Gitti Gülden  01/10/92

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The pvc bra, the swastika armband and the scary hairdo are history.  Siouxsie Sioux is back with a new album and a new image for the Nineties.

"Thirteen years of dressing up and making a bloody noise" is how Siouxsie Sioux describes her career so far.  After a three-year hiatus, Siouxsie & The Banshees re-emerged last month with the marvellously addictive 'Kiss Them For Me'.  This month brings their twelfth album Superstition, their most seductive selection of songs since 1978's The Scream.

"It felt right to take a three-year break," says Siouxsie, "and it feels justified in that we've come back so strongly.  For the last few albums, people have been arguing that we've had our time and that we should just disappear.  There was someone at Radio 1 who was saying that we've been uncompromisingly weird since 'Hong Kong Garden'.  It's never felt that way to us.  There's never been a logical or fashionable progression.  The Banshees has always been more of an idea than an actual solid group.  The idea was never to get a recording deal, go on tour or meet other pop stars.  But there must have been a fantasy at the back of our minds that we could go on Top Of The Pops and disturb some kind of equilibrium.

"There's a general feeling that we've been erratic over the years and, in a way, I would agree with that.  I agree that there have been disappointing albums (Join Hands, Juju, Tinderbox), but they've never been completely hopeless.  They were more like intermediary phases really.  We've always approached them with 100 percent commitment.  Every time we set out to make the definitive album.  Each one is a different kind of transformation."

The Banshees' remarkable powers of regeneration have always been reciprocated by Siouxsie's ability to subvert her own image.  The prototype punkette look was born the night she wandered into a  Sex Pistols gig at Islington's Screen on the Green in August 1976 wearing a black plastic cupless bra, fishnet stockings, suspender belt, transparent polka-dot mac, stilettos and swastika armband.  Twelve years on, she would take to the stage wearing knee-length boots, satin hotpants and glitzy top hat.  By this time, she had popularized New Japanese Chic, Gypsy-Punk and, most famously, the startling all-black outfit with the gravity-defying crimped hairstyle which became known as Gothic and was consequently aped by every noir aspirant from Middlesborough to Manhattan.

"Dressing up is important in that it's an almost constant source of amusement to me.  But it's something I would do anyway.  Everyone has phases where they just feel like slipping into a pair of jeans, usually when they're feeling a little out of sorts and can't be bothered with anything.  But it's great when you know exactly what you want to wear.  It puts you in a great frame of mind.  It's playtime for me.  It's a good form of recreation.  It's always been more a sense of playfulness than any kind of career move.  Ever since I left home, I've got a strange, perverse thrill from looking the way I did.  It was like having a massive surge of adrenaline.

"It's not that I set out to create a new look that will be memorable.  I just get tired of things quicker than most people and often I just feel like being contrary, just because someone's got to be.  It's nice that some things are remembered.  Other times its irksome.  The Siouxsie with spiky hair and black leather thigh boots became something of an icon.  It obviously influenced girls and boys that went on to form bands and sadly it turned into Goth.

"Basically, I just like people who have many faces.  The way Marilyn Monroe could go from looking very glamorous to sad and vulnerable.  The way Jayne Mansfield could go from looking sweet and childlike to some kind of sex siren.  Maybe it's got something to do with a kind of schizophrenia."

Back in 1979, Siouxsie remarked, "We are spanners in the works of uniform progression."  The Banshees seem determined to remain punk rock's obstinate survivors.  Superstition brings them kicking and screaming into their third decade, as offish, capricious and wondrously out of context as ever.

"I always used to say that we would finish when we made the definitive Banshees album," she says.  "I guess that's a real good fail-safe.  Every time we make a record that sounds like our best, all those other possibilities open up.  It always seems more interesting to carry on than not to.  Besides, we wouldn't give our enemies the satisfaction of seeing us throw in the towel.  After all this time, spite still seems to spur us on."

Jon Wilde 1991 

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Twenty-four years ago, the Hollywood starlet Jayne Mansfield had her head cut off in a car accident after a satanist put a curse on her boyfriend.  This cheerful episode in the life of Los Angeles is the inspiration behind 'Kiss Them For Me', the first single in nearly three years from Siouxsie & The Banshees, which despite it's fashionable dance production and vaguely baggy trappings is a nightmarish return to the sinister Banshees landscapes of yore, which is exciting news for THE STUD BROTHERS.

"I was in the studio, waiting for my turn, reading Marie Claire and they had this outrageous article on Jayne Mansfield which summed up someone's arrival, success and tragedy in Tinseltown.  I was interested in the idea of someone being motivated by all that glitters and the results of that.  Mansfield wasn't a puppet.  You tend to think that all these people under the studio-system were, but she wasn't.  What was so apparent with her was that she had a total grasp of what she was doing, she'd do anything to promote herself."

Siouxsie sounds wonderfully passionate.  Mansfield was something else.  Since reading that article in Marie Claire, Siouxsie read virtually everything else on the woman.

Jayne Mansfield was a film star.  A real star, not one of those pissy, clean-living excuses for personalities Hollywood throws up today.  Mansfield was truly up there and out there, ensconced in the stratosphere, living out in the Hollywood Hills in a place called the Pink Palace.

The Pink Palace, as any Los Angelino will tell you, lived up to its name.  It was pink.  Pink, pink, pink.  The pool was pink, the beds were pink, the champagne that flowed from the pink marble fountains was pink.  Jayne's pet poodles were dyed pink.

Jayne married three times, once to a Mr. Universe.  She was pneumatic.  "Men," she once told a reporter, "are like milestones.  You have to hurry on to the next one on the road ahead."

The Pink Dream Lady died 24 years ago in a pink halo of blood and brains, decapitated in a car crash on her way to New Orleans.  With her died her chauffeur and her man of the moment, lawyer Sam Brody.

It's this messy corner of Hollywood Babylon that the Banshees have chosen as the subject for their new single, their first in nearly three years, "Kiss Them For Me".  And it sounds so sweet, so deliciously sugary ("Sugar-coated," says Sioux) - lots of lines about heart-shaped pools, beauty queens, glitter and glitz.  We love it, it's got one of those classic Banshees choruses, delivered with unexpectedly dizzy delirium - Siouxsie sounds so innocent.

A DJ friend of ours loves it too.  Which is weird because he DJs in House and thinks rock 'n' roll stinks.  Basically, he tells us "Kiss Them For Me" has a classy St Etienne percussion, nice funky guitar and a real sweet New Ordery keyboard.  Yes kids, it's Banshees In Baggy Shock.  There's even a Youth remix, an electro-pulsebeat aimed at, Siouxsie explains, the real sonic vegetables.

Blows you away, doesn't it?  But then that's what the Banshees have always been good at - perfectly reinventing themselves for the time.

We meet them in Whitechapel, home of Jack The Ripper, the distinguished Victorian serial killer.  We're in a photographic studio run by a group of gregarious young people who supply us with endless cups of real coffee and Maryland chocolate chip cookies.  We're sitting on a church pew.  Siouxsie and Severin are reclining on the couch opposite.  Only Budgie's braved the modernist furniture.  There are at least five pieces of modernist furniture, all, we imagine, designed by a joker passing as a sadist.  There are metal-framed stools and a metal-framed dentist's chair, all upholstered in black rubber spikes that comfortably give way as you sink onto them.

Siouxsie strokes the dentist's chair.

"I know someone who'd like one of these.  If the spikes were real."

In the corner there's one of those huge open coal-gas fires.  And we mean huge - you could roast a pig over this one.

No one says anything for a while.  We begin to get the feeling we must all be waiting for Bulldog, Cat and Mouse to come in and kiss each other.

Eventually we say it's a great single, very modern, very dancey.  Very now.

Severin nods.

"We deliberately chose the single for those reasons.  It showed that we were listening to what's going on."

Severin's looking very Spanish, or at any rate as Spanish as any fair-haired, fair-skinned Englishman ever could.  The same applies to Budgie.  Siouxsie's simply looking Spanish, magnificently so.

"You're saying because it's dancey it's modern?" she asks.

Well, er, no.  Not just that.  The production's very up to the minute and it does end on a very high note, builds to it in fact.  Ending on a high note is pretty characteristic of the times, isn't it?

"Well, the production  was to do with Stephen Hague (of Pet Shop Boys fame)," says Siouxsie.  "And as for the dancey thing, we've always put out dance mixes."

