COMPILATION - ONCE UPON A TIME | |||
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UK CD | Track Listing | ||
Cat: 831 542-2 Click on cover for full scan |
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First Released On CD: | 30/05/89 | ||
UK Chart: | N/A | ||
US Chart: | N/A | ||
Sleeve Design: | Rob O'Connor | ||
Producer: | Various | ||
ONCE UPON A TIME CD - PRESS | ||
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Q 1989 | ||
Chilling
From ice maiden to carnival queen - Siouxsie And The Banshees on CD. At the dawn of punk, Siouxsie Sioux was chiefly renowned for her dismissal of Bill Grundy as "a dirty old man" and for a dress sense designed to provoke an outbreak of British sexual hypocrisy. The Banshees may have made their debut at the 100 Club Punk Festival in 1976 but their extended assault on The Lord's Prayer was as much a dare as a stab at launching a career. Siouxsie's original invention was herself and that unflinching stare remains one of the great icons of punk's disdain. These beginnings render it all the more surprising that, 11 albums on, the Banshees have long transcended the first flush of punk to create an unmatched legacy of dramatic and very British pop. Polydor's release of the first seven Banshees titles on CD means that all their output is now available on compact disc bar the two "holiday projects", The Creatures and The Glove. If Siouxsie's reputation remains that of the haughty Queen of Gothic Punk, these CDs suggest that, within the parameters of their brooding and fantastical world view, there is a good deal more to Siouxsie and her long-term partner Steve Severin than that enduring image suggests. Although Siouxsie and Severin's punk credentials are impeccable, the Banshees were the last of the original punk clan to release a record. By the time Hong Kong Garden entered the Top Ten in August 1978, the Banshees had already seen their fair share of touring and rapidly progressed beyond the confrontational three-chord thrash that had rendered punk a musical cliché. Spearheaded by John McKay's sheet-metal guitar, their debut LP The Scream virtually invented the Gothic rock genre overnight and stands alongside Magazine's Real Life as a turning point in punk's movement away from rabble-rousing and into the internal landscape of the psyche. While songs like Carcass are dated by their goose-stepping beat and stone-faced delivery, the gut-wrenching Overground and the dizzy Jigsaw Feeling demonstrate that already the Banshees were far more concerned with psychodramas of disgust than confronting society head on. The Scream was a new take on suburban angst as Siouxsie's howling vocals intimated that the boredom and alienation of suburban life amounted to nothing less than a horror show. On later albums, the Banshees would uncover a rich exoticism in suburban fears; on The Scream, Steve Lillywhite's thundering production ensures that they sound trapped. Restored on CD to all its forbidding austerity, The Scream is both a declaration of intent and something of an artistic full stop. The following year's Join Hands indicates that while only PiL could match the Banshees' chilling wail of noise, they'd left themselves little room to manoeuvre. McKay's guitar still seesaws disturbingly and Severin's ear for compelling bass riffs is apparent on Placebo Effect, but while Siouxsie turns domestic claustrophobia into Gothic nightmare on Premature Burial and Mother, her vocals are oddly unwieldy. While Hong Kong Garden had displayed an ability to combine a playful sense of unease with driving pop melody, on Join Hands there are only riffs. The departure of McKay and drummer Kenny Morris a mere four days after its release suggests that the Banshees' two halves had indeed reached an impasse. The next album Kaleidoscope featured the now long-serving Budgie on drums and guitar work from John McGeoch and Steve Jones. The Banshees' embattled state obliged Sioux and Severin to rediscover their pop flair and the album's tow singles, Happy House and Christine, display a renewed ability to surround Siouxsie's icy mixture of fatalism and sarcasm in the kind of melodies that even a punk's parents might hum. The inventiveness of a piece like Red Light, driven along by the clicks of a camera shutter, proved that the Banshees were considerably more than a one-trick pony. 1981's Juju finds McGeoch firmly ensconced on guitar, Sioux and Severin devoting themselves to an exhaustive exploration of the power of idols and the Banshees reborn as a magisterial hard rock band. On moody songs like Arabian Knights, Siouxsie unveils a new sensuality while the Banshees display the brooding authority of the Stones circa Paint It Black. Juju confirmed the Banshees' staying power even if their frequent assaults on the singles chart has never own them a mass following like that of The Cure. Most early Banshee albums have their indigestible moments and the argument that they are the best singles band gains some credence from the Once Upon A Time collection where early singles like The Staircase gain contrast from later stabs like the eerie Israel. A sequel is now surely due. A Kiss In The Dreamhouse (1982) found the Banshees further investigating the kind of offbeat textures that Brian Jones brought to the Stones in the mid-'60s. Songs like She's A Carnival and Cascade make gorgeous use of strings while Siouxsie's voice acquires a hidden warmth for studies in erotic extremity like Melt! and Obsession. Dreamhouse probably remains the Banshees' finest hour. In 1983, the Banshees marked time with the live Nocturne, a well-recorded resumé of the band's capacity for Sturm und Drang lightened by the occasional exchange with the audience ("What time tunnel did you crawl out of?" Siouxsie asks one particularly nostalgic punk fan). McGeoch had flown the nest immediately after the Dreamhouse and Nocturne misses his magisterial authority despite Robert Smith's capable but understandably muted understudying. Smith soon departed in turn and the Banshees spent the mid '80s trying to capture their old fire. The Banshee's origins and Siouxsie's forbidding stare have made it hard for them to escape their punk associations while their use of horror imagery has occasionally blinded fans to the questions of power and threatened innocence their unsettling narratives explore. These CDs lend their work a fresh clarity and trace a remarkable evolution which serves as a reminder that, for its bravest exponents, punk was always more a question of daring than a set of conventions. The Scream 4/5 Mark Copper |
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ONCE UPON A TIME - IMPORTS/PROMOS | |||
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Japanese Import LP | Track Listing | ||
ONCE UPON A TIME - LINER NOTES | ||
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I was scratched, fiercely and justly by
HONG KONG GARDEN and was never the same again. Siouxsie and the
Banshees, on the nightmare edge of our sheltered world, were concerned
with nothing less than breaking the rules of logic, space and
time. Accepting, exploiting and confusing pop music's universal
vanity, futility and profound quality, they set about eliciting from
life's facts and fantasies a sense of the things that matter.
