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I think Hyaena was closely surrounded in the best of year list by Morrissey, Sylvian, McCulloch and Fraser, and I got the feeling that a lot of that other music, music of otherness, music battling against the anxieties of existence, featuring guitars played in a certain jingle, jangled way, voices singing about certain forbidden things in certain dramatic, sublime ways, words packed with hidden significances, intricate, convulsive arrangements that split their time between earth and space, between a psychedelic vision of pop and a punk impetus, drums that knew their own lucid but hectic mind, and melodies that seemed more than mortal, owed a lot to what Siouxsie and the Banshees had been up to since they were born, bloodily and noisily, screaming their punk lungs out, in 1976.

There were no other groups from that revolutionary English 1976 still around in 1984, or if there were they certainly were not making albums that could exist alongside the new music inspired by punk.  Never as loved, as glorified, as they should have been, for their influence and their continuing contemporary presence in the manic, blinding 1980s, it is true to say that the eloquent, infectious power and glory of Hyaena, which was to an extent taken for granted at the time, exists because of how the group felt neglected and unappreciated.  Were they so taken for granted, and in a way so abandoned, because they dressed up for work in a particular way that might involve fortune telling, or because their singer was a girl with deliciously strong opinions who had an inexplicable hair-do, or because they sang so blackly and colourfully about the supernatural, the malignant and the surreal?  Maybe they were punished for organising some of the basic principles, rules and symbols of what was now known as Goth, although Joy Division, also responsible for some of the sickly spreading gloom and doom, got off a little more lightly.

For some reason, they were not totally trusted, and perhaps it was for the best, because the ignorance inspired them to respond as ecstatically and searchingly as they did on this album.  Which is not just a precious Siouxsie and the Banshees masterpiece - we can count how many there actually were another day - but an extreme pop masterpice, and it's amazing to wonder how we can plot the route the blues, or maybe just thinking itself, took to get to such a place.  Presumably the route passed through the eyes of Antonin Artuad and the blood of Captain Beefheart.  You can also imagine a route Arthur Rimbaud and Marlene Dietrich took that tunnelled through to the intense verse of Patti Smith and the morbid nightmares of William Burroughs.

Those favourite 1984 albums, with Hyaena snapping, snarling and twisting right at the lead, suggest a soundtrack to the year 1984, and a disturbed real world undergoing various transformations, that wasn't Orwell, or Thatcher, or MTV, or "new romantic", but was somehow one made up of beauty, yearning, strangeness and an implicit promise of fantastic adventure.  It's a 1980s that is not often considered in the usual histories of the decade, but in the middle - or at the edge - of all the excess, and the gloss, and the super materialism, agonised, flamboyant rock music was being made by those isolated, introverted adventurers writing songs as a kind of concentrated resistance to the harassing pressure applied to the imagination by the insistent forces of mediocrity.  Siouxsie was the face of this resistance, in stark contrast to Thatcher, the corrosive face of harassment.

The songs on Hyaena, gliding, giddy, frantic, blissful, crumbling, determined, responding to all manner of harrowing cruelty and abuse and frustrations, gripping onto transcendent purpose in the face of the rise of violent sensationalism, is music that should be used more often when images and news events of the polarised 1980s are shown.  Usually we hear Wham, Frankie, Duran Duran, but rarely the music that actually evokes the torn, turbulent atmosphere of the times.  Images of head turning 1980s conflict inspired by the destructive and mean spirited Margaret Thatcher combined with the fierce, degenerate and appalled music on Hyaena would be a better way of explaining how reality was to an extent being mutilated by insidious unseen powers.  A few minutes of various Margaret Thatcher edits from her most imperial phases in the 1980s cut to Blow Your House Down would explain much about what happened to the decade.