We're told Siouxsie dances a lot.  Apparently she danced at her own birthday party in top hat and tails.  Which, when you think about it, is a very great thing to do because most popstars are too self-consciously cool to even meet the guests, let alone trip the light fantastic.  As a teenager Siouxsie also danced a lot, mostly in London's gay nightclubs (really, in the late Seventies, the only places a young punkette could go without being trashed or molested).  The Banshees met at a dance club.  But to say the Banshees have always released dance records is a bit...

Severin sees it coming.

"No, Sioux, you mustn't say we've always been into dance music.  Because we haven't.  We hate it."

Siouxsie nods vigorously.

"We're just jumping on the bandwagon," she sneers in Miranda Richardson Queenie.

Irony's not something the average pop fan is terribly familiar with, particularly those who wear black trousers, black jackets, black tee-shirts and black hair with black highlights.  If the reaction to The Cure's baggy debut, "Never Enough" was anything to go by, the release of "Kiss Them For Me" should inspire another terminally tedious debate in the Backlash column.  They'll be loads of "How dare they?" missives from Christine in Hong Kong Gardens and Justine de Sade from Griefingtons Central.

Siouxsie says the Banshees have always been funny though their humour's not of the rubber-chicken, whoopee-cushion variety.  More about playing with pop.

We wonder what they think of the current state of pop.

"Like what?" ask Siouxsie.

Like The Farm, we blurt.

"Well, I wouldn't pay to see a bunch of brickies onstage," she says.

Budgie's puzzled by them.

"They remind me of lads that've dared one another to go onstage, like lads in a pub egging one another on.  It's like karaoke but one step further."

There's not a lot you can say after that.  Let's talk about Jayne Mansfield.  Let's talk about how you relate to Jayne Mansfield.

"I think I related to her in a very distinct way," says Siouxsie.  "In that there seems to be a lot of girls who're using music as a vehicle to fullfil their ambitions in the way that Jayne Mansfield used the studio-system.  Making movies wasn't the be-all-and-end-all for Jayne Mansfield, it was being famous and living that way that counted.  And I think it's the same with a lot of girls in music now."

And that concerns you?

"Yeah, it's sad.  I mean, tragic.  It's like people are taken by the allure of the glitter and not by the content.  If you get no enjoyment, no satisfaction for what you're doing, what you're striving for, if it's all image, then once the media has sucked up your image and moved on you're left with nothing, you're left really sad and terribly lonely."

Siouxsie reckons that a good part of the reason she started in music was to become famous.

"Deep down," she says, "I'm sure I did."

But fame was never really enough.  And for 10 years this has been a bone of contention between the Banshees and their American record company, who quite reasonably presume that, were the group to spend a little time on the road, they'd break America, they'd break the world.

The Banshees have never toured for more than two months.

"I will not live to an itinerary," says Siouxsie.  "I don't like knowing what I'm going to be doing tomorrow, let alone in two or three years time.  And that's what it takes nowadays.  God, three years."

Following the release of their as-yet-untitled new album (due in mid-June, produced by Stephen Hague and featuring John Klein and Martin McCarrick who played guitar and keyboards on 'Peepshow'), the Banshees have agreed to join the Lollapalooza tour of 20 American cities.  It's a kind of Reading on the road and good for everyone concerned.  Good for the Banshees because it's not that long;  good for their record company because they'll be playing alongside some of America's fastest rising stars - Jane's Addiction, Living Colour, Ice-T and Nine Inch Nails.

When they get back, they take a break and then, in  the autumn, briefly tour Britain and Europe.  This is about as busy as it's ever been for the Banshees.

Are you looking forward to America, Siouxsie?

"Yeah, sort of," she smiles.  "I mean, I do like the States but I don't think I could live there.  I think it's immaturity would get to me after a while.  It's just too young a country, no past.  I would certainly never choose to live in Los Angeles.  I don't know why people even go there."

The sun, the sea, the stars, the money?

"You can get that anywhere." shrugs Siouxsie.

Severin nods.

"I think you'd end up not knowing anything if you lived out there.  You pick up a newspaper and there's nothing in it."

As two of Los Angeles most vociferous British advocates. we find the Los Angelino's total ignorance of anything beyond the California State Line thoroughly understandable.  If we had our brains cooked in California sunshine and our senses sated by purest Peruvian marching powder, we too probably wouldn't give a monkey's what happened elsewhere.  Strike that, we probably wouldn't give a monkey's what happened outside the front door.  Besides, we explain, Los Angelino's may not know anything but at least when they meet you they're curious.

Budgie grins.

"Yeah, but it's a funny sort of curiosity, isn't it?  It's a bit like being curious about the moon.  Like, you don't actually want to go there because you've heard its a pretty miserable place, but you'd like to meet someone who has."

Sure.  To a Los Angelino a Brit is literally an alien.  Which is sort of where our defence collapses.

Come on though, America s not just Los Angeles.

"Well, I do like that about America," says Siouxsie, "the fact that it's enormously diverse, that you can have a Los Angeles and a Chicago.  New York's probably my favourite place.  Oh, and Houston, Houston's wild.  I thought it'd be full of rednecks shouting obscenities but it wasn't.  It's got this really strong gay scene out there.  We played this really outrageous club.  Afterwards we went out into the audience and had another show there.  They've really got a sense of enjoying life in Houston."

We hear American fans are generally more appreciative of you than their British counterparts.

"In a way, yes," says Severin.  "They don't have you catergorised in the way they do over here.  It's like people here get pissed off if you play a venue that's too big, over there they don't care.  They're used to big spectacles, they're used to people being celebrities and stars.  At the same time though that seems to breed an obsessiveness I consider rather unhealthy."

How do you mean?

"You know, screaming, shouting, the obvious things."

And you don't like that?

"No, no way," says Siouxsie.  "The worst thing though is when people start crying in front of you."

Sounds weird.  What do you do?

She laughs.

"Well, I don't say, 'Shut up! Don't be stupid!'  I've tried patting them on the back and saying, 'There, there, there', but that just makes them even more hysterical.  They start screaming, 'Oooh! you're so nice!'  You can't win, you really don't know how to respond."

Budgie:  "The only fans we really meet at close quarters are those who've taken the trouble to get there and they're exactly the sort who gush and grab.  They've normally run away from home to follow you round the country."

Sioux:  "They try to talking to you and its like, 'B... b... b...b...' Total gibberish.  So they sort of grab at your clothes and hair."

She illustrates the point by stuttering madly and making a savage grab at Severin's collar.  The normally unflappable Severin is flapped.  Briefly.  Almost subliminally.

Budge:  "That sort are almost better than the ones who come on really cool with some cerebral dissertation.  You know, like,' I've studied your lyrics for years now'.  That's actually really scary because you're not sure what they've got on their mind.  Or behind their back."

Sioux:  "The American thing about being open worries me too.  You'll meet someone for the first time and within 10 minutes they'll have told you how they were raped at the age of six.  And that's when the great British reserve becomes a bit of a hang-up too.  You're in a quandary as to what to say because people never say things like that over here.  Obviously it depends on what's being said.  I mean, if someone's saying they've been raped then I don't say, 'Oh don't bore me'."

Severin and Budge smile sardonically and Siouxsie drops her jaw in mock indignation.

"I don't, I do not do that.  Naturally though it does depend on the degree of injury.  I mean, if someone was telling me their tortoise died I would tell them to shut up."

Are people in the habit of asking you to sort out their problems?

"Fans, yeah, but usually in letters.  There's always this thing where they put you on a pedestal and sort of give you this mystical healing power.  Somehow they believe you've never had any real problems.  To which I always say, 'Yeah I had that problem too'."

Budgie:  "That's the irony, there, because they tell you their problems and you point out you've had similar problems too.  But, of course, as soon as you relate to their problems there's really no reason for them to be talking to you.  Suddenly you're just the same as them.  It blows the whole thing for them and then they seem really lost.  It's basically, I think, because they're looking for a secret you can give them."

He pauses to ponder this.

"The worst thing," he declares suddenly, "is when someone literally gives you their problem, makes it your problem.  It's like you get some bloke from London turning up penniless in California and saying, 'I'm here for the tour, look after me.  It's mad."

Sioux:  "It is mad and in the past we've been real softies and its turned against us.  After a while they've behaved like spoilt brats.  It's made us a bit harder."

