Pop's Royal Couple?

Ten years ago Siouxsie and the Banshees were punk rebels, tearing down the bastions of rock and society. But are they now only part of the cosy '80's establishment, the handsome heads of a new royal family? Kevin Murphy asks if they're still a dark, menacing shadow over music. Peter Anderson turns the spotlight on Sioux and Severin.

The story of the Banshees has been told in myriad ways. Their utterances have been neatly wrapped in a cocoon of intellectualism.

Those glorying in their dissection have pained long and hard over their worth in language not normally afforded a mere pop band.

Why have the Banshees warranted such treatment? Are their scream-filled tales hinting at more?

Those who have crossed their path and felt the lash of Siouxsie's scything tongue have hit back from the safety of their typewriters. And in the face of such ignorance the Banshees' intolerance and mistrust has been sold as arrogance.

As articulate spokesmen for a generation of lost souls, seeking solace in a nocturnal world, the Banshees have been heralded as the initiators of a gothic movement that preens and dreams; and it hangs like a noose above their heads.

The Banshees are now ten years and nine albums old.

The years have done little to weaken their resolve. The make-up and ideals remain intact. Ten years has seen them elevated from acidic pretenders to establishment--a role they're constantly defending. Their latest album, "Tinderbox," romps and swoons with all the majesty of "Dreamhouse," and so casts off the laboured millstones of "Nocturne" and "Hyaena" which threatened to be laid at their grave. "Tinderbox" is a refreshing slant on the Banshees' disturbing perspective and restores their vivid shades to pop's pale palette.

After my endorsement of their new-found lust, I was informed they wished to restore links with Sounds and, perhaps feeling an enthusiastic ear would be a sympathetic one, I was chosen.

And so it was that at four one morning, I found myself in Cologne's Holiday Inn with Siouxsie, the Banshees' queen, perched at the end of my bed and her prince, Steve Severin, in a near-by chair. They had just completed three European dates--Brussels, Amsterdam and Bonn--in preparation for their first major assault on the States.

Involved as I am in the exhilarating world of rock 'n' roll, even I am not at my best at such an hour, even if the animated conversation of this pair showed *their* resilience. What metamorphosis was it then that has changed these mere mortals into the precious personae of the printed page?

Perhaps people take the Banshees *too* seriously.

"I don't think we warrant analysis," Sioux replies.

Surely simply by setting yourselves up onstage you're vulnerable to analysis.

Sioux: "It's hardly set up. I mean, it was a very naive thing to do to form a group anyway. Completely thoughtless and very naughty, horrible of us to unleash ourselves on people. Completely selfish. To an extent, you can analyse what a song is, or what a group is but there are generally a lot more important things you don't talk about."

You're always talked about in very reverential tones.

Steve: "We've been victims of some terrible purple prose. It's nothing to do with us, it's just people tend to launch off into some very strange areas when writing about us."

Would you like to be seen as a band with humour?

Sioux: "With fun rather than humour."

Following the birth of the Banshees, legions of pale imitations hurried in your wake, and so a generation of gothic monstrosities were spawned.

Steve: "It was quite weird watching the support group tonight and thinking it was very obvious that we must have come into their influence somewhere along the line, but in a narrow way."

Sioux: "But it's completely humourless and ridiculous that they call themselves Christian Death. For us to be perpetrators of the goth government, which is what's been thrown at us, bemuses us."

How do you see yourselves?

Sioux: "Not as goths. I can imagine The Damned influencing the goths."

Steve: "I was sitting at the side of the stage listening to their sort of thing and thinking that we were starting with 'Cities In Dust,' which was a universe away from what they were doing--it's just a really happy pop song--and thinking where does it all connect? It's really bizarre."

Perhaps it has to do with people picking up on the subversive side of your music.

Sioux: "People are confused by the fact that we do songs like 'Tattoo' and 'Obsession,' which are wrongly classed as horror, which I hate. And into black, I mean, the words 'black,' 'gloomy' and 'doomy' have been used so much about us. I just think those songs are the hidden side, rather than the overt side, as opposed to black. I hate 'black' as an adjective."

Steve: "Somehow, 'Ju Ju' set off all this goth thing. I think we've done one goth album and that was 'Join Hands,' in '79 for God's sake."

"The subject matter wasn't goth," Sioux adds indignantly.

"It has gothic overtones," explains Steve.

"Burial overtones. *Burial*," corrects Sioux.

Steve: "Take someone like Bowie, the things he was actually writing around 'Ziggy Stardust' and 'Aladdin Sane' were completely at odds with the way people thought about him or why they were into him."

"They pick up on the superficial aspects of the way Sioux looks. The way we might mention death every now and then. But there's so much more to it than that. Take 'Dreamhouse,' there's nothing goth about that at all."

"There isn't...it's herbal," laughs Sioux.

The Banshees' music has always had a uniformity, but within its spectrum there has always been room for pop.

Sioux: "I don't think it's a deliberate strategy, but both are vital for each other to remain healthy."

Steve: "Anything that's popular tends to have many sides. Someone like Prince you can take on many different levels; nothing too intellectual about it, but in a way there is because it's clever."

Sioux: "There's a lot of lunacy in it, which I like."

Steve: "You don't usually get lunacy without some intelligence."

Prince's sense of humour has never been questioned.

Sioux: "No, but it would probably sit much better if we looked like Dire Straits. The fact that we're handsome little bastards goes against us."

Why, because people don't take you seriously?

Sioux: "They don't want to take us seriously."

When The Clash wrote "No More Elvis, Beatles, or The Rolling Stones" as a reflection on the state of the music business with its antiquated regime of superstars stifling the development of fresh talent, it was taken as a slogan to be chanted by the voice of punk.

This new breed vowed to change things, and as the Banshees were amongst its hierarchy their word became folklore. Early pieces were punctuated with scathing quips about the redundant dinosaur age, how life ended at 25. Their music and stance were focused on teenage rebellion.

Ah, the impetuosity of youth.

The Banshees are no longer 25 and the years have seen them join the ranks of superstars they once despised. Irony moves in such glorious circles.

Steve: "I think it's really strange that in the last couple of years, it upset us all for a time, we've been treated as though we shouldn't be here, we'd outstayed our welcome. But we've got through that. The way we started and the way we've done things has always been a precedent, maybe not on a grand scale but a precedent nonetheless. I don't know how people can take the argument for getting rid of Genesis and getting rid of Yes from ten years ago, and apply it to a different bunch of people."

Sioux: "We haven't replaced Genesis or Yes by any means."

Steve: "People seem to miss the point that the whole reason to get rid of Genesis and Yes was because the music was fucking tedious, not because they were ten years old. I don't think that applies to us."

Genesis probably felt the same as you.

Sioux: "The groups we've mentioned are men groups. Budgie and John knew Led Zeppelin, and they probably were good, but those sort of groups leave me cold. To me they were very much boys' groups."

But in the same way as you feel what you're doing is different they probably felt they, too, were vital.

Sioux: "How can Phil Collins ever have felt different?"

Steve: "I see what you're saying, but I wouldn't give people like that the benefit of the doubt. It's another decade, for God's sake."

Sioux: "There are different values for a start."

Steve: "It's not as if we're sitting in Santa Monica or Beverly Hills saying, 'We're not talking to Sounds or NME, they're slagging us off.' There is a certain responsibility to face up to all those questions, but we're not going to defend what we're doing because we're confident what we're doing is the right thing."

"It goes back to that Quantick thing. (A recent NME interview by David Quantick who confessed to them he hated 'Tinderbox' and wondered why they carried on.) I mean, we probably won't do an interview with the NME for another of couple of years now. If they're going to have that attitude, we're not going to waste our time."

Sioux: "They've always had that attitude. No one has actually said to our faces, from *that* paper especially, something we're doing *now* is good. They have to rely on the ammunition that what you did last year was brilliant, but what you're doing now is shit."

"It's almost like they're the biggest dinosaurs ever: an artist makes money when they're dead, like something that went before was good but at the time they were too narrow-minded to see it."

Is one of the reasons you carry on because it's safe; you know what's coming next, your immediate future is neatly planned?

Steve: "No. I think our lowest point came after Robert's (Smith) departure, that was when we started to think about whether we should carry on."

Sioux: "I'd say the lowest point was when John and Kenny left."

Is the reason you carry on to spite people like them?

"Spite keeps us going," smirks Sioux.

Have you achieved as much as you'd have liked?

Sioux: "No, not at all. I don't care about sales, I just want to make the definitive album for us, and we haven't done it yet."

Would you know if you did?