Meanwhile, for those fascinated by such things, the Siouxsie and the Banshees guitarist on this album was none other than the matter of factly enigmatic Robert Smith, also known for a cryptic hair do, this one possibly brushed into shape by the ghost of Poe and containing a family of dragonflies.  Smith was apparently prepared to take exceptional pains driving himself in the direction of insanity by splitting his time between his own demanding group The Cure, and the Banshees, who were not necessarily gentle on their guitarists.  The Banshees are one of the great guitar groups, but their guitar sound, all those brilliant shards, the harsh, cool madness, the electric pouncing, the whirlpools of deepening surprise, the circular unwinding, the curious purity, was not as such created by one player but a sort of shadowy, volatile community of contributors, ships that passed in the night.  Between them they conjured up the kind of pristine playing that flashed, crashed and smashed in the near and middle distance while the adamant Siouxsie took psychodramatic control of her words and characters and kept alienation moist.  Between them they were the guitar player for Siouxsie and the Banshees, always on the verge of being dismissed, or dismissing themselves, and that is a wonderfully strange and exclusive, and evidently dangerous, little club to belong to.

Smith inherited a way of doing things in these sparkling, militant settings from the first Banshee guitarist, John McKay, who disappeared as if by magic early on, and the eventual next guitarist, John McGeoch, who alchemically elaborated on McKay's sense of disordered static action.  Clearly the role was a kind of curse, and McGeoch, after monetarily appearing as permanent as drummer Budgie, wandered off into the fog that was never far away from the Banshees touring caravan.  Smith lost some card game, or fancied brushing up close to such fellow conspirators of pleasure, and became, shock horror, a Banshee.

He played in this sonic area anyway, so that it sounded as if some of his scrupulous, questing ways with a guitar had influenced McKay and McGeoch in the first place.  Sometimes it's as though all the ghosts of Banshees guitarists past, present and future are being channelled through a stunned, sleepless Smith.  He fitted perfectly into the group, so perfectly that it clearly couldn't last.  The ground was soon falling away from beneath his feet, and it wasn't long before Robert packed his bag, and returned under cover of night, feeling a little faint, to his other home, The Cure, which suddenly seemed a lot less calamitous.  What a story he had to tell.  No on really believed him, even though the look in his eye suggested the inside of his skull had been altered by the experience.

This being a Siouxsie and the Banshees album, it is not too far fetched to consider the following... Siouxsie and the Banshees' songs are like daydreams which edge toward nightmare - toward our desire to be pursued, cast out, demolished, damned - daydreams undertaken, I should suppose, so that we may escape the reality of such things and protect ourselves from life.  Such daydreams are certainly among the great uses of fiction; for in fiction they become fetishes or amulets, little patron images, more often of devils than saints worn to keep the wind away, which nevertheless blows as it wills and in its own severity.  We use them, these fictions, like sympathetic magic or homeopathic medicine, to control our experience of what they represent.  It is like sticking pins into the wax model of our disaster; and when we put the model away, we put off, having enjoyed it, the disaster.  Hyaena has finished, it was a beautiful shock to the system, and who knows what will happen next.

Paul Morley 18/12/08

After their early greatness but before the percussive influence of The Creatures - Siouxsie & The Banshees' variable '80s.

There's something brilliant about Siouxsie & The Banshees.  Even if you don't like them, even if you blame them for goth or Tim Burton (how many songs about voodoo dolls does the world need, really?), you ought to admit that they were extraordinary.  Outcasts of punk, astonishingly it seems now, heroes of Peel sessions, they instantly forgot about Nazi posing (no, they weren't Nazis, but there was an armband and that never-forgiveable lyric in Love In A Void) and released one of the most ecstatically pop-pink singles of the day, Hong Kong Garden.  Then there were two brutally wonderful albums, The Scream and the under-rated Join Hands.  And then two of the band left.  And then John McGeoch, the greatest lead guitarist of post-punk, joined and helped Siouxsie, Severin and new drummer Budgie to turn the Banshees into a great post-punk pop band, a phase that included McGeoch's brilliant monument, Juju.  And here we are now with the mid-period reissues, and it's going to get a bit wobbly from here on in.