The sensuality of Siouxsie and the Banshees encourages us to feel more deeply by, amongst other things, making us think on our pulses. Siouxsie made up her own spectacular normality, the Banshees took a distantly individual way out from punks and smoking ruins, skimmed past the quaking rocks of a fragmenting pop culture, slyly violated listeners inherited sense of fun and form and devised their own mighty sense of glamour and passion. A breakdown didn't interfere with their accumulation of form or upset the succession of balances. A change in calm mid-stream aggravated and altered the emotional pattern, reinforced their electric descriptions of the unnatural. I admit unashamedly to being pierced by Siouxsie and the Banshees imaginative conviction. They alone are the beginning of some brand new restoration period. Paul Morley, November 1981 |
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ONCE UPON A TIME - PRESS | ||
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Melody Maker 1981 | ||
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A swift Christmas recommendation: lest we forget there was love before the Human League. Polydor have issued this package of Banshees' 45. They're all brilliant, of course, unmistakably Sioux; ponderous, poignant, once petrifying, now pretty (and) peculiar. Look I shouldn't have to tell you this, if you haven't got all these already you're really not worth knowing. But "Once Upon A Time" provides a neat opportunity for reassessment; compilations always play havoc with personal perspectives, muck about with memories and cause a lot of arguments. This one will. Like were the murderous "Mirage" and "Love In A Void", the original McKay/Morris Banshees, better or a patch on the creepy "Christine", "Israel", "Spellbound" Budgie/McGeoch bunch? Is the gradual shift from irresponsible aggression to artistic impression, from shock to seduction, from fury to focus, an exciting revolution or a softening into self parody. No answers from me, I love 'em all. Apart from their debut, "The Scream", and this years "Juju", "Once Upon A Time" is the Banshees' best album, stripped by commercial necessity, of their occasionally shallow semi Gothic horror shenanigans. These singles are coiled and concise, sure of their targets. They search and destroy, whether by insinuation like "Playground Twist", overt violence like "Mirage" or clever cunning like "Arabian Knights", how that sodomy/bestiality line sneaked past the BBC censors was this year's great pop victory over hypocritical media morality. "Once Upon A Time" is testament that stylish, imaginative, subversive protest is still alert, alluring and alive. It's a salute to the Banshees' breathtakingly uncompromising accessibility. And the real buzz is....the best is yet to come.... | ||
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Christine Lyrics | ||
She tries not to
shatter, kaleidoscope style Christine Singing sweet
savages, lost in her world Christine |
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Christine Credits | ||
Severin -
Lyrics |
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Inspiration/Influence/Band Comment | ||
SIOUXSIE:
"It’s about Christine Seisnal (adopts country accent): She’s
got twenty two personalities! She don’t know who to play with!" Source:
Zigzag 05/80. STEVE: "All twenty two personalities had different names, which was a really good source for the lyrics - the Strawberry Girl, Banana-split Lady . . .they were either names by her or the family. There’s a book called The Three Faces Of Eve about her, which is more like a biography she wrote with a friend of hers from her childhood, a cousin. She turned out to go to college and become some sort of knob on psychiatry." Source: Zigzag 05/80. SIOUXSIE: "Part of that oppression comes over in our number ‘Christine’. She became a textbook case ‘cause of the traumas she’d been through as a child. She witnessed many violent acts." Source: Sounds 28/02/80. |
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Arabian Knights Lyrics | ||
The jewel, the prize I hear a rumour Myriad lights A tourist oasis
I heard a rumour
Veiled behind screens
Ripped out sheep's eyes Myriad lights |
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Arabian Knights Credits | ||
Sioux -
Lyrics |
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Inspiration/Influence/Band Comment | ||
SIOUXSIE:
" 'Arabian Knights' was inspired by the fact that I was listening
to a lot of The
Doors at the time. I wanted those kind of melodies
running through it." Source: The Authorised
Biography 2002 SIOUXSIE: "It’s nothing to do with a ‘feminist’ thing, it’s like a humane thing. Like how the Muslim women cope, I don’t know. The way women are treated in some religions, if it was a race being treated like that and not a sex, there would be uproar about it. I still haven’t overcome being a girl yet, as far as other people see me, and that’s very important. I think it’s happened a bit, but not enough." Source: NME 15/08/81 SIOUXSIE: "To think, some of our records might end up with an 'X' certificate. Like all the fuss over our 'Arabian Knights' single with the line about 'orifices'. It was only a new way of describing something...something natural, physical. It wasn't smutty or rude. Just imagery...but they don't like that." Source: Smash Hits 06/86 SIOUXSIE: With 'Arabian Knights' it was quite a thrill to get the word 'orifices' on the radio." Source: Record Mirror 11/11/89 |
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