Sioux: "Yes, I think 'Dreamhouse' came close."

If and when you achieve this, would you call it a day?

Sioux: "I think so, yes."

But having achieved the ultimate Banshees album, you might turn round and think, "Well, if we've managed to achieve this who knows what else may lie ahead?"

Sioux: "Then maybe we might have to learn how to enjoy success, 'cos we've never managed to do that."

Steve: "I would imagine success would give you two things--freedom and time; time to sit back and think. But we've never achieved that; it's always been on and on."

Sioux: "It's irrelevant whether something's going to be successful or not, it's taken for granted it's not."

So you're pessimists, ha?

"No, just realists," comes the synchronized reply.

So, what is your ultimate ambition?

Sioux: "To be as huge as the throwaway people, but without changing."

Does change mean compromise?

Steve: "I can't think...I may be completely wrong...we've actually said we wouldn't compromise. Maybe we did in the first few years. The whole idea of a single is a compromise."

Sioux: "You compromise to make it sound fab on the radio."

So if someone offered you enough money to play Wembley Stadium, say, you would?

Steve: "Oh Lord, yes."

If your ambition is to become the biggest then surely any compromise is justified?

Sioux: "No. It's important to be the way we've always wanted to be."

Steve: "No one should ever step into a group unless they think: a) they hate every other group; and b) that they can be better than everybody else. That's the reason we started. We want to be happy at the end of it. We don't want to be Madonna."

What's wrong with Madonna?

Steve: "I don't think she's very happy."

Sioux: "I think that kind of thing inspired Bowie to write 'Fame,' the uncontrolled fame and overkill."

Steve: "There's not a lot of honesty in what Madonna writes. What we completely lack is selfish ambition. The sort of ambition people like Patsy Kensit exude is totally alien to us."

Sioux: "My ultimate goal is to mean as much to someone as my favourite pop star meant to me when I was 16 or 17."

If you'd felt like that you'd have given up nine years ago, for that's exactly what's happened.

"Really?" Sioux asks, somewhat surprised.

Being huge, but on your own terms, seems to be the stumbling block.

Sioux: "There's always a catch. We want to have our cake and eat it...and that's what I want."

Do you ever worry that the whole Banshees corporation will get too large, too impersonal and ultimately cause your demise?

Steve: "It's one of the first things we talked about with our old manager, Nils. He wanted a Banshees logo on top of a skyscraper, eventually. One of the things he did after seeing our first shambolic gig was to say, I want to see you on Magpie. And we thought, Brilliant, we'd  love to be on Magpie playing this nonsense. That attitude permeates everything we're doing."

Why don't you do things like Saturday Superstore?

"We were on the Wide Awake Club and made some marzipan bumblebees," Sioux explains proudly.

Do you like all that?

Sioux: "I prefer that to a music programme. I think we're much better out of context."

Why don't you do more, is it because you're not asked.

Sioux: "No, it's just that I don't like doing any kind of promotion."

That's the game you have to play, though.

Steve: "I re-evaluated all of that when I saw George Michael on The Aspel show, he was really, really good at that. I'm not particularly keen on their music or what they're doing, but it was more honest than most of those type of people. Like, if we're classed as goths then I can refer to them as *those* type of people."

Do you resent him?

Steve: "I don't resent anybody, we both want our just desserts, basically."

And you haven't had them?

Steve: "I think people have worked a lot less hard and been a lot less inspired and got a lot more out of it than we have."

You've constantly appeared frustrated that people have tended to lump you in with other pop groups. What would you regard as the prime difference between, say, you and the Bunnymen?

Sioux: "I can sing."

Is that important?

Sioux: "To be honest that's not the reason. I don't like male singers that get all their cues from Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed or Bowie."

But, with respect, you're a woman so there is that vague chance that it might sound a teensy, weensy bit different?

Sioux: "Well, I've based myself on those four and I don't sound like them. I think if McCulloch had based himself on Eartha Kitt, it may have been more interesting."

Sioux purrs a glorious Catwoman purr.

"She's brilliant. What a dame."

Will Susan Dallion (real name) become redundant?

Sioux: "No. I'll just be able to live completely in my own head. I'll just desert everything."

How long will you keep it going?

Sioux: "I can imagine myself at least 2,000 years old, with banks of cats and banks of stone male statues. The best question that most women ask is, 'Would I ever do a TV interview without any make-up?' And I say, laaaaawd no! Well, unless I was feeling especially vindictive and I'd turn everyone to stone, if they saw me."

What excites you?

Sioux: "Just things like when I see a rabbit on the motorway and point it out, but no one else sees it. Once I get over nerves, every concert's exciting."

Add a token concession to their humble plans for world domination, they're shortly embarking on their first extensive tour of America.

Do they have much respect for the natives?

Steve: "No. None whatsoever."

Why bother going then?

"Cos there's always a load of misfits," Sioux adds mischievously.

Steve: "It seems to be a catchphrase wherever we go; like, Amsterdam's nice, it's a shame it's full of Dutch people."

Do you fall in love easily?

Sioux: "I try not to. It takes up too much time."

Isn't it exciting?

Sioux: "Not if you're looking at the watch."

Does the idea of three kids and a house still repel you?

Sioux: "Yes."

Why?

Sioux: "It's boring, very boring. 'Specially when you think three kids were three babies before that. *Yeeeuuucch!* Hate babies. I think babies are the ugliest things ever."

"Three adopted boat children might be fun," chips in Steve.

"Put them on a stick," adds Sioux with glee.

Is it hard work being a Banshee?

Steve: "That's the question you should ask John."

Sioux: "It's as easy as pissing to us. Some people have got blocked bladders, though."

Finally, what ambition do you have beyond the Banshees?

Kevin Murphy 10/05/86

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It was unlikely.  Who could miss the Matt Black Princess, creator of the Gothic look which has inspired untold numbers of adolescent girls (not least Mary of East Enders) to ransack the make-up counter and emerge with faces you could play chess on, and owner of a gravity-defying hairstyle that has launched more cans of hairspray than Bet Lynch?

It's true that if you didn't live breathless with excitement through the rise of punk rock in the late 70s, you might be unaware of Siouxsie & The Banshees as a musical phenomenon, even though they have maintained their success (25 hit singles and albums) through ten years of the fickle music scene.

But even if you couldn't pick her voice out from the rest of the Radio 1 mélange, Siouxsie is not someone you could pass on the street without a second glance.  For even in a world seemingly swallowed by the matt black aesthetic and full of ghoul-faced pop rebels, Siouxsie has always stood out, a voodoo Barbie doll in leather and black lace - the original creator of what has become a classic youth style.

So I did recognise her when she appeared, complete with a posse of Siouxsie clones in tow - not, it transpired, an entourage, but fans who'd pounced on her in Piccadilly.  Autographs were graciously dispensed - the first sign that there was more to Siouxsie than her reputed hauteur and disdain.  Yet whatever her underlying personality, aggression has always been an important part of her.  She has been known to put her stiletto heels to more imaginative use than simply walking around in them.

'One of the worse things about this knee,' she said as we sipped Earl Grey, referring to an injury sustained on stage last year and still not fully mended, 'is that I cant wear my stilettos,' I felt reassured - if I said the wrong thing during the interview, I'd presumably still walk out in one piece? 'Not necessarily,' she replied sweetly, brandishing an ivory-headed walking stick.

It was Siouxsie novel and striking appearance that first attracted public attention back in 1976, when as one of the Bromley contingent, a group of Sex Pistols fans who set the sartorial pace on the emerging punk scene, she was sporting the Cat Woman look.  Long before Steven Strange, Boy George and Marilyn proved that you had only to look like a star to become one, Siouxsie and her cohorts had established the principle.

Siouxsie & The Banshees didn't deliberately form as a band so much as just happen, at a punk festival one night in September 1976.  Literally interpreting the punk dictum 'anyone can do it', Siouxsie, fellow Bromley contingent member Steve Severin, Sid Vicious and Marco Pirroni (later Adam Ant's sidekick) clambered on stage and ran through a ramshackle 20-minute version of 'The Lord's Prayer'. 'It was meant to be our 15 minutes of fame,' Siouxsie recalls, 'But we've managed to sustain it for ten years, which only goes to show how addictive dressing up and making a noise for a living can be.'

The Banshee sound, a kind of superior pomp and stomp pop, might be characterised as suburban song noir.  If the look is black, so is the sound, and Siouxsie's lyrics, which abound with references to madness, isolation and claustrophobia.  'I'm a sucker for Hitchcock and psychological thrillers.  I'm fascinated by impossible reality, like the German girl Christine, we wrote about, who was a multiple schizophrenic with 22 different personalities.  If I hadn't been a singer I would like to have been a psychiatrist.'

