spontaneity. We took things for
granted." In fact, it had come to feel exactly like the confining
routine Siouxsie had left Bromley to escape. "I've never had a
proper job but I imagine that is what it feels like. It was
horrible," she says.
On the underground dance scene, however, she and
Budgie began to see a way forward again. They struck a deal with the
dance label Hydrogen Dukebox to run their own bijou independent company.
"The modern dance scene has more energy, it's closer to the spirit
of why we first started," says Siouxsie. "We intend to operate
outside that tight, organised way of doing things. It's about bringing
back the openness and spontaneity and getting rid of all the baggage.
I'm the same person but I wasn't happy being part of something that was
so established."
She says the word as if it is tainted. Like some
Maoist adherent of the theory of permanent revolution, as soon as
anything begins to feel safe and comfortable, she wants to change it.
Much of this attitude seems to stem from her hatred of her suburban
upbringing. She hasn't been back in years but all her language is still
couched in the vocabulary of entrapment and escape.
She is fascinated to hear that I have only moved ten
miles up the road to the leafy lanes of Westerham and have taken the
train from Bromley that very morning to meet them.
"The suburbs are the most narrow place you can
come from," she says. "It isn't the city where things are
happening and it isn't a rural situation where you are in touch with
nature. It is neither and the mentality is a narrow-minded, middle-class
respectability in which everybody tries to conform and blend in with
everybody else."
It is also an attitude loaded with hypocrisy.
"And what goes on behind that respectable veneer? Maybe there is an
alcoholic or a complete neurotic mess. Yet the will to preserve the
outwardly normal exterior is obsessive." And she knows: her own
father was an alcoholic and she was brought up never to talk about it.
Yet she is sharp enough to realise that it was the
suburbs that made her what she is. "It is an amazing breeding
ground to kick back against and, yes, if it wasn't for that environment
I might not have burst out in the way I did and been so aggressive in my
rejection of its values. It was stifling and I hated it. It was so very
English and I never felt particularly English."
Which partly explains why Siouxsie and Budgie, who
married in 1993, now live across the Channel. They paint a picture of
rustic domesticity and marital bliss; Budgie cycling around the village
and Siouxsie pottering in the garden and feeding her cats.
"We were desperate for some sense of ordinary
community where you can interact with the people around you," says
Budgie. "In London the signals are so confused that it just becomes
a jumble in your head," But isn't there a conflict here between
their art and their lifestyle? They have just been telling me how they
hate anything safe and comfortable and here is Budgie talking cosily
about how he can leave his bike anywhere without needing to lock it up
and Siouxsie waxing lyrical about deadheading the roses.
"Of course not," she says. "I'm aware
of how people want to preserve a cartoon image of me but I refuse to be
inhibited by it." And when you think about it, she is right. The
Creatures' music is edgy and dark but what right do we have to expect
that to be mirrored in the way they live their personal lives?
"Exactly," says Budgie. "Though you should see her
slashing away at the roses in her spiky heels and patent leather
gloves."
"Was it frightening when you used to go out
dressed like that?" he asks Siouxsie. She admits that it was.
"But knowing you would attract attention and ridicule was the
thrill."
"I grew up in St Helens and we ran the gauntlet
when punk started," he muses. "We were threatening to people.
Everybody my age wanted to get a job and get married and have a family.
I didn't and I felt very isolated. I joined a band to be in a
gang."
So much for not dwelling on the past. I am sitting
here with two old punks growing misty-eyed about the alienation of their
youth. I ask Siouxsie if it feels strange still to be doing what she
does at her age. "I am shocked by the passage of time. You think of
stuff that happened 15 or 20 years ago and it seems like last week. But
it is only when journalists write about a female artist that they talk
about age. You'd never ask that question of a male artist."
I tell her that I am interviewing Mick Jagger shortly
and plan to ask him exactly the same. "But that is different,"
she insists. "They decided a long time ago to continue just being
the same old Rolling Stones. That's the job they do." Changing
tack, I ask if she has ever regretted not having children.
"I never wanted kids. There seems to be an
epidemic of people having children and I don't need to add to it,"
she says. It sounds like a rehearsed answer but then she softens.
"Sometimes I think I would have liked to have had a daughter. But
we have cats. One of the reasons we moved to France was to have more
room for them."
At the end of the day, Siouxsie and Budgie remain a
paradox. The press release they put out to announce The Creatures'
return name-drops Nijinsky, Frida Kahlo and Emily Dickinson. They
recently staged an evening at the Lux cinema, a London art movie house,
showing clips from their favourite and mostly very esoteric films. Then
at their comeback gigs they gave away a free seven-inch single called
Sad C**t. It seemed as puerile as the swastika incident all those years
ago.
"I don't believe in being provocative for the
sake of it," Siouxsie says defensively. "I'm trying to reclaim
why I got involved in this in the first place. I hate this wagging of
fingers saying you can't do that. And I reject the idea that you can't
talk about art because you are a pop singer. We have always been much
more eclectic. There aren't any rules apart from trying to remain
unpredictable. Most people want stability and think the less surprise
the better. It shocks me how many people want that from their
music."
She seems to be talking about those people in the
suburbs again. When we part I tell her I am taking the train back to
Bromley. She is warm and friendly and hopes that we will meet again
soon. But she doesn't ask me to convey her fond regards to the place of
her birth.
Nigel Williamson 10/10/98
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