Severin:  "We're very insular anyway on tour, its like a family thing.  There's no open door backstage.  There is no open door."

Are you saying the easiest way of coping with fame is to behave like a star?

"Well," say Severin, "that's all part and parcel of the sort of attitude you have to get on the stage in the first place.  You can call it a star-attitude or just an attitude that you're presenting something only you can present, so you've already got that in your make up anyway.  So to be larger-than-life offstage as well is quite easy."

Sioux:  "Thing is we don't act the star with each other.  We couldn't.  This band doesn't and never has."

Severin:  "Though of course, Sioux travels in a limo, me and Budgie go on a tour bus and Martin and John are on pushbikes behind."

Siouxsie giggles enthusiastically then adopts a Thatcher-like severity.

"We tell them," she says, wagging her finger, "you can't come on the bus because you haven't earned it yet.  We've been here longer than you."

She plays the part very well, so well we're left with the feeling that were Martin and John present they'd have burst into tears.  And she does this kind of thing a lot, slips in and out of roles - Queen Bee, Queen Bitch, dizzy coquette, even thigh-slapping lout (though this, we must say, wasn't one of her best).

Ages and ages ago, Siouxsie told a fanzine that so long as the Banshees continued to be seen as "nasty" they'd be on the right tracks - the Banshees had to unnerve.

They still do.  Even before we knew what "Kiss Them For Me" was about we felt there was something skewiff about it.  Partly because of the way it sounds, but mostly because it was the Banshees who made it sound that way.

With the Banshees, even after all these years, you still suspect some sinister motive.  Siouxsie admits they play on this suspicion, slip barbed one-liners in to f*** us up.  So the Banshees are still nasty but they're no longer shocking.

Nothing's shocking nowadays.

Thoughtlessly we exclaim that nothing shocks us.  And then remember porno-mutilation, Holocaust newsreels, the grotesquely inflated stomachs of malnourished African kids with a mouthful of lies.  And serial killers.  And car-wrecks.  Real ones.  But what shocks us most about all of it is that it continues to fascinate.  It holds you like nothing else and leaves you feeling sick with yourself.

"Everyone," says Siouxsie, "is fascinated by people like Dennis Nilsen, everyone.  The classic one is car crashes.  When you're driving past, you know you really do want to look but you know it'll be in bad taste, so you don't."

Everyone's fascinated by violence.  But does everyone fantasise about it?

"Do you mean violent dreams?" asks Siouxsie.  "Because I do have them but I've never enjoyed them.  They've always been nightmares for me.  Have you had, er, nice violent dreams?"

Guiltily we confess that, yes, we both have.  And that we both find them quite exhilarating

Siouxsie nods sympathetically.

Worse, we continue, we recently discovered that we both spent a fair amount of our waking hours daydreaming about punishing imaginary assailants, using our respective mind's -eyes to choreograph and rechoreograph the violence.  We tell Siouxsie we think (we hope) it's cathartic.  She looks baffled.

Budgie looks strangely relieved.  He looks over at Siouxsie from his spikey stool.

"Yeah, the other day someone said something to you, I remember.  We were in that shop and the door was stuck, I couldn't get it open but I heard what the guy said.  And I  had this very slow kind of playback of me with a baseball bat smashing him over the head.  But I had to replay it a couple of times because I didn't get it right first time.  I was thinking, 'No, if I hit him in the kidneys where it'll really hurt'.  Then I thought some of his mates would come up so I'd have to learn martial arts so I could kill them all."

Budgie looks round at us.  Finally, soul-mates.  Perhaps potential cell-mates.

"Don't you think," says Severin, "It might have something to do with us being constantly aware of how fragile our frames are, and how easy it would be to just die?  See, I have the opposite sort of daydream where I'm walking down the road thinking 'That car's gonna hit me'.  Or sometimes I just fantasise about my own death, how simple it could be, how completely unconnected to anything.  That's what's so scary about serial killers, you've got no say in it.  You can guide your life all you like, you can be in absolute control and still someone could come along and end it all."

Probably what Jayne Mansfield was thinking when her head left her shoulders.

Senseless.

Apparently not.  The Pink Dream Lady's boyfriend, Sam Brody, had a curse on him.

"There was this guy," explains Siouxsie, "called Anton La Vey.  He was a kind of magician, a sort of Satanist to the stars.  Jayne Mansfield was always getting involved with people like that, people she thought could help her career.  Anyway, her boyfriend was very jealous of this guy because Jayne was always saying how wonderful he was, and one time he knocked all the candles off the guy's altar.  And the guy put a curse on him, told him he'd be dead within the year.

"And in the course of the next 11 months they had nine accidents.  The 10th accident, in the 12th month, was the one.  And, since then, The Pink Palace was bought by Mama Cass (of the Mamas And Papas) who choked to death, and Ringo Starr who refused to live there after pink started seeping through the walls.  Finally Englebert Humperdinck bought it, had it exorcised and he's living there still."

She does sound wondefully passionate.  Mansfield was something else.

"Kiss Them For Me" is gorgeous, wicked, glamorous, wide-eyed and utterly self-aware.

Pretty in pink.

The Stud Brothers 11/05/91

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'Twice Upon A Time' is SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES' second singles compilation, the sister volume to 1982's 'Once...' It's a testament to a band who came out of punk with more vision then their contemporaries, and retained their sense of dignity and wonder long after most of 1977's upstarts had burned out or faded away

"WE’RE SINGLE-minded," says Sioux.  "It’s not worth doing unless you’ve got certain values and certain standards, and you stick with them.  It doesn’t make you the most popular person always - but that’s never bothered me."

"And you can’t ever try to be fashionable," adds Steve Severin, who’s watched many incarnations of the Banshees spark, splinter and re-generate since he, Siouxsie and Sid Vicious first raised hell in The 100Club in 1976.  "Or you’ll just get caught up in the industry wheels."

This time around, we rejoin their story in 1982, when Duran Duran were Number One, and Siouxsie wore fishnets and inspired a further 10 years of emulation from her Goth admirers.  Her "rivals", Toyah and Hazel O’Connor, wouldn’t last the year out...

‘FIREWORKS’

(Originally released May 1982, single only)

"We did a ‘Top Of The Pops’ appearance for this, and they had this horrible flashing neon sign going ‘SIOUXSIE! SIOUXSIE!’ and then they were going to have fireworks..." recalls Sioux, with faint distaste.  "We said, ‘NO! NO! NO!’ - so they got the hump.  They really do take it personally if you object to anything they do.  The video we did was cut short cos the guy who was in charge of the pyrotechnics blew his face off!"

"We were in an island in the middle of a lake," recalls Severin, "with a glass tunnel that went all the way to the shore and up to this little platform..."

"And what happened," rejoins Sioux, "was that suddenly we heard an almighty bang and he was going, ’AAARRRGH! AAARRRGH!’ He ended up in hospital with three layers of skin missing."

"And about a year later," Steven recalls, "he looked 10 years younger."

"A great face peeler," enthuses Sioux.  "So, any old bags out there who want to look younger should blow a flare in their face.  I think Michael Jackson has, but it didn’t work too well..."

‘SLOWDIVE’

(Originally released October 1982, and appeared on the "A Kiss In The Dreamhouse" LP)

"It was just a drunken evening..." recalls Severin. 

"And I remember I wanted the string players to slow down and get tired," says Sioux.  "So the ’Oh my God!’ in the middle of the song is one of the string players’ wrists falling off!  And the video was this boy’s first dance routine!  It took months of rehearsal, and getting him to wear false eyelashes."

Severin smiles ruefully.

‘MELT’

(Originally released November 1982, also from "...Dreamhouse")

"We’d just come back from our first tour of Japan, and it made a real impression on us all," remembers Sioux.  "Lots of people gave us Japanese clothes and artwork and cards.  They were incredibly generous, it was almost embarrassing to be treated like that.  But the impression of being in Tokyo in the spring, and all the blossom, going on the bullet train for the first time, drinking sake in copious amounts with gold leaves spinning in it... it’s the most different place you can ever go."

‘DEAR PRUDENCE’

(Originally released September 1983, single only)

"We recorded that in Sweden, and the idea came from touring around Scandinavia, listening to The Beatles’ ’White Album’," says Severin.  "That album has always been an influence on the way we work.  One of the main reasons we chose it was that John Lennon’s version sounds a bit unfinished.  There’s also the background behind why he wrote it, that it was supposedly to do with an attempted rape on Mia Farrow’s sister, by the Maharishi (The Beatles’ guru at the time).  It’s the same as why we do ’Helter Skelter’ (again from ’The White Album’), because there’s a context to it.  (Charles Manson said he used it, and the accompanying ’Piggies’, as inspiration for the Sharon Tate murder).