Superficially, the world of her songs couldn't be much further from the leafy South East London suburb of Chislehurst, where she grew up.  She was the youngest of a family of three children, but with a much older brother and sister she felt more like an only child and she soon became conscious of great pressure to conform.  'I was being pushed into becoming very secure and respectable.  But I'm against going steady, getting engaged, getting married - the whole thing.  I have always been an individual.  I have always hated going round with the crowd.'  So the recurring themes of claustrophobia and isolation don't seem so surprising after all.  Another typical Siouxsie subject emerges in the latest Banshees single 'Candyman' - children threatened by dark, corrupt forces.  Her father died suddenly when she was 14.

Siouxsie makes no apology for the bleakness of her work.  'I like reading and the things I like to read are not usually about jolly subjects.  I couldn't take on a Barbra Cartland book, because to me there's nothing there.  It's the same with songs.  When they're nice and harmless they don't seem to mean anything.'

Doom and gloom apart, the Banshees' music has struck a chord with the record-buying and concert-going public and their popularity shows no sign of decline.  Meanwhile, Siouxsie's style and looks have brought her a different kind of attention, with magazines and photographers such as David Bailey and Terence Donovan nagging her to model for them.  She has usually refused, well aware of the dangers of being turned into a sex symbol, judged solely on her looks, with the band reduced to the status of back-up musicians - in short, of what has happened to Sade.

Instead she is one of the few female pop stars who - unlike Madonna or Kate Bush - has not traded on the tease factor to win attention for her music.  'Right from the start I was conscious that as I was the only girl in the band the record companies would try to turn me into a glamour puss.'

However, we mustn't forget that Siouxsie first caught the tabloid imagination when she went on stage in a no-cup, black leather corset and thigh boots.  Not sexy?  'When you're proud of something you're doing, you don't mind drawing attention to yourself.  But when I did that, I did it more as a confrontation.  I was trying to take the mick out of society's sexual convention.  I was protesting about the attitude that said it was all right for a girl to walk into a club in an uplift bra, but not with breasts bared.'

The image has changed and developed over the years and now, abandoning the blatant aggression of bare breasts, Siouxsie likes to see herself as having more in common with the vamps of the silver screen.  'I like the vamp look because although it is erotic and glamorous, its also wicked and a little bit threatening.'

Above all, at 27 Siouxsie believes that her new, satin-swathed silhouette reflects the tempering of some of the more abrasive aspects of her personality.  'As you get older, you become less strident, less absolutely convinced that you are always right.  You lose that black and white vision of the world.'  Which should come as sweet music to the ears of mothers hoping that the Siouxsie-influenced excesses of their daughters' appearances might be 'just a phase'.

But it is a phase that has lasted ten years already for Siouxsie, and she still displays many of the contradictions associated with adolescence.  For all the imperious hauteur of her stage persona, in person Siouxsie seems rather fragile and waif-like.  With an image that demands attention, but also masks whatever insecurities might lie underneath, it is no wonder she is such an influential model for young girls.

Her adolescent hero, David Bowie, another one fond of mask-like make-up and of adopting personas to conceal his own, always claims to have wanted to turn himself into a living work of art.  As Siouxsie hobbles out of Fortnum & Masons every head in the restaurant turns to follow her slightly wobbly progress and it strikes me that she has come close to achieving this.  She is, along with Grace Jones, one of the few women in pop to rise above the transient status of a sex symbol, to become a true pop icon.  She's up there with Bowie, Bryan Ferry and Michael Jackson, a performer whose image is as classic, ubiquitous, familiar and imitated as a corporate logo.  Every town in Britain has a crop of 'Siouxsies' - and she thought I wouldn't recognise her.

Pat Sweeny 1986

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No, she doesn't live in a gloomy, Gothic castle in the misty wilderness of Transylvania but she does have the odd death-mask or two!

Exterior

"It's in West Kensington, in the basement of this old Victorian house down a quiet side-street. It looks quite unprepossessing from the outside-hardly a 'rockstar pad'! I like basements-they're quite dark and spooky."

Hallway

"I designed the whole interior myself. As soon as you open the front door, you see all these hands coming out of the hallway wall, holding lamps. I ripped that off from the Roman Polanski film Repulsion which stars Catherine Deneuve-there's a fantastically surreal scene where this woman, who's going mad, is having a nightmare, and all these hands begin to emerge from the wall to grab her."

"The floor in the hall, like the rest of the flat, is bare varnished floorboards, with the odd rug for embellishment. The predominant colours are my favourites-white, red, and black."

Living Room

"It looks spacious, basically because there's hardly anything in it! It's very sparse-I don't keep knick-knacks. The only things I've collected are these face masks, hung around the walls, which I've picked up on my travels. They're mainly from Japan, Italy, and Singapore. Some are just fancy-dress garments, but I've got a few death masks too."

"The main feature of my living room is this wrought-iron spiral staircase that leads nowhere. It was actually the thing what initially attracted me to the flat. I saw it and thought, `Mmmm - I like this'. It's a hangover from the house's conversion - it used to lead up into what's now the ground-floor flat."

"I've also got lots of lights on dimmer switches, and hidden lights in places where you least expect them!"

"The main item of furniture in the room is the TV and video. I've got a big video collection. My fave film at the moment is one of those really old late-night horror ones, called The Old Dark House, 'cos there's a character in it who looks just like me!"

Bathroom

"Ah yes, now... I've got two of those! My mum was really impressed when she heard that. Thing is, one of them's really tiny-there's barely enough room to close the door when you're in it! The other one is what I call my 'hell-toilet'-it's like a mini-torture chamber!"

"There are sculptured heads poking out of the wall, bits of exposed brickwork sticking out, and a horrid witch's head I found, with purple hair. It's all in black, with big hairy spiders nailed to the wall. My mum loved it. When my nieces and nephews came over to see me, they wouldn't go in it at all! I was pushing them in, and they were worried that I was going to turn the light off and lock the door. That's my favourite room in the whole flat."

Other Rooms

"Not too interesting, really. The kitchen's always quiet and bare 'cos I hate cooking. The bedroom's also very bare-it's just a room where I go and sleep. And that's all I'm going to tell you about it!"

29/03/86

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SIOUXSIE

"I rarely delve into anything...I usually have a head-on collision with it."

The elegant tea rooms at Fortnum And Mason's in London's Piccadilly may not seem like an obvious location for a meeting with someone as gloriously vampish as Siouxsie, but she fits the surroundings perfectly. Gracious, serene, slightly haughty, she looks stunning in a scoop backed black dress, a full length red astrakhan-style coat and a black fedora.

Heads do not turn because one does not turn one's head in such an establishment. One sips one's Earl Grey tea, nibbles at one's strawberry tartelette (trying not to get lipstick on one's chin) and averts one's glance from far corners, where one tries not to notice Mick Jagger. I've always suspected Sioux has a wicked streak, but today she's being charming and witty. However, she only gives away as much as she wants you to know. So here's the current view from a Sioux...

THE SICK KNEE

"It dislocated completely and came out the other side. It was painful, but it looked much worse -- this kneecap hanging out where it shouldn't be. Complications set in, because I carried on the tour -- the leg was in plaster five weeks when it should only have been two. The plaster came off and it wouldn't bend, it was real horror story stuff. They told me 'yes, well of course the ligaments, have been torn out and they've bled and healed, so there's a lot of gunge and it won't bend', and I was threatened with being put under anaesthetic to have an 'assisted bend'. So I worked really hard with some weights at home, I'd rather be in pain on my own than have a doctor hear me go 'ouch'."

THE CANDYMAN

"It's really to do with grown ups' abuse of children's trust, whether it's sexual or not, the innocence and dependency as well. I just find anything to do with that is repulsive. Pornography or people showing their boobs, that's another thing. I'm not going to be puritanical about any of that because that's all grown ups.

"Our manager thought it was about drugs, the candyman being the supplier or whatever. I suppose it can be translated as that, if you're thinking about young people being used in that way.

"The cover illustration is supposed to be a maypole. Some phallic symbol always seems to turn up...'But there's a huge phallus on it!' (adopts 'Young Ones' voice). The same people that thought it was a druggy song thought that. Freud would have a field day with those people!"

TINDERBOX

"The album's coming out soon, it's called 'Tinderbox'... It's called that because everything seemed to happen either around situations or the effect of weather, and the word conjures up something explosive that's to do with something being combustible, by the fact that the sun's there and it's made it that way, it's not man made. It has that theme to it, although it's all very diverse.