The Banshees' problems would always revolve around two things: one, they found it hard, as we shall see, to keep a stable lineup; two, the core lineup was prone to a certain stylistic saminess.  So, as John McGeoch's alcholism reduced his musical contribution, the Banshees found themselves making A Kiss In The Dreamhouse, an album that would be Juju part two if it weren't for the addition of a uniquely gorgeous production style, all strings and percussion, glitter and Klimt.

Dreamhouse is so lushly luscious that the Banshees song from this era I've always associated with it - the achingly lovely Fireworks - isn't even on it (it turns up now, in its excellent 12-inch version).  But there is the wonderfully John Barry-like waltz of Melt and the very saucy Slowdive, a song about sex so sexy that even the normally frosty Siouxsie is compelled to pant "Oh my God!" in the middle.  Dreamhouse also opens with the obligatory great "single that never was", Cascade; it ought to have been great, but it slips quickly into Banshee filler.

On Hyaena, McGeoch was replaced by temporary Banshee and Severin collaborator Robert Smith, off of The Cure.  ("I beat them at pool,"" Smith said during his time in the band, "and they get ratty."  That's my favourite quote about Siouxsie & The Banshees).  Smith couldn't stay in the band - he had to go and invent goth and Tim Burton - and a sense of marking time runs through Hyaena.  If A Kiss In The Dreamhouse is Juju 2, then songs like Dazzle were Dreamhouse 2.  There are some good moments here.:  the tacked-on cover of Dear Prudence would have been a lovely flipside to a Banshees' White Album 45 of Helter Skelter, and Swimming Horses (the first great song about seahorses) is oddly haunting, but this is still an inessential album.

Robert Smith played on Nocturne too, also reissued here.  This could have been an epic live album - a double, no less, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall, the elite venue of post-punk.  Nocturne is alright, and no more; Siouxsie asks fans shouting for old songs if they've come from a time tunnel, then she presents a selection of songs old and new which fit stylistically into the band's early-'80s template and don't particularly blossom live.  The much, much better Seven Year Itch live album does the job better.

Time passed.  The Banshees entered a time tunnel and released the lovely The Thorn EP, with its orchestral versions of songs from their first two albums; then they got themselves a proper permanent guitarist, John Carruthers from Sheffield's Clock DVA.  Carruthers, as well as bringing a healthy northern with to the band (when they played on The Old Grey Whistle Test, a camera zoomed in on a sticker on Carruther's guitar that read OH NO!  NOT ANOTHER BORING GUITAR CLOSE-UP!) was also a robust guitarist, and on Tinderbox he took the band away from the psychedelic whimsy that sometimes threatened to infest their music.

I interviewed Siouxsie and Severin in 1985 when Tinderbox came out and made the slight error of telling them that I thought it was rubbish.  As Severin stared into his teacup (like all Banshees interviews, it took place at Fortnum & Mason), Siouxsie patiently explained that I was completely wrong, and later told the Melody Maker that they wouldn't be talking to the NME again (that's my most embarrassing Siouxsie & The Banshees story).  Nearly 25 years later, I have to revise my judgement, Tinderbox does in fact have some great moments - the superb, chunky single Cities In Dust, for example, the horny 92 Degrees and the great Candyman - but its production sounds stodgy, and long songs like This Unrest and Sweetest Chill are Banshees by numbers.

After Tinderbox, the Banshees began to incorporate the percussive brilliance of Siouxsie and Budgie's Creatures spin-off, and they got interesting again, and even worked with Tim Burton.  Better was to come.

Banshees' albums tend to take a bit of getting into these days with their sound symphonies outnumbering the songs on the whole.  On 'Hyaena' this balanced has been reversed to produce a record that some of the most melodic utterings from the band for a long time.

The non compromising nature of our top gothic supergroup is still to be found on 'We Hunger' and the frenzied 'Blow The House Down', but there's an unusually tuneful accompaniment to Siouxsie's mature vocals on 'Running Town' and the superb 'Belladonna'.

Of course Smithy boy's packed his bags since this was recorded, but it wont matter too much because the Banshees have coped before with AWOL members.  They'll bite their lip and head off laughing, hyaena like into the future.  