"There are always misinterpretations.  Songs like that are more than just pop music."

‘SWIMMING HORSES’

(Originally released March 1984.  Appeared on the "Hyaena" album)

"This is based on a programme I saw about a female version of Amnesty, called ‘Les Sentinelle’," reveals Siouxsie.  "They rescue women who are trapped in certain religious climates in the Middle East, religions that view any kind of pre-marital sexual aspersion as punishable by death - either by the hand of the eldest brother in the family, or by public stoning.

"And there was this instance of a woman whose daughter had developed a tumour, and, of course, gossip abounded that she was pregnant.  The doctor who removed the tumour allowed her to take it back to the village to prove that, no, it wasn’t a baby - but they wouldn’t believe her.  The woman knew her daughter would have to be stoned to death so she poisoned her, out of kindness, to save her from a worse fate.

"Now this organisation has all these escape routes for women like her, mainly through the elder brother who pretends to have killed them.  But once they’ve been saved, they can never go back.

"So the song starts,  ‘Kinder than with poison...’ I also used the imagery of, ‘He gives birth to swimming horses’, from the fact that male sea horses give birth to the children, so they’re the only species that have a maternal feel for the young.  It was, I suppose, an abstract way of linking it all together without being sensationalist.  I remember just being really moved by that programme, and wanting to get the sorrow out of me."

‘DAZZLE’

(Originally released May 1984, also from "Hyaena")

"I wrote the strings for this on a toy piano!" remembers Sioux, fondly.  "The sentiment behind it is of lying in the gutter but still looking up at the stars.  I’d seen ‘Marathon Man’, and I was really intrigued by the guy swallowing diamonds to keep them, and then realising it was like swallowing glass - that they would pass through his system and tear him apart.  So that’s the line - ‘Swallowing diamonds, cutting throats’.

"Quite a lot of this, and ‘Swimming Horses’, came from visiting Israel for the first time.  ’The sea of fluid mercury’ in the lyric, is the Dead Sea.  We did this crazy thing and hired a car to go to the Dead Sea, Robert (Smith, their then guitarist) had to be the chauffeur, he was the only one who could drive.  But when we got their it was like ’The Hills Have Eyes’ - all barbed wire and tanks and flags with skull and crossbones on them!

"We also went to Tel Aviv, where most of the audience were on acid - which was available after the show, so we took it as well!  We ended up on the beach, having a party until sunrise, and, of course, we ended up swimming.  The sea was very clear, but there were all these little fish flying out of it.  It wasn’t the drugs, honest!"

‘OVERGROUND’

(Originally released October 1985, from "The Thorn" EP, but the track first appeared on the debut album, "The Scream")

"On the tour after ’Dreamhouse’, we went out with a string section, "explains Sioux, "and we incorporated ‘Overground’ into the set.  We got so many enquiries as to whether we would release it like that, we went ahead."

"It was early 1978 when we wrote it," says Severin, "and everyone else was going twice as fast and..."

"To be in a punk band was to be in a thrash band," finishes La Sioux.  "Like everything, it all gets very clichéd, and people just get one-dimensional."

‘CITIES IN DUST’

(Originally released October 1985. From the "Tinderbox" LP)

"This was our first trip to Pompeii, another amazing experience," Siouxsie enthuses.  "Seeing a whole civilisation petrified in lava was like putting yourself in the place at the time, and imagining how it must have been to be there when it happened.  I find it really easy to do that, to get ghost images of life continuing as it was.  I often wonder if that’s what real hauntings are - your imagination and your senses bringing things back to life.  That’ why you’d never be able to capture it on film."

‘CANDYMAN’

(Originally released February 1986, also from "Tinderbox")

"’Candyman’ was trying to put across the unspeakability of child abuse, and again, trying not to sensationalise it, just coming up with a very strong picture of a character that was sickly sweet and oozing repulsiveness," Siouxsie explains.  "The amount of people who’ve been abused is incredible, and it’s only lately that the subject’s been brought out into the open.  The whole thing’s such a power trip, and you realise the victims must have been so in fear of saying anything - cos they’ve been told by the perpetrator that they’ll go to hell or something.  I suppose religion is very guilty of funding that as well," she muses.  "Organised religion is all about separating and dividing, it’s not what it should be about.  And repressing.  And making sure that no one tells the truth.  They use the fear of God to keep people down and obedient." 

‘THIS WHEEL’S ON FIRE’

(Originally released January 1987, from the "Through The Looking Glass" LP)

"I had the hots for Julie Driscoll!" Sioux laughs.  "I can’t remember when this originally came out, but I’d have been about 11, and I was besotted by her, by the way she looked, by her voice.  It was very different to watching Lulu on ‘Top Of The Pops’, this woman with a shaven head and huge black eyes.  I thought she was incredibly beautiful, very spiky and strong and tough - not at all cute and cuddle and feminine.  And I loved the song.  It conjured up all sorts of fantastic stories for me."

"It wasn’t until I dug it out of my record collection that I realised it was written by Bob Dylan," adds Severin.

"And I nearly said, ‘Let’s not do it’," admits Siouxsie.  "I hate him!"

‘THE PASSENGER’

(Originally released March 1987, also from "Through The Looking Glass")

"Iggy Pop’s someone we’ve admired for a long time," reveals Sioux, "and the first time we played France, our gig was cancelled without anyone telling us.  But we found out that he was playing the same night, so we all bundled into a cab and, as we got there, in the distance, you could hear ’The Passenger’.  The song is very much a journey in itself."

‘PEEK-A-BOO’

(Originally released July 1988, from the "Peepshow" LP)

"I really like the violence of the sound," says Sioux, "and I was really surprised that it got played on the radio.  I just thought that the subject matter and the sound of it would scare too many people away.  We were incredibly un-hip at the time, too, and we really confused people.  They just didn’t know what to make of us then."

‘THE KILLING JAR’

(Originally released September 1988, also from "Peepshow")

"From here on, we were a CD band, and we were always asked to do remixes," smiles Severin, ruefully.  "This one worked really well.  Mike Hedges did the remix, but he called himself Roland Death - as in roll on death..."

"It was really playful at the time, the idea of f***ing around with something, rather than doing it because you had to," Sioux recalls.

"Now you have to do it," Severin grimaces.  "It should be done because it’s interesting to do, not because the record company needs it for the clubs!"

‘THE LAST BEAT OF MY HEART’

(Originally released November 1988, again from "Peepshow".  This version was recorded live at Lollapalooza, August 1991.)

"We thought this would work at Christmas," sighs Siouxsie, "but it didn’t!  Still, I really like the song, and this version’s from the last gig of Lollapalooza in Seattle, so it’s quite emotional.  It was raining as well - bit of a damper, that day.  It wasn’t quite as good a farewell as it should have been.  But I think farewells are always a soggy let-down."

‘KISS THEM FOR ME’

(Originally released may 1991.  From the "Superstition" LP)

"It’ll be remembered as one of the key songs of Lollapalooza, along with Nine Inch Nails’ ’Head Like A Hole’," says Severin.

"It was fun," adds Sioux.  "It was originally going to be called ’Let’s Get Smashed’."

"And it had Budgie rapping on it," Severin laughs.  "But not while Sioux was singing!"

‘SHADOWTIME’

(Originally released July 1991, also from "Superstition")

"This wasn’t intended to be a single," Severin reveals.  "It’s a Roxy Music ’For Your Pleasure’ tribute for all you trainspotters out there!"

‘FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN’

(Not previously released in this country as a single, again taken from "Superstition")

"That was a case of a really good remix totally changing the song," says Severin.

"We were in Amsterdam, ordering the remixes down the phone to Junior Vasquez," laughs Siouxsie.

"And the worst thing was, he sent 17 of them back!" says Severin.  "We had to listen to them all on a coach in America.  It was like, ’Okay, which torture shall we have today?’"

"But I did get to live out my Emma Peel fantasy in the video," Siouxsie enthuses.  "Lots of catsuits and karate kicks!"

‘FACE TO FACE’

(Originally released July 1992, from the "Batman Returns" soundtrack)

"Now I can spit and scream!" roars Siouxsie.