"Does it seem like there's been a long gap between stuff being released? No-one seems to have mentioned it, but for us it was so frustrating all last year. We started recording it last May, for a month in Hansa and had problems with the producer."

DARK SIDES

(I ask why Sioux always writes about people's dark sides, their hidden secrets)... "I don't really like to call them dark sides, I think just the understated unmentionables or just the hidden. When you're honest, your favourite story or film isn't about someone having a wonderful time, life's wonderful, there're no problems and nothing could be wrong. I wouldn't be motivated to go and watch that. I like something more believable, but also more fantastic as well.

"I think there is that darkness in everyone, one of the worst emotions is jealousy and greed and everyone feels it, but it's down to whether you can control that and not let it control you -- a lot of people can't, a string snaps in them. I remember seeing a documentary which said that people who seek to wear uniforms are more likely to abuse their authority -- like boy scout leaders, teachers. Some people relish the abuse of power."

BANSHEE MOVIE STARS

"We went to LA to do this film called 'Out Of Bounds'. It was just us being ourselves in a club scene. There weren't really any stars in it, just a lot of young people, superbrats. It came across as a kind of 'Repo Man'. The director did 'Tightrope', I really liked the tension in that. I just thought it'd be a good thing to see what it was all about appearing in films and not feeling repulsed about doing it, because we've been offered a lot and they always want to make us more punkified. We actually got offered 'The Howling', which on paper sounded perfect-- 'Hyena' was just out, but the script was like clichéd Hammer horror. I got an offer to be a ghost in Mexico as well -- I was quite up for it, it's somewhere I've never been to and I'd go just to be there, but we had commitments here."

CATASTROPHE

"We're survivors because we turn disadvantages into advantages. There've been so many instances where catastrophe has struck the Banshees, but it motivates you once the feet have been put back on the ground again. We probably attract disaster for a very specific reason, it's totally out of our control. It's only in retrospect you realise it, at the time you're devastated. Maybe I'll look back and think 'thank God I dislocated my knee that time'. Certainly it made me sit back a bit... oh no, Godzilla's packed up again, I'll have to ask for a light... it's a good pick-up line ... is there someone handsome here?"

FATE

"Yeah, I suppose I do believe in fate. Again, only in retrospect. When it happens I think dammit, I get really browned off. I don't know how much of a big hand you have in it without knowing it. I'm much happier when I don't have to analyse a situation and somehow things right themselves. Of course you have to be able to be in control, but I much prefer it when it's just... natural-- when things are in the right place and their reason for being there is just perfect."

ASTROLOGY

"I don't poo poo it or anything, I don't disregard it but it's not something I've thought much about. Are you talking about reading your horoscope in the newspaper? Everybody does that whether they believe it or not. A friend of mine is into doing birth charts and offered to do mine, but hasn't got back to me. Probably thought 'my God, this woman's in a mess, I'm not going to give her the news!' Other than that, I haven't delved into it to be honest. I rarely delve into anything, I usually have a head-on collision with it."

THE OCCULT

"Again, to delve into it could possibly be dangerous. Things that I've read, some bizarre tales about some odd bumpings off, all very heavy. I don't know if it's that the people involved are basically evil and they're perpetuating this fear, or if it is actually something that scientists can't explain away. I just think it can be dangerous if you're dealing with something you don't know about. Again, it's a misuse of power."

MY FAIR LADY

"This friend of our photographer is outrageous, he can get any bit of material and make something out of it, and he does outrageous hats. He's in a world of his own, and extremely talented. I've always wanted to try hats on but never have. I'd love to try wigs on. If I knew anyone who had fab wigs, I'd try them on, but to actually go into a department store...

"We just had a play around in the photosession, it was quite refreshing to do. It's just if you're in a mood to be a brat and say 'let's try these on', it's just dressing up, something I always did when I was young. I always fell down the stairs in my mum's stilettos. I clumped down the street and wished I could tape the noise of the heels, I used to love the noise.

"I haven't been able to wear any stilettos since I did my leg in. As soon as it gets better I'm going to get them all out of the cupboard and traipse around in them. It's horrible if you're used to wearing them and towering. I'm 5 foot 8 anyway, but with a heel I can get a six footer out of me. It's wonderful, brilliant. It's such an easy advantage."

PRESSURE

"We're certainly not under pressure because we've never invited it, we've always delivered stuff without being asked for it, or if they do we tell them to go to hell, we're not ready yet. It's a self made situation. There're a lot more people desperate to be famous for 15 minutes now, I think. That shows in the climate at the moment in pop music, there're more people willing to do anything to be famous, even if it's for that brief flash. Good luck to 'em, but they're literally burning their bridges. Maybe it'll just get rid of all those people who are famous for that short time and they'll be replaced by something else. It's certainly more exciting than Dire Straits!"

THE BUSINESS

"Whether you want to be aware of it or not, you are. You can't avoid it. I don't particularly care what's going on really. I'm still enjoying myself, I'm still having fun, thank God for that. I look at other people who are definitely not having fun, again who are very desperate. It's unfortunate for groups just starting off who aren't like that, cos record companies can say 'we don't care for your high ideals, there're a hundred people with no ideals who will co-operate with us'. That's bad."

MOVEMENTS

"I despise movements, to be honest. The Banshees were forever lumped along with a movement that they weren't really much to do with. There were lots of groups who were roped in, like Wire and the Buzzcocks, they were fab, but they weren't 'buy your punk combo outfit'. There was so much of that around, which I hated. All that attitude fizzled out and they looked so dated, and they don't stand the test of time. I thought the ones that were more individual within the movement still stand the test of time. Pete Shelley -- fab, what a cutie. I thought that at the time, I thought what a cutie."

HAPPINESS

(I ask if Sioux is surprised she's so happy in her work) "Yeah, cos so many people are miserable. So many group situations are awful, really. I still don't have much to do with the business, that 'I'm a part of the music business and we're all chums', I've always hated that. I'm still very much looking out from the inside, or looking in from the outside. Most musicians are really boring anyway. I'd much rather talk to people like this man who makes mad hats, they've got much better stories. I hate people who get off on being in the music business. If a cab driver asks me what I do, I might say I'm a secretary or something. It's embarrassing. It can be glamorous, like anything can be, but it depends how you live your life."

AMBITION

"I'd love to have a palace with a swimming pool and I'd love to be able to not need anything... but that's a sandcastle. I mean, it might happen, but I'm certainly not going to lose sleep over it if I haven't got it. It'd be fab if I did. I think everyone's got a goal of having a castle or being totally self-sufficient, making one's own haven. I'd learn to be a maintenance man or something, to maintain everything in perfect working order. That's another vocation!"

FAITH

"To me, that means belief: in myself, I suppose. And the knocking down of all religion, but having your own. I don't have faith in organised religion. I believe that everyone is different and you've got to work out how to impress yourself, and you know that better. Depression and being dissatisfied with what you're doing, how you are behaving or whatever, to control that and master it -- there's an art to that. It's working it out for yourself -- different things apply to different people. I'm always very wary of people who've got plenty of mouth. Never trust a mouther."

CALM

"At the moment I feel very calm about what I'm doing, but it's probably the calm before the storm! But something will slap me down if I get too calm or too smug about it, and rightly so. You can never know it all or do it all. Something will always shock you and you find out more about yourself."

Betty Page 15/05/86

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Crikey. Who's in a bad mood, then? Well, you'd be too if you'd just dislocated your patella and had the inner label of your latest single banned because it was "rude"...

A strange day, October 24. There was Siouxsie, perched in her swanky London hotel room, being a bit provocative about this and that and the next minute--bang!--she's flat on her back on the stage of the Hammersmith Odeon with a dislocated knee. Eurgh! She's "rushed" to hospital where her patella is snapped back into place, and she's kept in for the rest of the night under heavy sedation. Early the next day the specialist reports no permanent damage and so, like a real trooper, she decides to go on with the tour.

But here comes the strange bit: just hours before her accident, Siouxsie had been drinking tea out of a cup and telling me that the "worst possible thing that could happen to a singer on tour is to catch a cold. It's a real nightmare...any second you might croak or squawk. I had a real bad one last week and I'm just about shaking it off"... And then she goes and bangs her knee! Bizarre, eh? But then The Banshees are often getting into scrapes. Their latest single "Cities In Dust," for instance, has caused a bit of a stir - the inner label (of all things) has been banned. "It's all so stupid," says Siouxsie. "The picture we used was over 3,000 years old. It's of a man and a woman together and all those fuddy-duddies at Boots and Woolworth's have decided to put black blobby stickers over the 'offending' bit. But it's really funny because you can still see exactly what's going on. It's so pathetic."

