NO MORE HEROES - EXTRACT

 
 
  Siouxsie Sioux (vocals), Steven Severin (aka Steven Havoc; bass), Marco Pirroni (guitar), Sid Vicious (drums)

Suburbia: Cosy, comfortable, reassuring, decent, respectable, cosseted, bland, soul-sucking, soporific suburbia. Away from the inner cities of Britain in the mid-70s was a parallel universe where Marks & Spencer were king, where minor promotions in middle management were the anvils on which life’s ambitions were hammered out. And where any trace of individuality, flare or difference was stripped away in the guileless pursuit of conformity. You can hear the false gods of consumption and normality overthrown in punk staples like the Members’ ‘Sound Of The Suburbs’, Gang Of Four’s ‘At Home He’s A Tourist’ or XTC’s ‘Making Plans For Nigel’. But you can hear it most acutely, and over an entire
career, in Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Susan Ballion was a disaffected loner, her youth blighted by illness and an alcoholic father, who first met Steven Bailey, her future romantic and musical partner, at a Roxy Music show at Wembley Arena in late 1975. Bailey had a job in accounts at RCA, until the tedium got to him. Ballion, meanwhile, was already reacting against the stultifying Bromley environment by dressing as outlandishly as she could, hiding her shyness behind armadillo quantities of glamour and otherness. A gang formed around them, notably Simon Barker, Berlin, Simone and William Broad, aka Billy Idol. In some ways Ballion was, conversely, the most worldly of this emerging group, regularly travelling to London to visit gay clubs and woitressing at the Valbonne in Carnaby Street, where her sister was a go-go dancer. But it was Bailey who first clocked the Sex Pistols, supporting Fogg at the Ravensbourne College of Art on 9 December 1975. Suddenly they had, in his words, “a mission”.