"This is the biggest up and down I can remember in our career," says Severin.  "The excitement and adrenalin of doing it so fast was just brilliant.  We hadn’t felt like that in years.  And then, as soon as we’d finished recording it, there began the worst nightmare I’ve ever had."

"Basically because it was Warners who put it out," Sioux explains, "and they procrastinated about when they were gonna release it for months, so then Geffen said they were gonna release it.  And, as soon as that happened, Warners did release it, but in such a way that it’s probably the world’s best-kept secret.  The best thing about it was that we did a really great song, we did our own really great video and we got to meet Tim Burton - who I really admire."

"It was the first time that we’d had a taste of what it’s like to not be in control," shudders Severin, "and it’s really horrible."

"Warners are such scumbags!" Siouxsie spits.  "I’d like to go on record as saying that I hope someone there dies really soon, or they fall down a big hole on the golf course and never come back!  That sounds bad, but I enjoy bitching about a good baddie." 

Cathi Unsworth 17/10/92

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Betty Page 01/92

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Siouxsie doesn't like the '90s and it's all your fault.  This generation, you lot, are 'sadly lacking' as far as youth rebellion goes.  The glories of punk are recycled into comedy TV.  So how does the Ice Queen survive in a time of global warming?  David Cavanagh goes Sioux-gazing...

THE VERTIGO SCALEXTRIC LOOP-DI-LOOP SCENARIO THAT LAYMEN know as the Hammersmith flyover must look pretty unspectacular from Siouxsie Sioux' window.  With a non-committal grunt she lets the blind snap up, fidgets with fingers that still haven't learned to cope with their owner-operator's decision to sack the fags, and transforms her patented femme frigidaire veneer into some vaguely endearing it-were-all-fields-round-here-when-I-were-a-lass nostalgic moue.  It's a gesture she will come back to again during the morning.

Out there beyond the blinds chugs the number 11 bus, ferrying a new generation of post-pink shoppers to Shepherds Bush Shopping Centre, past the Hammersmith Palais where sweaty bloodletting gigs have yielded to godforsaken disco inferno nights and Esther Rantzen's Search For A Star auditions.  A few miles away is Notting Hill, where Siouxsie used to live until this spring, when hassles and boredom and Poll Tax demands forced her out.  The Sioux domicile is now in the south of France, where she shares house room with four cats and one budgie - her husband Budgie, the Banshees' drummer since 1979.  She does call him Budgie, in case you were wondering.  "And a few other things besides."

She peeks once more out of the third floor of the Polydor building.  She's seen them all come and go.  Another Polydor employee is leaving today: eleven years at Polydor - a life sentence, but still three fewer than the redoubtable Sioux.

Back home is the first garden she has ever had, and a chance to speak the language she first heard when her Belgian father used to sear at her in French when she was a baby.  Over here is a London that means nothing to her and a monarchy that she and a few mates had a rather famous pop at some centuries ago, and which is now, ironically, decaying with every day.

"Yes, the guillotine's been sharpened," she says warmly, peeking out at the flyover and the buildings that weren't there last time.  "It's ironic."

But it sounds like it's a fairly meaningless victory for her.  "I'm disappointed with London," she says.  "I think it's lost something vital.  It's become safe and very complacent again.  people are so self conscious about looking for the next punk thing, all ready to pounce on it and clingfilm wrap it.  Whatever happens, it's got to be contemptuous of what's happening now and what's gone before."

Hmm.  Music is dying (runs her argument) and this generation are not worth saving.  It's all a bit Imelda-Marcos-in-exile somehow.

"This generation are like the love children.  They grew up with parents that understood them.  They grew up liking the same music.  That's maybe what the problem is.  The youth rebellion of looking at society and poking holes in it is sadly lacking in this lot, I think."

Have you got any children?

"No."

Do you want any?

"I've always said never," she replies after some thought.  "But the idea isn't possible now."

She's garbed in a startling combination of black leather and brownish lace.  The waistcoat, trousers and boots are shiny black leather, the style of a woman who is just about to give a motorbike a really hard time.  She has a small, black heart painted on the left side of her face, just under the eye.  The eyes are black.  Her bag is black.  It's a bit fucking black in here actually.  And under the black waistcoat is a brownish lace body wrap thing that appears to be see-through.  Actually transparent.  To stare would be ungallant, but, you know, while she's looking the other way out at the flyover...

So, Siouxsie.  The past.  Siouxsie Sioux is one of the few rock stars who will admit to you that the current line-up of her band is not her favourite.  That personal honour goes to the Siouxsie/John McGeoch/Steve Severin/Budgie line-up (1980-'82), the full-tilt orchestral power of which kicks off the new Banshees double compilation album, 'Twice Upon A Time', with the swaggering 'Fireworks'.  That was, true enough, the stellar Banshees line-up:  'Melt!', 'Slowdive', the 'A Kiss In The Dreamhouse' album in 1982 and, God, all those strings.  Siouxsie giving it the seven veils on Top Of The Pops in a golden antediluvian dawn before MTV or CDs or the resuscitation of the dinosaurs.  The Ice Queen.  Cruella De Wossaname.  Budgie, whacking hell out of the drums.  A mystery and a playfulness to the Banshees that yanked them out of the post-pink pack.

Listening back to side one of  'Twice Upon A Time' must have been something of a blast for Siouxsie.  She sounds like this was her favourite time.  There was, she firmly maintains, "a lack of cynicism" about music at the time.

Her subsequent flits in and out of fashion - there was a serious wilderness period around 1985-'86 which still brings a grimace to the Sioux features - have left her cool, detached and totally out on a limb.  Anyone who can write off an entire generation as "this lot" obviously doesn't have a hell of a lot in common with her constituency, and yet she was still the first person Tim Burton called when he needed a new song for Batman Returns.

Is is better to be in fashion or out of it?

"Probably out.  If you want your ego stroked, sure it's better to be in fashion.  But anything in fashion will be out of fashion just as quickly.  I've learnt to not take either particularly seriously."

Who came up with the phrase Ice Queen to describe you?  Was it you?

"Naoww."

Did it immediately appeal to you?

"It went well with my fairy tale image," she says, laughing slightly, "but it wasn't really an accurate description of me.  It was the impression of someone who'd probably never met me.  Every person I've ever met since then has expressed astonishment that I haven't frozen them out or glared at them or bitten their head off."

Well, the potential amputee would be excused for treading warily.  Certainly, the personnel at Polydor all snap into action as soon as she appears, in a way that you suspect they don't when Little Angels come calling.  They seem a bit scared of her.  But if you tell her that, she gets embarrassed.

"Oh.. right... I'm not aware of that."  She breaks eye contact.  The flyover becomes riveting once again.  "But I think everybody should be treated with some respect."

Do you think people are afraid of you?

"Hopefully."

You like that idea?

"Yes."  She nods slowly.  "In a faceless place like a record company it can be useful.  I mean, I can imagine Phil Collins walking here and it not affecting anyone."

Phil Collins?

"Unless they were told he had lots of money."

Why Phil Collins?  What brought him on?

"I don't like people who don't have a presence,"  she says, just a little coldly.

Yes, but Phil Collins?

"I hate Genesis," she says with sudden vehemence.  "I despise them.  I hate the affableness of them, just that ordinary blokes... the... I hate their music.  I hate how they put themselves across.  I think they should be (she looks around for a suitable punishment)... torched.  And Abba.

Again Siouxsie Sioux seems somehow rooted in the past.  Wasn't this a battle that was fought in 1977?  Didn't she and the punks boyos get all this out of their system 15-odd years ago?

"Well, maybe it's something personal then."

Have you ever met anyone in Genesis?

"No.  And I wouldn't want to."

It's a major beef, clearly.  Weird.  Is her music still important to her?  Does it keep her going?

"Yes it does," she says slowly.  "Music makes you dig deep down inside yourself.  It's still very vital to m.  I'm still not content.  I'm still digging in.  I still feel very ignorant.  So yeah, I've no idea what I'd do if I didn't do music."

She has never acted, although you'd think she would have by now.  The offers used to roll in - notably the role Hazel O'Connor later accepted in the distressingly putrid "punk movie" Breaking Glass - but now she's settle for a stylish cameo a la Nick Cave in Wings Of Desire or her hero William Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy.  What did she make of Sid And Nancy?