"What I find really annoying," she seethes, "is that people find a bit of titillation perfectly acceptable. Like, it's alright to say 'bristols', but 'breasts' is offensive. They just can't take real life or facts, but innuendo is fine. It's almost like they're trying to ban biology."

But the mystery around the single doesn't end there. There's all these "unnatural coincidences," you see. "'Cities In Dust'" could easily be applied to the Mexico disaster," reckons Siouxsie, "or even the situation with the riots here. But the song was written *well* before any of that. People write into the Banshees' office with cuttings from papers all the time, showing coincidences between our lyrics and current events. It is a bit weird, I must admit."

But does she think there's anything deeply significant about all this?

"No. Not really," she replies, keen not to be drawn into an area where she might come across all supernatural and pretentious. She's far too mature these days for that. But you can tell by the glint in her eye that, sneakily, she'd like to think there was something more to it...

Taking another sip of tea and closing the door of her bedroom to block out the noise of the TV (The Banshees are in the next room watching snooker), we get talking about the subject currently blazing in America--censorship.

"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."

But doesn't she think some Banshees lyrics just go out of their way to shock?

"No. But," she adds saucily, "we do see how much we can get away with. Sometimes." Saucy or not, The Banshees do take their music very, very seriously. "You've got to think or hope that your music helps people get through the day."

So do most bands share that kind of attitude to their music do you think?

"No, I'm sure they don't. I don't think they think like that at all. I've got quite a brutal attitude, I suppose. I get up in the morning and look in the mirror and think 'I'm not going to let you down.' I don't know how most pop stars can even look themselves in the mirror at all, some of the things they come out with."

What else does she feel strongly about?

"What makes me angry at the moment is all this child abuse. Children being left in drawers to die. If there's one thing that makes me go 'aaargh!' (she screws herself up into a ball) it's that. I can understand people lashing out in the heat of the moment but that long, slow cruelty--it just appalls me. A big dilemma for me is working out if these people are mad or just plain bad. It's difficult. If someone starves their child or deprives them of light until they're blind...well, that's just wicked. But capital punishment? I don't know. There's so many complications. Is it worse to lock them away for life? If I had a four year old daughter and she were molested and left dead in a ditch then, honestly, what would you think? Of course you'd want that person dead. You just couldn't help yourself."

Calming down a mite, she collects her thoughts and takes a deep sigh. "I've just got to the stage where I go through life thinking most people are rotten. If they turn out to be nice then it's a pleasant surprise. Actually I think it's quite a cheerful way to look at things.

"All I know is that life is terrible and you better live with it and stop moaning."

A few hours later she'll be flat on her back in hospital with her leg in plaster. Life *can* be pretty bizarre...

Peter Martin 06/86

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Have SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES successfully lobbed another one over the net or are they finally out of deuce?  DAVID QUANTICK engages in a love match with racqueteers SIOUXSIE SIOUX and STEVE SEVERIN.  Umpire:  BLEDDYN BUTCHER

This is a doubles match;  me and my tape-recorder on one side of the net, Steven Severin and Siouxsie Sioux on the other.'

Over the cups in a West End tea-room, we will talk a great deal about the Banshees' new album, 'Tinderbox', their seventh original offering, and one that we find some difficulty in agreeing about.

Back and forth the arguments go; like epic rallies, my words go over to Siouxsie and Steve, and they whack them back at me.

They've done this sort of thing before, seasoned champions of debate that they are, but this time round they're playing on a rather difficult court.

'Tinderbox' is perhaps the least interesting Siouxsie & The Banshees album yet;  only it's deranged predecessor, 'Hyaena', is worse and even that was fascinating for its wilfulness.  This time round, the Banshees seem to have played it very safe, made a record that takes no risks and offers up no surprises.  'Tinderbox' offers up an aspect of the Banshees that one hoped not to see;  competence without verve.

So over the net we go...

FIRST SERVE

Siouxsie is looking at me very politely.  Severin is looking at a tea-pot.  I've just told them that I think 'Tinderbox' is an album whose only distinguishing mark is that it sounds like Siouxsie & The Banshees, and that it has no thrill or excitement to it.

Siouxsie sends the argument back over.

"That kind of accusation doesn't really penetrate because it's been said of every album since 'The Scream'.  As far as reviews go, it's always been, oh, another Banshees record.  That criticism always sounds like the right thing to say from the other side...

Nevertheless, says the other side, they all had an extra edge to them... from 'The Scream' through 'Kaleidoscope', to 'A Kiss In The Dreamhouse', every Banshees LP made you start, do double takes... after the mess of 'Hyaena', it looks like you're afraid to take risks.

"We were unhappy with 'Hyaena' and the memory of how it was put together, and we need to put some distance behind the memory of doing it..."

Severin raises his eyes above tea-pot level.

"It's just basically an album of really strong songs, and that's all we wanted to do.  We just wanted to sit down with the new guitarist (John Carruthers, ex-Clock DVA) and write songs, as opposed to being the Banshees zooming off in one direction or another.  It was all done to be one complete overall album..."

OK, so you've made a nice complete album.  A nice complete staid unadventurous album that's incredibly samey.

"Um," says Siouxsie, "I think it just sounds complete."

With a mighty thwack, I propose that it's complete in its seamless texture, that the Banshees have approached making 'Tinderbox' with that desire for rock consistency so beloved of U2 and Simple Minds.  Severin leaps across the court and hurls an answer back at me.

"An album should be one whole atmosphere and one tunnel vision.  We've done albums where they're all over the place, and within a year you're jumping tracks and the rest of it.  We just deliberately went about making eight complete songs, and the difference between those eight songs is much more exaggerated than you're saying.  And it's a complete insult to say they're like U2 and Simple Minds, 'cos they're nothing like those things..."

I didn't say that;  I said the way you used the texture of recording resembles the saminess of a Lillywhite.  I certainly didn't say 'Tinderbox' sounded like U2.

"No," says Steve in a concessionary mumble.  "I didn't think you did."

There is a pause of several light-years.  Teacups clink vaguely behind us.

First round, 15-love to me.

A SAFE GAME

Severin is back in the fray.  

"I think you haven't got an open mind to it.  Mike Hedges ('Hyaena' producer) always used to say you have to take risks, because people expect you to.  So in that sense people tend not to notice what you do... They expect it to be unusual and unique, and don't really delve into it to see that it really is unique and different from the last one... People expect us to be innovative, and if we aren't, people think were standing still.  It's a very extraordinary situation."

True.  I concede a point.  The world has an insatiable desire for novelty;  in pop music more so than in other fields.  But what you see as a steady development, a solid piece of work, others see as decline.  How many LPs have you made?

"Seven," says Siouxsie.

Well, this business does eat you up...

"Yeah, but we haven't been eaten up".

People say you're all dried up.

Severin gives me one of the most extraordinary looks I will ever see.  Sioux just smiles at me pityingly.  I start to burble about their staidness again;  Severin taps one over to me.

"People says that Tom Waits is dried up, that he's staid.  He must've done 14 albums.  It's an impossible situation;  people only level that accusation at you when you've done seven albums.  We should get a gold bar saying you can now say that we are ten years old, therefore we haven't got any ideas, we've got brain death when we're 28..."

Most people are boring after seven LPs.

"We're not other people," smiles Sioux.

So what makes you unpredictable?

"We've continued being Siouxsie & The Banshees."

Oh great.  And Status Quo have continued being Status Quo.

"Yeah."

Well, it doesn't make them unpredictable, does it?

"No, but I don't think we've ever written a whole batch of songs that sound like the first one."

You've come close this time round...

"Well, explain!" cries Siouxsie.  "Examples!"

Here we go again... that efficient, dull production, those predictable arrangements...

"Yes," she says a touch tersely, and then, like an ever-patient schoolteacher, "I asked you to give an example of repetitiveness, which is what you're talking about in relation to Status Quo."

Oh, just the use of familiar Banshees devices which are quite hard to pinpoint - odd snatches of guitar, the occasional vocal phrase;  you sound like you're repeating yourselves, harking back...

"Again I don't agree;  the uncommerciality of us - which is unintentional - is because we don't hark back;  the wrong thing to do commercially is to release in succession songs like 'Cities In Dust' and 'Candyman'.  They do not follow suit."

Yes they do.  The whole LP is seamless.