Andy Strike

More press...

The stars that shine
And the stars that shrink
In the face of stagnation
The water runs
Before your eyes

Swallowing diamonds
Cutting throats
Your teeth when you grin
Reflecting beams on tombstones

A jamboree of surprises
Playing Russian Roulette, or the lucky dip
A clench fist to your heart
Coal dust on your lung

Dazzle, it's a glittering prize
Dazzle, it's a glittering prize

A silver tongue for the golden one
In a dead sea of fluid mercury
Baby piano cries, under your heavy index and thumb
Pull some strings, let them sing

The stars that shine
And the stars that shrink
In the face of stagnation
The water runs
Before your eyes

Dazzle, it's a glittering prize
Dazzle, it's a glittering prize

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass & Keyboards
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
Robert Smith - Guitar & Keyboards
Strings - The Chandos Players

A ravenous greed
For a brood to feed
A lusting spawn
On a weakened fawn

Do you hunger for this
Hunger for this

Sucking leeches feel the need
Sucking dry unsaited stomach pops
Sharpened knives with flying sparks
Sagging bodies with stretch marks
And your belly aches

Do you hunger for this
Hunger for this

As the rust creeps
Corrosion seeps, a rotting seed
Eat me, feed me
With your belching foul breath
Your destructive kiss death

Do you hunger for this
Hunger for this

Just the taste of a sweet kiss

Shanghaied on a locust flight
The thirst from a vampire bite
Fills the emptiness inside
Consuming, everything, green eyed

We hunger
We hunger

Do you hunger for this
Hunger for this

The bliss of a sweet kiss

Do you hunger for this
Hunger for this

We hunger
We hunger

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass & Keyboards
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
Robert Smith - Guitar & Keyboards

Deep in the heart
Of a seething beast
Think of bright lights
A splendid feast

But something's missing
She's feeling low
Something's missing
She's going home

Take me back, I'm feeling low
Take me back,  I'm going home
Take me back, I'm so alone
Take me back, I'm traveling home

Suspicious stranger
There's something wrong
She is changed
Ah but this is not

She is back
But she's not home
She is back
But she's still alone

She came back after all this time
She came back to warning signs
All is black when the lights are on
Nothing rhymes its been so long

Deep in the heart
Of a seething beast
Think of bright lights
A splendid feast
Where you arrive
Can be home
Where you come from
Isn't always home

Take me back, I'm coming home
Take me back, where I belong
Take me back, I'm leaving home
Take me back, I'm coming home

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass & Keyboards
Budgie - Drums, Percussion & Marimba
Robert Smith - Guitar & Keyboards

BUDGIE: “Nothing had been written and nothing was happening. I had a go on the bass and the guitar, and Robert was playing around on piano. That’s how we worked out ‘Take Me Back’. It was the only way things moved forward.” Source:  The Authorised Biography 2002.

Sunrise breaks its fatal perfume
And I'm dizzy to distraction
The scented clutches of a siren's lament
Embrace the sound of enchantment

Five fathoms deep, the lovers leap
The lanterns of skin beckon us in
O belladonna

Night falls decent shrouds her intent
In a halo of sharks and a skeleton mask
O belladonna

Daylight devours your unguarded hours
Burnt and charred, this bride of scars
O belladonna

Lost in the glare, all of us stare
The patterns of pain, scream out your name
O belladonna

Severin - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass & Keyboards
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
Robert Smith - Guitar & Keyboards

Falling in your
Falling in your
In your arms
In your arms
Fish on a line learns to live on
Dry land
Thrown back again to drown

Kinder with poison
Than pushed down a well
Or a face burnt to hell
Feel the cruel stones
Breaking her bones

Dead before born
Words fall in ruins
But no sound
She's dying of your shame
She's maimed by your pain

He gives birth to swimming horses
He gives birth to swimming horses

Fish on a line
But back in the water to drown
We drown
Floating in sky

He gives birth to swimming horses
He gives birth to swimming horses

Take a ride on the tide
With the assassin at your side
This weightlessness under water
Forgets in slow motion
And washes pointless tortures