"I hated that film," she says, animated once more.  "I hated that glorification of it.  I just was not interested.  Horrible.  Ugly.  Not being in control of yourself.  I hate the romanticising of being a victim."

So go on then.  What was Sid Vicious really like?

"Well, before he was in the Pistols or after?" she says, mollified.  "I knew him before he was in them.  He had a great sense of humour, and his meanness always had a sort of black humour to it, which is something he lost when he became caught up in the Pistols' whole rock 'n' roll thing.  I probably wouldn't have been able to have got on with him then.  From what I hear he did change a lot.  I saw him once and I almost didn't recognise him.  He was just gone.  He'd left the planet."

Sid's former employer goes a bit quiet.  This is about the longest speech she's given today.  Siouxsie & The Banshees, of course, have never split up, so they have judiciously avoided all those tawdry getting-back-together atrocities to which their peers have repeatedly fallen victim.  There are strong rumours as we speak of that...

"Oh, the Pistols," she says, affecting an air of immense boredom.  "Yeah.  God, it's so ugly.  If you stop you stop.  I think the idea of reforming something that's gone, I just find it really ugly.  it's like bald men combing their hair over.  Just admit it.  It's gone."

Which punk bands did you like?

"Quite a lot of people from America, like The Cramps.  Suicide, Iggy even then.  Early Wire.  There's probably a lot more.  If you prompted me..."

Er, the Pistols?  The Clash?  The Damned?

"Oh, the cartoons.  Well, the Pistols were really important to me, but that was before they signed and released a record.  It was the event of going to the shows that affected me.  I've never played the Pistols since.  I've never had a desire to."

And there she was - large as life and twice as scary - standing behind the Sex Pistols and coming into our homes, when BBC2's Bank Holiday TV Hell extravaganza re-ran the infamous Billy Grundy/Pistols showdown from December '76.

It was the bleached, teenage Siouxsie, and she was only on for the most fleeting of seconds, but it was definitely her:  snotty, fearsome, uncommunicative.  And around her slouched various surly, monosyllabic Pistols, most notoriously an irregularly-dentured yob with a severe social grievance who went by the name of Johnny Rotten.

The day after this Siouxsie interview, he was up on stage at the Reading Festival regaling an audience whose language he didn't speak with taunts they were too bored to decipher.  Blah blah...  England is dead... blah... you're a blank generation... blah.  Yeah, OK, John.  If you say o.

So that's how they scattered, then.  One went to Los Angeles, the other went to the south of France.  Neither of them has a hell of a lot to say about the country they left.  For the last time today Siouxsie Sioux contemplates life beneath the flyover and audibly curses the day she decided to give up smoking.

David Cavanagh 1992

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'Superstition' is the title of the Banshees' latest album.  Bathed in rich and golden imagery, shimmering with undulating rhythms and intricate ambitious strokes of musical mastery.  'Superstition' promises all the usual beauty and whispered spells which have always rolled and tumbled so exquisitely from this peculiar band.  There's all you'd expect and nothing you'd expect.  Siouxsie graces the sleeve, glowing like a legend from Hollywood, statuesque and ethereal, a goddess in a different disguise.  A dance song (the one which broke the silence since 'The Last Beat Of My Heart', 'Kiss Them For Me') opens the bag of surprises and yet another transformation is complete.

It's funny to think that people still associate this sumptuous sophistication with black bandages and complexions generally associated with the mortuary.  Images are not easy to lose when they're powerful.  Steve Severin is patiently philosophical about the need people have to persistently label his band 'goth', maintaining that moving away from that has not been a preoccupation, rather an evolvement.  Although he does admit that the album cover was designed to establish a new and equally powerful image.

"For a certain time the image was very strong and definable and so as much as we have tried to move away from it, perhaps we've been too subtle.  For this one we had to do something like put Sioux on the cover looking completely different before people stood up and said 'it's a new image!"  That dance song has helped as well.  Critics either melted in orgasmic awe at the manifestation of something so completely unexpected and right, or said 'oh well of course dance has always been something to associate with the Banshees'.  It gave them all a little piece of gold to chew over.

"It wasn't particularly conscious.  It wasn't chosen to be a single because of that.  It was chosen to be a single because of Sioux's melody rather than the rhythm of the track.  Other songs like 'Cry' we chose not to put out, because they were too close to what people might expect, but whatever you call dance music, it's really just the area where people are experimenting with sound, and it's of interest to us on a sonic level."

Nonchalant detachment, a simple denial of cashing in on the dance craze, or merely how it was?  Dealing in images, whether of themselves or those within their songs could lead people to wonder how contrived the Banshees may be.  Beautifully, yet deliberately well thought out images maybe representations of something deeper, yet they do not necessarily have to be directly from the heart.  Could there be a little of the voyeur in all of this?  A smattering of detachment from the comfortable viewing position of a cosy backseat?

Until Severin mentions dream diaries, Angela Carter and Indian academics you could conceivably be forgiven for thinking so.  Yet not only is he obviously fascinated with the idea of myth, effectively trading in it through his work, he also believes in re-creating it for himself, thus realising the same applies to the band and the way people need to perceive them.  The way people need images.

"A lot of the stuff I was interested in last year was coming from Angela Carter (author of such modern day fairy tales as 'The Magic Toyshop' and editor of 'The Virago Book Of Fairy Tales') and Marina Warner (who's written extensively on myth and icons, notably Joan Of Arc and the Virgin Mary) and the idea of re-interpreting fairy tales.  Angela Carter did that and Marina Warner concentrates more on why fairy tales became what they became, how society shapes them.  It's quite interesting because most of them are really quite horrific and brutal to start off with, and end up as moral tales teaching people about right and wrong.  It's to do with the idea of interpreting something in a completely different way.  You wonder why people spin myths around this band.  It's an interesting thing to play around with."

'Superstition' is scattered with images.  The tragic Jayne Mansfield whose life ended on a curse, Elvis who sprang up in a dream Severin had, the dying earth and the unforgettable scenes of Tiannamen Square when a solitary figure beckoned death through the ultimate challenge.  Myths and images of the 20th Century to play around with.  "Dreams have always been important in the work of the band.  Around the time of 'Kaleidoscope', Sioux had a period when she kept as notebook by her bed and started writing things down.  I began doing it with this album, and the song that's most connected with that is 'Softly'.  I had a dream that I met Elvis and all he said to me was "Softly".  I also had this tape which I got in America.  It was shrinkwrapped to a paperback called 'Is Elvis Alive?' and was supposed to be him ringing from a payphone explaining how he'd survived and what he'd been doing.  There was nobody on the other end of the line.  At the beginning and end of 'Softly' you can just about make out a short wave radio with bits of this tape in it.  It's not important for people to know that, but it gives that atmosphere of something a bit more clairvoyant going on.  The lyrics are nothing to do with Elvis though!"

With 'The Ghost In You', Stephen Hague (who produced 'Superstition') tried to make me drop the reference to Tiannamen Square!  But I think it's important to deal with those things, although in a different way, otherwise you're just sloganeering and it can come across as exploitative.  That was stunning news footage, one individual stepping in front of a tank.  Nothing has struck me that powerfully since."  Maybe when Severin gets to America again he'll find something gross enough to stir him up.

The band are heading across the ocean this summer to perform with Jane's Addiction, Ice T, Nine Inch Nails, Living Colour and the Butthole Surfers on the Lollapalooza tour.  It's to be a traveling festival with music, art, politics and access to all information from gun associations and the army to ecological concerns fringing the aural delights.  A stab in the fat belly of the 90's, it's an ambitious and imaginative way to get people to dance like maniacs for a day and invite then to do some worthwhile thinking into the bargain.  Perry Farrell, lead singer and eccentric genius with Jane's, is behind the circus and bring an avid Banshee fan, he required their involvement.

"We were the first band they approached, and in fact the only English band playing.  I like the idea because it's ambitious and it doesn't really matter how well it works as long as everybody's having a good time."

Severin claims the Banshees would have been involved if the only other attraction than the bands had been a hotdog stand.  But he obviously gets a kick out of the subversive elements - and possibly shaking any aspiring Bob Geldof's upside down by their ankles along the way.