"It's very well seamed;  it's all sewn up.  That's what we aimed for."

Severin is now vexed.

"If you look at the actual songs and the way they've been constructed, that's where innovation is.

"I can understand... the seventh album will inevitably sound like the Banshees.  Unless Sioux suddenly transformed into a black woman and me and Budgie left..."

A striking thought, and one that would undoubtedly revitalise the game.

A PARTING SHOT

As games of tennis go, this one has been a bit inconclusive.  Whatever points we may have scored, we haven't scored them off one another;  they don't believe me and I don't believe them.

But I tell them all I meant is today's Banshees are lacking a certain spark...

Siouxsie, all smiles:  "What a shame!"

Severin, leaning away from the tea-pot:  "Maybe that's why the albums called 'Tinderbox'..."

New balls, please.

Dave Quantick 1986

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Just when you thought it was safe to go out at night again, SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES return.  Smarting with fury after their 'Hyaena' was sent packing, their new discipline will not permit listeners the same leeway this time round.

What?  Me happy?  Mind your own business!  Last Wednesday Greta Garbo celebrated her 80th birthday.  Despite 50 years of Hollywood prying, her divinity, her mysteries remain intact.  A remarkable achievement.  Her person stands inviolate, or at least as undefiled as she desires.

This September Siouxsie & The Banshees turned nine years old.  These past few years they have not proven as resistant to the snoops and personality collectors as Garbo, in all her self-imposed solitude, has managed.  The fabulous frieze the Banshees used to present has been nigglingly chipped away by souvenir hunters and well wishers - strangely, their enemies never did them any real harm - until it was flattened out, rendered one dimensionally flush, just like the shriller Banshee haters always said it was.

If the Banshees' record looks poor in comparison, it should be pointed out they work within a more vicious, spiteful, vulturous and impatient popular culture, which sells an altogether baser idea of star.  The Banshees always stated their intention to pursue stardom.  Indeed, they rightly declared themselves stars before any recognised system acknowledged them as such.  That they disdainfully cackled in the face of the media's late acceptance of them served to fortify their star myth.  They intuitively knew they had it - they didn't need anybody telling them back then.

But something got lost in the way of the Banshees' cold resolve.  Those long term Banshee watchers amongst us looked on in horror as the group seemed to become slowly absorbed into the anecdotal chum structure of the music press supporting the pop star system, which reciprocated with gossipy features showing that even Siouxsie could be one of the lads, and, boy, could the Banshees party.  In short, they were no different from the rest of us.  This was the revelation we did not need to be told.

The debilitating process of such amiable articles on their lofty indifference to adoration - paradoxically they were then presented by the same media as suitable candidates for worship - certainly made them less remote.  The more that was shown of them, all these intimate little mask-slip glimpses we were afforded of the Banshees at work and play, suggested they were less in control than they claimed.

Now, the Banshee notion of stardom was never an act of self-elevation, certainly not a matter of them presenting themselves as objects for examination.  It was their way of defining and preserving the essence that marked them out from the rest of the herd, of keeping others from encroaching on their space.

But, not bored with them yet, the media wouldn't let them go.  The more the amiable buffoons buffeted Siouxsie's blackness, believing themselves to be doing the group the favour of rescuing them from the cold, the more they exposed the fallacy of their own undertaking.

The myth of Sioux doesn't so easily fall away, though until their recent European hibernation it had become somewhat tarnished by over-familiarity.  Luckily, the Banshees - namely Sioux and Steve Severin, Budgie and latest guitarist John Carruthers - have phenomenal recuperative powers.

For the followers' part, they did not require any stagey friendliness from the Banshees.  They certainly weren't after some icon to venerate.  They were offered a greater and very real intimacy:  the essence of Siouxsie & The Banshees poured into performance and records.

Hippy? GO shove it!  Gaze across at the face of Siouxsie Sioux opposite.  Now tell me, is there anything more you need to know about her?  Suffice it to say, the baubles have been cleared out with the babble, gone with the gaggle of geese establishing their pecking orders elsewhere.  Their attention span didn't stretch to the Banshees' silence.  After a year away, a summer spent working on a new LP in Berlin and a tour of out of the way places across the continent, the Banshees returned a renewed and thereby invigorating force.  No radical departures, they have relocated their capacity to surprise, stir and even motivate.

"Something you brought up in your Belgian review (from the costal resort town of De Panne), " recalls Siouxsie, as we cast ourselves adrift in the tourists of Queensway, packing back and forth between a German Konditorei and two deckchairs in Hyde Park, enjoying - Sioux, that is - the anonymity of being amongst foreigners.

"You said we played a lot of new songs that sounded like the older ones.  Well, they do, I suppose.  There's no denying that the Banshees have a sound, whether we're using guitars or stringed instruments, no matter what we're playing it comes out sounding recognisably Banshees.  We do not want to make ourselves sound different just for the sake of it."

Their new songs make room to move within the narrow parameters of the Banshees style.  Sunk in deckchairs, watching the sun go down over London, Siouxsie plays me their forthcoming single 'Cities In Dust', inspired by a visit to Pompeii during the Italian tour.

Budgie's clatter of percussion provides a turbulent expression of the earth spewing forth it's pestilences, while guitar and bass inscribe a laced rhythm/melody with the churning fear of the inhabitants, combined with a quizzical awe at suddenly being placed at the mercy of natural forces.  And Siouxsie's lyric is the free-frame of a city petrified for all eternity, it's distraught citizens final seconds, spent nobly or otherwise, here preserved for all to see.  As with Siouxsie's best work it places the concrete reality of the event in opposition to the way we are invited to see it now, contrasting the view presented to the tourist - "It's really awesome, but at the same time quite sad," she elaborates, "dusty bodies, an empire buried in dust;  brats have graffiti-ed the wall, while their parents have to be reminded what to do with their litter, before-and-after bootleg books on sale outside..." - and her imaginative reconstruction of the catastrophe.

Destruction on such scale, natural or otherwise, echoes through the ages, particularly in the 20th Century, which has endowed man with the ability to outdo nature in damage.

"If there were to be a wipe out, I think I would like it to be something natural," posits Sioux

"It's good to know we can be obliterated without all the nuclear hysterics.  That's quite healthy in a perverse way, in that it shows there is no ultimate power really, we are mere mortals after all.  I'd rather be washed away in the tidal waves than by the whim of some far removed person.  But I don't think that'll happen anyway."

Closer to home, Siouxsie's concerns rarely touch on massive fears,  Instead she pinpoints with unerring accuracy those that really get the skin prickling.  The Banshees have never bowed to the twin fears proposed by pugilist author Norman Mailer in his absorbing biography of the existential hipster The White Negro (from Advertisements For Myself, Panther) - they being the atom bomb and the dark shadow thrown across western culture by the concentration camps.  It's critics have accused him, not altogether unfairly, of harnessing catastrophic concerns to render his design for resistance all the more heroic.  The comment could also be applied to some contemporary big issue bombardiers like Weller and Bragg.  The common myth-take about Siouxsie & The Banshees' reputedly morbid fascinations originates in a very basic misunderstanding.  Theirs is not a horror of death.  Its is a horror of being, to which death sometimes comes as a comforting close.

"We are talking about horror in the broadest sense," Siouxsie cautions, "so it could include something like incest.  Otherwise it degenerates into a generalisation I don't like about the Banshees and that's horror in the narrow sense of schlock, eyeballs, brains, the offal factor..."

Broad it is, but that doesn't preclude the narrowing of focus to scan the string-snap precipitating breakdown in an early song 'Suburban Relapse'.  This was, and is, the power of Siouxsie's horror:  it brilliantly illuminates an individual fearfully suspended in one's own living space, one's own hole, one's own body.  This is all one is left with, and it's slowly being eroded by the outside.  One's defences slip away, leaving one prone to the daily bombardment of image, voice, touch, making claims, demanding love, refusing to leave one alone with all that she has got left - one's self.  Normally, of course, one copes with it all quite easily as part of the run of things.  Then that day comes when one is caught offguard, equilibrium out-of-kilter, and one is in no condition to prevent that multiplicity of cells starting work on the irreversible deterioration of the self.

Or, there's always waking up to the true nature of one's normal circumstances and being horrified by the sight.

"... That's too close for me to talk about," Siouxsie lets slip.  "I mean... I do feel totally disgusted with the world quite a lot of the time... horrified and frustrated... well not so much at things that go on in the world, but things that happen to individuals rather than a whole population, the plight of something being done to someone, to a much smaller number, like just one."

The danger of body counts is they become just so many statistics.