He gives birth to swimming horses
He gives birth to swimming horses

Floating in sky like fishes can fly
Through your arms

Sioux - Credits
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass & Keyboards
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
Robert Smith - Guitar & Keyboards

Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play
Dear Prudence, greet the brand new day
The sun is up, the sky is blue
It's beautiful and so are you
Dear Prudence won't you come out and play

Dear Prudence open up your eyes
Dear Prudence see the sunny skies
The wind is low the birds will sing
That you are part of everything
Dear Prudence won't you open up your eyes?

Look around round
Look around round round
Look around

Dear Prudence let me see you smile
Dear Prudence like a little child
The clouds will be a daisy chain
So let me see you smile again
Dear Prudence won't you let me see you smile?

Lennon/McCartney - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass & Keyboards
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
Robert Smith - Guitar & Keyboards

Following desire in your eyes
You're mine you're mine all mine
Following the signs ... in your mind
You're mine, you're mine, all mine

Bring me the head of the preacher man
In the sickening daze ...

O the rotting sun washes down
The moonshine boys
The vultures drool
They pluck the gold dust from his eyes
And pick his bones until they're clean
The book of sorrows the American dreams

Bring me the head of the preacher man
On the blazing trail

Heaven holds lonestar promise el dorado
The insane theatre, once more we rise
To drain the last of liquid sleep
The gift of chance
Eating the worm as the vapour drops & dances
And everything stops & dances

Bring me the head of the preacher man
We tumble down these lonely days
We tumble down

Severin - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass & Keyboards
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
Robert Smith - Guitar & Keyboards

Just a step onto the street
An uncomfortable heat
Rattlers at your feet
In running town

Helter skelter all a swelter
The impetus is seething
In running town
A thousand curses
Full speed ahead

Lockjaw aggression
And buzzing imitations
Deride the friendly Martian
In running town

Helter skelter all a swelter
The impetus is seething
In running town
A thousand curses
Full speed ahead

If you gaze into her face
She'll come back & drown
All refugees in the sea
Of running town
A thousand curses
Full speed ahead

Laughter rebounds & strangles
That sound in running town

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass & Keyboards
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
Robert Smith - Guitar & Keyboards

From the fury pit, a reek of misery
Like a trumpet groan, tornado moan
The splendor splits like a golden skin
He and the wizards cry like hummingbirds
In treasure glows, your weeping wings
And a slaughter grins, on a pleasure spike

When held on high by the riverside
Like a torn-throat child
In a jackals hide
Cool water dies, vile diamond eyes
Silent in flamingo ease
Distant in troubled trance
Within a whirlpool, we're breaking our backs
The tears of the moon
The sweat of the sun
Sacrificial hearts for a pointing bone

With a gorgons head and a coal of skulls
They're kindling fires in open wounds
Pointing bone
In a jaguar skin, blood matted mane
Beacons blaze toward a waning moon

Severin - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass & Keyboards
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
Robert Smith - Guitar & Keyboards

Weaving in his basket chair
Twist you round a lock of hair
Made of straw, the wicker man
Made of straw, I'll blow your house down

Bishops falling from the windows
The lightening makes your hair stand on end

This dervish frenzy, will make you run around
This dervish frenzy, will turn your head around
Blow the house down

Stretching a rubber band miracles trip over
Feel where we stand
Shift the ground, caterpillar man
Crumbling castles in the sand
Blow the house down

Feebly we put our heads out of our foxy lair
We feel the chill from the night soar
Standing in the storm, waiting for the flash to crash
Counting seconds before we turn to ash

It's getting nearer
Blow the house down
This dervish frenzy, will turn your head around

Standing on the stairs that want to fall down
It's getting nearer don't turn your head around
Made of straw
A lighted match
Burn the house down
Turn your head around
Pillars of salt watch as it all burns down
Down to the ground
Blow the house down

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass & Keyboards
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
Robert Smith - Guitar & Keyboards