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The
Rainbow is a magnet for the lookalikes who scamper on shaky stillettos
down the echoing tube tunnels and skate through the teaming rain and the
blackened side-streets to the holy Image, the Icon, the Goddess. A crowd
of glad-to-be-greys. Cold, bitter children on a night out. But why come
here? Why? The Banshees’ music is black, doomy and colder than the
night outside. You could stand in any bus-shelter if you wanted that
effect!
Siouxsie doesn’t cater for ‘entertainment’,
which is fair enough: the music searches for something, constantly
strives for something higher than the average expressive faculties of
rock and roll. OK whether they manage to convey and simply assimilate
their basic themes and currents of thought is questionable. But a good
gig on a Saturday night? Maybe masochism is hip again.
Everybody seemed to be sitting in somebody else’s
seat by the time The Human League appeared and the atmosphere was none
too amicable. Whatever, The League did their stuff, easy, simple synth-rock
with a slide-screen on each flank flashing meaningless signs. Dead
boring. Dead bourgeois. The Human League are like ELP and Genesis and
it’s a comment upon the so-called ‘punks’ present that they were,
for the most part, lapped up. The League are, most nauseating of all,
very patronising. They play The Righteous Brother’s ‘You’ve Lost
That Loving Feeling’ and Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock And Roll’ as if to
assure their audience that ‘yes, dears, we’re one of you after all,
so don’t worry about the technology or the thigh length suede
boots...’ They do a song called ‘Blind Youth’, which really says
it all. Oh, and Adrian did the lights!
Siouxsie’s a big star now. She’s distant and
untouchable. Siouxsie sucks. You go on a band’s impression for the
most part, don’t you? Well, Siouxsie at the Rainbow (Wow!) was a
wizened Judy Garland image of total despair. The gig was a mess from
start to finish. Everything seemed to go wrong. For a start the bozos
down the front gave the gig a chilling 1984 aura by wasting the front
row of seats. My, how macho, how punky, how BRAVE! Credit to the
bouncers for (ostensibly) keeping their cool in the face of
sub-intellectual, collective identity crises.
The set began with ‘Staircase’, the sound finding
it’s feet over the lightweight, somehow undeveloped single. Siouxsie
bounced typically, more compulsory it seemed than inspired, squeezed
into such narrow images she must be nearly choking half-way through
every song. The band stand almost completely still throughout the set,
unmoved by any vague beat figures in the music. It’s features such as
this that separate the Banshees from middle-field rock, but the features
slide into alienation as well. The separation between band and audience
is astonishing and, to me, highly disagreeable.
The set consisted mainly of new songs. Courageous but
somehow contrived and merely part of the general image of ‘being
different’, maintaining some sort of introspective and, for all
intents and purposes, false sense of the unique. ‘Placebo Effect’,
‘Playground Twist’ and ‘Premature Burial’ went way way above
everybody’s immediate and urgent sensibilities I’d guess; the song
structures are interesting and inventive but they are undermined
by their own supposedly admirable sterility.
The catchy sections, the stomping teutonic rushes,
detract from rather than enhance the overall structures and convey a
fragmented, bitty effect. ‘Icon’, lifting from a reserved opening to
that inexhorable metallic race of music, impressed (again transiently).
The standards, ‘Hong Kong Garden’, ‘Metal Postcard’, ‘Helter
Skelter’ et al were pedestrian and routine. It was an uncomfortable
feeling.
Siouxsie and band, moreover, insisted on bantering
with the crowd and firing (even) mock kicks at the busy bouncers,
pretending some link, some basic communication with the bemused crowd.
Siouxsie and band want the best of both worlds, and it’s their
undoubted naievite, their badly disguised confusion, their cant, that I
find most unappealing in them. Yeah, Siouxsie’s such a tease.
Siouxsie’s such a scream.
Dave McCullough
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