"Unfortunately yeah.  But of course people are different.  Some people are moved to do something if they see thousands of people starving rather than just one family hungry down the street or across the hall."

A good or great Banshees song is highly attuned to the effects of horror, be it one inspired by events or, simply, the terror of just being.  The Banshees might not deal out dole queue politics, but they have registered the despair of negotiating endless dimlit pale green corridors, be they in hospitals, mortuaries or office mazes.  They have also, of course, recorded the feats of modern heroes and heroines, who have overcome this horror of being, or perhaps have converted it into revolt into being, accepting their horror as their own, the thing that allows them the right to be.  Elsewhere, in 'Fireworks' and parts of 'Kiss In The Dreamhouse' they've suggested sensual pleasures worth living for.

Just once did they let slip their invaluably tight grip of their own reality, when during the writing of 'Hyaena' Siouxsie and Steve Severin seemed to maroon themselves on a nightmare cornmash of video nasties.

"Oooh," smarts Siouxsie.  "Well, yes, that period we did go through a phase of watching a lot of video nasties, a warped period of staying up quite a few nights a week just watching the things.  I'd just bought a video machine, that was three years ago, and everybody I knew seemed to be, like, in a video nasty club.  I mean, there was a lot of unreality, waking up to video images.  A song like 'We Hunger' arose out of that environment.  I wasn't really living with any subtlety then."

Apart from 'Dazzle', a majestic noise sculpture, rolling on a rhythm lumbering out of control, most of 'Hyaena' felt like the pair had succumbed to the bludgeoning of their chosen viewing.  Guitarist Robert Smith's imminent departure undoubtedly contributed to it's unsettled and half finished nature.  Not only did the LP succumb to the bludgeoning, it follows that it contributed to the same.  The Banshees seemed trapped in a mental landscape from which few report back.

At some point during the Banshees' travels, however, Siouxsie, Budgie and Steve got to grips with the precious thing sliding away from them.  Perhaps sixth Banshee guitarist John Carruthers reminded them of what they once had.  The set they've been trailing around Europe proves they've reinvented that distinct sensibility.  Though at the Belgian festival where I saw them, the cold usually got to me before the frisson, half remembered tunes still haunt.  The Banshees have around a dozen to draw upon when they tour Britain next month.  Due to a split with their producer Huw Jones, the LP many will eventually turn up on isn't due out till the New Year.

Without a record to promote, the tour serves as a throwback to Siouxsie and Steve's pre-signed days, when they struck towns up and down Britain with an alien, bordering atonal rhythm noise, for which there was no real gauge or precedent.  The remembered experience still informs  Banshees concerts.  This has nothing to do with nostalgia - more delayed shock.

Given a high proportion of unheard material, it might be useful to outline some song themes.  Sioux:  

'Cannon':  "It was inspired by seeing a book programme about T. S. Eliot. I think it was.  And it touched upon this freak weather period in the 20's, when it was either incredibly hot and oppressive or ridiculously cold when it shouldn't have been.  Apparently, in desperation about what to do a cannon was shot into this oppressive sky every night in the hope of bursting a rain cloud.  The image of this deserted town, with someone having to stay behind to fire the cannon, stuck with me."

'This Unrest':  "The title is self explanatory.  Not this unrest within society, but within oneself."

'Sweetest Chill':  "It touches on the death of a loved one, being touched by the chill of their presence..."

'Parties Fall':  "It's a slightly sad story about people dressing up all day to go out at nights.  And that's all they do... The parties spoil perhaps when you get too old to do it."

'92 Degrees':  "That was sparked off by a short story I read where crimes would escalate when the temperature reached 92 degrees.  It's about the rising panic of the people who know what's going to happen as the temperature rises towards that number.  I mentioned it to Steve, who'd seen some alien from outer space film, in which, right at the end, a sheriff says:  'Yeah, just about at this temperature everybody goes crazy'."

There is little room for cheap emotion in the Banshees' schema.  Sentiment is misleading, it runs tears that discolour and distract the listener from the song proper.  Due to misunderstandings dating back to 'Love In A Void' Siouxsie, subconsciously or otherwise, has since mostly written in the third person, her neat, telling stories declaimed in a style intended to distance the singer from the situation she is describing.  Thus she avoids any possible confusion of her identity with those of the characters she is speaking through.  The song is presented to the audience without excess mystification.  This is probably what Siouxsie intending by proclaiming herself a star.  The status doesn't furnish her with the excuse to pontificate or condescend to an audience:  it is to bring the Banshee art right up to the spectator, while retaining her privacy.

Again, the need to maintain some distance can partly be traced back to the experience of 'Love In Void'.  Its notoriety inevitably means it is nosily requested.

"I hate the rabble rouser element in the song," remarks Sioux vehemently.  "I just don't like hearing lots of voices roaring their approval.  Sometimes, I'm told we're cruel because we don't encourage that camaraderie spirit.  But I feel if we did - feel the need to perform and be one with the audience and that awful myth - the audience would really despise you for it."

After all these years, and despite all the temptations, Siouxsie & The Banshees still resist the easy route to ready acceptance.  They've managed to rip/breach the massive sponge of the popular sphere, which soaks up anything squeezed up against it, normally allowing for no diversity, though it will entertain the conceits of those ironic subversives so long as it takes to blot them, before seeping the lot back soapy clean and thereby compatible with the prevailing social order.

Within the sound they've rent in the sponge the Banshees are a rare instance these days of a group willing to goad its disintegration.  After nine years, however, an unavoidable familiarity makes it easy to undervalue their largely consistent vitality.  Before immersing myself in this investigation I'd about given up on them, too, disheartened by the mess of 'Hyaena'.  But some whimsical sense of duty prompted me to plot a faultline through hitherto ignored B-sides.  Some have already been fully incorporated into the Banshees canon - 'Voices', 'Pulled To Bits', 'Red Over White' - others display an adventurousness easily missed by just skimming the A-sides.  A song like 'Tattoo', for instance, outlines a bizarre sensual obsession far more precisely and engagingly than the Bruce Dern picture of the same title.

Previously lulled by a sense of familiarity into lazily dismissing Siouxsie & The Banshees as past it;  these sides shocked me into listening again.

"I suppose," sighs Siouxsie early on, pressured (like no other established group) into justifying the Banshees continuing existence.  "I suppose being accepted to me is like being buried.  And, regardless of what the Banshees are, after nine years, it is inevitable that we're tolerated.  Coming to terms with that is pretty horrifying.  There's a certain amount of what some people term as being respected - they've done the full whack - which comes with the age of the group, and I find that nauseous."

Any burial yet is decidedly premature.  Their true level of mainstream acceptance doesn't amount to enough dead leaves and dirt to rake over the shallowest of graves.  Don't turn your back on the Banshees yet, otherwise that grave might well end up yours.

Biba Kopf  28/09/85

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DISTURBING THE DUST

SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES, All-time Goth supremos, are back out on the road for one of their infrequent tours.  Steve Sutherland dropped in on them for his annual chat, and he surveys their new single ‘Cities In Dust’ and considers the group’s place in the wider scheme of things.

SILENCE isn’t like the songs say.  Silence isn’t golden.  It’s black and blue and bottomless.  It echoes with failure and frustration.  It’s blinding white and interrogating.  It’s no friends and lost loves and loneliness.  It’s the unforgiving hours, inactivity, infidelity.  It’s nothing.  Nothing to reflect off and nothing to sink into.  Nothing.

Most crave to fill their silence with laughter, gossip and the warm clink of chilled glasses.  The banshees aren’t any different and yet they’d have us believe they fill their silence with a solitary scream.  Why?  It’s what keeps us wondering.

Silent for a year and fiercely independent for eight, The Banshees are doing just what they shouldn’t and just what they should.  They’re playing to people who adore them and they’re doing it night after night for 30 days or so.  Strange.  The Banshees slogging up and down motorways like any old band?  Surely not.  They’re special, but why?  It’s what keeps us wondering.

That The Banshees are still here, in Brighton, anywhere at all is something of a miracle and also a malaise.  All they stand for surely says they should have blown apart in a blaze of glory, gone the way of all good punks, disintegrated into cold, dead nothing to nurture our warm memories.  But here they are, on this tour, risking their reputation, tampering with our appraisal.  They won’t be part of the past but they won’t pulverize it either.  They want to be living legends, often a sorry state of affairs.  But not The Banshees.  Not them.  Why?  It’s what keeps us wondering.