"Lollapalooza is in a way what everyone's saying about the alternative culture with it's own newspapers and following.  It's kind of an anti Band Aid thing.  Of course it's great that people raise money for worthy causes, but at what cost?  All the people that do it are well established bands and that's it.  Rock music is not just for that, so if Lollapalooza is successful, it may be able to change things, not radically, but at least it can happen and that's a beginning."  Lollapalooza will be swinging it's dusty way across America as you read this, but as I'm writing it the Banshees are still in rehearsal at The Rainbow in London.

The place has been closed for years and now belongs to some dubious religious sect with evangelist leanings who insist on wandering around the stage during these rehearsals, no doubt looking for satanic symbols hidden in the roadies' bootprints and voodoo dolls behind the drum riser.  Thank God they didn't find the backdrop.  Severin explains, "It's from this area in the middle of India where there are 20 remaining temples out of 85, left over from the 10th century, and they're covered in erotic carvings.  I found a book on it a couple of years ago and I began writing a song about it.  Then strangely enough, we turned up at Top Of The Pops and they'd really made an effort with the set.  Part of it was these relief figures, like jelly moulds, of two of these erotic carvings.  We thought it was great, but they decided it was a bit too saucy for 7.30 viewing in the end.

"I did some reading up about it, and I found this essay by an Indian academic about how people find these things pornographic.  He was trying to explain why they were there and the connection with religion.  It's something we got into before with 'Cities In Dust' - the idea of fertility rites.  This one was actually about Tantra, the ritual sex that's supposed to bring you closer to enlightenment, but it quickly became used by the priests to bring in loads of temple girls.  They turned it into an excuse, like most societies do.

I guess now we're in an age where that sort of thing is promoted by advertising, the idea of consumerism being sold by sex, and it's not really aligned to religion anymore.

Christianity put an end to that.  "Spiritual sex, ecological awareness, tribal laments and Hollywood tragedies - it's all here.  More than ever.  Nearly billed as 'Thirteenth Hour' (being their 13th album if you count 'Nocturne' as a double), the name was changed for no particular reason, any concurrent thread running through the album being notably absent.

"There's a good reason for superstitions though, a lot of them are based on rational fears.  personally I'm very superstitious, particularly in work.  Everything has to be done in a certain way.  It's more of a psychological thing, you want a series of events to happen and if they don't happen in a certain way you feel... well, I believe in good and bad omens and coincidences.  But it doesn't preoccupy me."  Don't believe a word of it.  He spent three years fretting about those gold lurex socks.

Liz Evans 08/91

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This is, after all, a band who came in to being by playing an extended free form version of "The Lord's Prayer", complete with Sid Vicious on drums and future Adam Ant Marco Pirroni on guitar, at London's 100 club in 1976.  Fifteen years later, after a succession of albums that saw Siouxsie (whose given name is Susan Dallion) and bandmates Steven Severin, Budgie, Martin McCarrick, and Jon Klein, restlessly turn over their sound without regard to current style or fashion, the Banshees are no less quirky or difficult to pigeon-hole.  They were, early on, a relentlessly grim band, most easily characterised by their abrasive style, and yet their biggest hit prior to this year was a techno-dance track called "Peek A Boo," from their 1988 release Peepshow.  More recently, their single "Kiss Them For Me," was the second most popular modern rock track of 1991 (according to Billboard magazine), while the Gavin Report gives their album Superstition, an eccentric blend of alternative instrumental turns, Eastern mysticism, otherworldly eroticism, and tension, similarly high marks in terms of college radio play.  behind the scenes the album marked the departure of long-time producer Michael Hedges, who had worked with the band since the early 80's, and the signing on of Stephen Hague, whose previous credits include the Pet Shop Boy's "West End Girls", New Order's "True Faith", and Pere Ubu's "Waiting For Mary."

Which, in a round-about-way brings one right back to the question of just what this band is about anyway, and by extension, just what was the essence of punk.  "It wasn't like 'I've read all the books you've read,'" says Budgie.  "Punk was a whole way of life: fending for yourself and doing what you wanted to do.  It was a bunch of people at a certain time and place saying, 'We don't need established BBC radio to do things.  We don't need established official cinema to show films.'"  And it was something, the Banshees' percussionist goes on to say, that caught on despite "the tabloids" efforts to contain it and make it safe.

"Once they do that, the industries take over and you get your token punk on a sit-com.  Innovation doesn't come from the big corporations, it comes from people who are willing to do the leg work on their own."

What did Stephen Hague bring to the last album that you thought was missing in the past?

Siouxsie:  I suppose he brought in a bit of discipline, maybe.  He's very deliberate and very methodical, whereas we tend to throw things at the wall and if anything sticks, it'll stay.  So we sort of approached this project quite differently, but we also got him to work a bit differently as well, recording stuff live and that sort of thing.  We're looking forward to the next thing we do with him and expect to do a lot of things live then too.

Were you the person that decided 'We need this discipline' or did someone else come along and say, 'If you did it this way it'd be right'?

Siouxsie:  I think it was something that we knew we had to find, and Stephen Hague had been pursuing us for a few years, and it was just the right time at the right place, so we considered using him, and obviously we had to meet him to make sure it wasn't just a jobs-worth person that we were going to work with.  We had to make sure we had similar ideas and taste.  We certainly didn't want to have somebody discipline us that we didn't either respect or get along with.  So we met him about a year and a half ago, in Santa Monica, when he was working with Robbie Robertson, and we seemed to hit it off pretty well and Superstition was the result of that.

At this point in your career, how would you describe the creative relationship with the band?

Siouxsie:  Pretty chaotic.  There's no set way of working.  It tends to be, I'll have a very strong idea - be it a lyric or the music or the mood - or someone will be playing something, just doodling, and I'll pick up on it and say, 'What's that?'  And magnify it and make it into something.  Or someone will bring in an idea and we'll work on it.  Some things just happen spontaneously, for instance "Softly" was written in the rehearsal studio with just Martin (McCarrick) and Steve (Severin) playing something and me sort of part ad-libbing off of an idea that I had, and then us working it out together after we'd taped it and decided it was something worth doing.

Budgie:  (On Superstition) some of the songs started with (Steven) Severin coming to grips with a computer, which was kind of a new way of working for him, and coming in with sequences of music.  Which in turn was a great way to begin working with a new producer, because they could communicate quickly by transferring discs of information from computer to computer.  That was one kind of direction that was happening.  Meanwhile there'd be a lyric that was in constant development, and maybe a melody as well.  Then of course we went into residential rehearsals where you just kind of kick around a lot of musical ideas and stuff.  I was playing around with a lot of different rhythms and beats - as usual - and even as we got to the recording studio, where we were actually laying down tracks and things, we still kept little areas of the studio building available for people to escape to in order to create.  'Under the stairs' we called it.  There was a little closet under the stairs and it was, 'Who's in the closet today'.

And some of the things written in there, like "Spiral Twist," ended up as B-sides.  We actually had more than enough songs this time around, causing us to toy with the idea of a double album at one point (laughs).

What do you say to people who might consider composing on computers as the antithetical to the idea of rock and roll as organic music?

Budgie:  But look at rock and roll, or whatever you want to call it; the whole things came about only because equipment got amplified.  When Hendrix picked up an electric guitar and started making noise with it, the whole excitement came from the switch from what Elvis was doing or something.  It suddenly became different because people were using the equipment that was new at the time, and I think it would be wrong to say, 'Oh well, this is as far as it goes.  We can't use this because it's new, it's modern, and we don't understand it.'  People are always frightened by new innovations, afraid, in a sense, that those innovations are going to take over and they'll lose that kind of organic integrity of the truth or something.  It just means that you've got to be careful that it doesn't get out of hand and you're not used by it.  You have to use computers the same way you use a recording studio, which itself is just a massive piece of technology.

Was creating "Kiss Them For Me" any different from creating things that were... less successful in the past?  Was there something you consciously did differently?

Siouxsie:  No. (laughs) In a word.  And that's pretty much the way most singles start out, in that they're not normally written as singles - it all depends on how they turn out.  "Peek A Boo" was a song that was going to be a B-side and as that progressed we thought, 'Oh, that should be a single.'  It wasn't written as a single, but it turned into one.

Budgie:  It's funny because it seemed to me that "Peek A Boo" was to Peepshow what "Kiss Them For Me" was to Superstition.  It's the one song that was pushed right to the limit, in a sense.  We laid way any barriers at all and we were constructing something entirely new, not really knowing what it was going to sound like.  The song is peaking at the point that you hear it, in a construction sense anyway.  It went way out there.  (laughs)  And what can I say, if people picked up on it, that's great.

What propels the way the band keeps reinventing itself from album to album?

Siouxsie:  I suppose just our giving ourselves enough space in-between albums.  We're very aware of not wanting to repeat ourselves and going too quickly from one album into another, as if it's a continuation.  We realised very early on that every new album needed its own identity.  You need to sort of gear yourself up in that frame of mind for it.

Budgie:  It gets back to the fact that you want to do 'another' album.  We don't want to just tread water and do something we've already done.  people always want to define what it is that groups do, but our sound is the fact that we keep reinventing it.  However, I'm sure that somehow it becomes apparent that the members of the group are integral to the sound of the band and that's what makes the Banshees the Banshees.  If you're just fulfilling another commitment, doing something that you're not really motivated to do, that's when you end up with something routine.  We've always avoided that.

Why is it that this band was able to survive when a lot of your contemporaries, people like the Clash and the Sex Pistols, didn't?

Siouxsie:  I think because of the openness of it.  We've always said that as soon as we feel trapped or for some reason unable to do things the way we want to do them, then we wouldn't do it anymore.  And we've held on to it belonging to us all the way through and not really relinquishing anything to anyone.

Early on I imagine you thought of your music as a way to combat some of the staleness that had entered what we now refer to as classic rock.  Do you still see your music as a vehicle through which you're rebelling against... whatever you want to rebel against?

Siouxsie:  I think obviously the impetus of how we were born was very much a direct result of what was going on around us.  And the thing you just mentioned was a part of it.  But also the way London was as well.  There were a lot of closed doors.  And as you progress you end up having your own demons to exorcise.

In other words, the further you go along, the more it becomes a process of looking inward at yourself.

Siouxsie:  I suppose so.  Obviously you're still effected by outside elements, but I think... yeah, I suppose it's more inward.

Now you mentioned closed door before.  What did you mean by that?

Siouxsie:  Well you were saying musically that things were very stale, but also it had become a very insular thing, which it should never be.  It should always be very open to anyone who has got something to do or say.  That was what was very exciting in that all of a sudden you didn't have to be able to afford to but equipment or take lessons in how to play an instrument or go to music college or whatever.  It was something that could work on the spur of the moment and on the energy of what you were feeling as opposed to any privilege you might have, being introduced with the music business.

You recently played C.W. Post, and it seemed like the majority of people in the audience were young enough to have been only five or six when the Banshees came together...

Siouxsie:  Or not born.  (laughs)

Do you think they get where the band is coming from?  Is it important that they get what the band was about back then?

Siouxsie:  No.  I think it's important that it means something to them now.  Right here and now.

When you look out at the kids in the audience today, do you see a youth movement?

Budgie:  The only thing that I can see at the moment that certainly grew out of what the kids wanted, and that nobody saw coming, is Nirvana, whose success, I think, reflects the fact that they've just had enough of House Music and Acid House and the Manchester scene.  That's the way it seems to me, but whatever it really is, I probably don't know about it.  (laughs)

Are record buyers as or more open-minded as they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago?

Siouxsie:  I think there will always be a portion of the record buying public that will be (open-minded).  I don't think they're the majority, but I do feel that there will always be a section of the audience that is open and seeking something that is expressing what they feel as well.

Do you think that the success of Superstition can be attributed to the fact that as the band matures it's actually becoming a more professional unit?

Budgie:  No I don't.  I would hope it's because people are getting genuinely excited by something we've done.  We are as 'professional' as we would like to be, in the sense that there are things that we consider doing, like coming into Geffen and doing interviews.  There are certain things you do.  But when you're in the studio, that's private.  That's not a profession that's your lifeblood.  That's what you do.  That's what comes out.  So the last thing in your mind is what comes into gear after the studio part is finished i.e. meeting with people and even touring to a certain extent.

When you started with this rock and roll thing, did you ever think that this is where you'd end up?

Siouxsie:  Oh no.  There wasn't really any concept of what the future would hold - and there still isn't.  It was really just a case of our doing what was right (at the time).  I mean, the band started with the idea that we'd do ten minutes and that was going to be the only show, and it's gone on from that - for reasons partly out of our control and partly in our control.  I like to keep it open in that way.

Danny McCue 20/01/92

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From their punk origins, Siouxsie & The Banshees have maintained a highly individual musical career for nearly sixteen years.  With part two of their greatest hits compilation, Twice Upon A Time, out this month we ask original members Siouxsie Sioux and bassist Steve Severin if it was love at first sight?

Siouxsie Sioux

We met after a Roxy Music gig in 1975.  I bumped into a friend of mine on the train going home.  She had a friend with her, blond hair and tight drainpipes, who turned out to be Steven.  I started chatting to him and her boyfriend and we just sort of fell together into this gang.  From then on we did a lot of things together.

There was a definite link between people like Roxy Music, Bolan and Lou Reed and what we were doing.  Steve and the others in the gang looked and dressed in a very ambiguous way that really highlighted the feminine aspects of them.  That was a revelation to me and I remember thinking that Steve looked so totally different, that he must be interesting.

There were no places to go for people like us to go.  I introduced Steve and the rest of them to gay clubs where we could just blend in.  There was never this dreadful attitude you got everywhere else.  When we went to clubs in the suburbs it was 'Don't touch my bird or I'll smash your face in.'  They felt very threatened by the way we looked.

After we'd been together for a while, going to clubs, parties and gigs, they told me about this band they'd been going to see.  The Sex Pistols, who were really beginning to create a few waves.  I vaguely knew who the Pistols were because by then I was starting to wear clothes from Malcolm McLaren's Sex boutique and they were being talked about.  It was round that time when it all seemed to get an identity and the punk thing happened.  By the time the whole Bill Grundy TV 'fiasco' had happened they'd coined a label for us so they could start hating us with some sort of unity.  It was very amusing.

I was rebelling against the typical images of women that were in music then.  Girls were a million miles from what I could relate to.  We seemed to fit together really well.  Olivia Newton John, people like that, all that prissy stuff was so alien to me.

The first gig we did as the Banshees was in 1076, Steve was on bass, Sid Vicious on drums and Marco Pirroni on guitar.  It was a totally spontaneous thing because we hadn't really rehearsed or anything.  The slot on the bill at the first punk all-nighter came up and we said "We can do that" even though we didn't have any songs or even a proper band for that matter.  Steve didn't know one end of a guitar from the other at that time but it didn't matter.  You just had to be part of it.

The Clash said we could use their gear but once they saw Sid with his swastika T shirt on they said "If you want to use our amps then take the stupid T-shirt off Sid."  Sid said "Fuck off, we'll use someone else's."  I think it was the Subway Sect who gave is theirs in the end.  We played anyway and I did this twenty minute recital of The Lord's Prayer.

Steve Severin, Bassist

I actually remember the Roxy Music gig in 1975 where I was introduced to Siouxsie by a friend.  It was just before she'd started wearing the stuff from Malcolm's shop and she'd got on this amazing puffball dress with ruffles, a sort of mermaid looking thing, that she's got from this theatrical costumers in London.  I thought she looked great because there was no one else at the gig who'd dressed up like she had and she looked amazing.  Really eyecatching.

I didn't really meet her properly until later that year and it was just under a year after that before we got a band together.  Things were really changing fast then and as soon as the Pistols started to happen then we started to move too.

The first gig was something you could never forget.  I was bloody loud and about the third time I'd actually seen a bass guitar in my life and only the second time I'd actually played one.  I don't think you could reasonably call it playing the bass.  I made a noise put it like that.

I can't look back on that time with any degree of seriousness, still less believe it was an important moment in rock history because it was all such a big joke to us.  A giant wind up.  I think the establishment began to get very threatened by us all.  Imagine today anyone being arrested for playing a gig on a boat the way the Pistols did.

We felt under threat personally some of the time and it wasn't an easy period at all because we looked provocative, and that jarred and rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way.

I remember we went to Paris to see The Pistols and this gang of French teddy boys jumped us in a back alley and had a go at us with knives.  That was pretty hairy!  It was quite frightening being at our gigs for a good few years too.  Unthinkable now with everything controlled so precisely.  Violence became a common theme at our gigs.  Once when we did a Mencap charity event they ripped up the whole of the front row of seats and I can vividly recall a huge burgundy velvet seat flying towards me on stage.  I spent the whole gig dodging missiles.  That's really what it was like then.

10/92

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