Where The Banshees erred at their own convenience from the basic punk doctrine that everything was disposable and better young-and-gone than old-and-around was in making a cause of their survival.  Through some extraordinary arrogant sense of self-interpretation, they’ve made a virtue of their vices and turned their disadvantages to their advantage.  In many ways the "Join Hands" tour was the crucial point in The Banshees’ illustrious history because when McKay and Morris quit the band on the road, they gave Severin and Sioux the perfect excuse and opportunity to turn what is essentially only a career into a crusade.  The fact that they’re here at all when, in theory, they shouldn’t be, has been embroidered into the chain mail of underdog and outsider ideology.  THEY tried to destroy the Banshees.  THEY failed.

It’s no coincidence that the Banshees’ set in Brighton included a domineering and pivotal version of "Icons" from the "Join Hands" album, nor that Budgie speaks enthusiastically of going to play Dundee and all those places they missed because of that disrupted tour.  It was six years ago that "the piggies" walked out but The Banshees’ determined sense of their bygones won’t let us forget it - it’s the bitterness they need for their edge, the revenge that reverberates through their occasional brattishness.  It’s their excuse to still be here and it’s what negates Nick Lowe’s accusation that they’re really just Curved Air in different costumes.

The "Join Hands" fracas, which split the band in half in 1979 and forced a reassessment, also provided Severin and Sioux with a convenient attitude.  "We’re like ‘The Picture Of Dorian Gray’," says Sioux.  "We continue unblemished while the guitarists we discard bear all the scars."

It’s undeniable that The banshees USE people, that, at the heart of this thing that exists whether we like it or not, is an insatiable vampire.  McKay quit because he couldn’t stomach "the degrees of compromise" the band were going through "to retain our tenuous grip on commercial success" but he’d blueprinted a sheet-metal guitar sound that would never be repeated.

His replacement, Robert Smith, came and went and came and went again, his contributions hard to fathom really.  The sense of derring-do that he instilled into The Cure was obviously inappropriate to The Banshees’ studied state of decorum and his input is probably better gauged as inspiration rather than energy.

John McGeoch's contribution is easier to define which makes his dismissal all the more inexplicable.  Creatively, it was the band’s most fruitful era and Sioux cites "A Kiss In The Dreamhouse" as her favourite album.  McGeoch's liquid agility and expert rein on spiralling majesty heralded a glorious procession of pop-psychedelia, adrenalin weirdness without all the drippy dropout trimmings.  And yet he couldn’t take the pace.  Or, at least, that’s the story.

Which brings us to John Carruthers, the boy with the unenviably enviable task of furthering the Banshees’ lineage.  Present indications are that he’s settled in fine, doesn’t rock the boat too much, doesn’t rock out embarrassingly and doesn’t say or do what he shouldn’t.  What he does do, though, has yet to be discovered.  His probation period will be over with the mixing of the new album, out in January, or as Sioux would have it, "in the bleak mid-winter."

Just now he’s just right, rigid onstage over those thrilling strums that hurry in "Christine", the picture of self-effacement during the crackling "Nightshift".  He’s quit smoking onstage, something he was roundly ticked off for when he first joined, and now communicates that cold otherness The Banshees demand for their stage presentation, something that, say, Robert Smith could only ever pass off as indifference.

Carruthers, the latest lamb to the slaughter, is unworried by the fate of his predecessors and just sycophantic enough to survive.  He’s a much-needed blood transfusion after the patchily brilliant "Hyaena", talking of which...

"John Wayne had AIDS."

Siouxsie maintains that cartoon controversy she acts out so well, right into the early hours.  We’re arguing about everything, she being contrary because it’s been expected of her so long it’s become natural, me being bloody-minded because I’m drunk.  The singers she purports to like - Eartha Kitt, Sylvester, Prince - are the camp ones and the films - "Life Force", recently - are the ones that are "so good, they’re bad."  This sense of almost school-girlish naughtiness is what passes for The Banshees’ public sense of fun and an intriguingly immature sense of perverseness permeates their senseless (but not nonsensical) rebellion.

They need something to kick against, no matter how unworthy or unworldly, because it gives them an excuse to STILL be.

In this, the Banshees have been blessed by their stormy relationship with Polydor, probably the most spectacularly bumbling major record company in Britain.  Petty as it may seem to the casual observer, The Banshees are damn adept at making mountains out of molehills and passing of misdemeanours as points of principle.

For instance, in the past year the band has been making an album, which still isn’t ready.  First they got in Bob Ezrin to produce but before he’d even entered the studio "we were", in Budgie’s words, "growing further and further apart", so he was packed off back to the States and Hugh Jones was called in.  Off they went to Hansa, Berlin, and tracks were laid down but here’s where things disintegrate.  Rumour has it that Jones brought back the rough tracks and, on Polydor's request, played the tapes to them.  The Banshees, who never, ’ever play anybody’ anything until they’re ready, got wind of the betrayal and that was it, the stuff was canned and Jones was off the case.

The Banshees are reluctant to substantiate the rumour, and attribute the split to Jones’ complete miscomprehension of what they wanted from the mixes, but it just goes to show the lengths some rebels will go to in search of a cause.  So now The Banshees are touring without an album to promote, suicide at this time of the year with all-too-few shopping days left ’til Christmas.  Are Polydor upset?  You bet.

"Aha," laughs Siouxsie, "anything to upset Polydor."

And so the mind-games continue.  The Banshees gave the record company a single, "Cities In Dust", a magnificent return to strident form with Sioux yodelling a death hymn to the victims of Pompeii and charting, with impish fascination, the unknowable agony of being boiled alive and fossilized by molten lava.  Comparable to their very best, "Cities" veers with harmless irresponsibility from the voyeuristic to the tender and, like the Banshees themselves, creates something of beauty from the contemplation of anguish.

So here it is, the first Banshees’ single likely to chart heavily since "Dear Prudence" and, as if to give the band something to rage against, Polydor object to the label on the record which depicts an ancient drawing of a bearded bloke giving a voluptuous lady one from behind.  Pretty harmless stuff, rendered inoffensive by history, but Polydor insisted a prick was a prick no matter how old it was and the label had to go.  The Banshees said no, the company imposed their own black spot to conceal the offending organ but stuck it on in the wrong place and now, oh joyous irony, the record slips on your deck so that the spindle which holds it in place coincides exactly with the rampant chaps banned bits.  The result?  A 3D screw in your very own living room.

And so, with that neat little bit of unpremeditated notoriety as an additional bonus, The Banshees take to the road with all the appearance of spiting Polydor and the fact that they probably had to tour to remain right in there with The Cure and The Bunnymen as Goth contenders is conveniently forgotten in all the hubbub, as is the fact that they should never really tour anyway.

The notion of playing the same basic set night after night is directly antithetical to The Banshees’ avowal that they’ve always been, and always will be, something special.  Their superb one-offs - The Elephant Fayre, Albert Hall, St James Church - suited their self-perpetuated reputation as the band who aren’t just a band and served their myth well, followers flocking from who knows how far away to attend the gathering of the faithful.  Playing infrequently in unusual places creates the aura of an event.

Not so a tour.  For a start, any old punter tends to come along, just for a night out, and, in Brighton, the bar stayed packed with disaffected punks while The Banshees performed to their devotees and those curious or anxious to add Siouxsie to their list of "rock greats I have seen in the flesh".  Somehow the necessity of putting yourself about a bit doesn’t suit The Banshees at all.

And yet they choose to ignore it by playing a set that’s as uncompromising as it ever could be.  Much of the time is spent playing new numbers which are baffling in their convoluted twists and turns and the audience is both awed by the occasion and restless for some point of recognition.  They get "Melt" and "Israel" but it’s no easy ride.

"I don’t think they expect that of us," says Sioux later.  "At least, I hope not.  I think they expect us to do something different, something a little bit dangerous.  I’d hate to think they wanted a show of greatest hits because that’s never what we’ve been about."

There she is again, making a marvellous virtue of necessity.

The album, as yet un-named, from which the new songs have been culled, is alleged to be stronger and more coherent than "Hyaena", a deliberate play on The Banshees’ behalf to get back to the idea of being a band.  Where "Hyaena" was recorded all over the shop, largely improvised in studios over a long period of time in a bid to capture some spontaneity and, as Siouxsie puts it, "danger", the new one was specifically and carefully constructed before they recorded in Berlin.  The mixing will now be done by engineer Steve Churchyard and what it lacks in, say, Mike Hedges’ madcap eroticism, it gains in clarity and identity desperately needed after the diffuse "Hyaena".

Some will say the Banshees are cleaning up their act to offset faltering popularity but, with that wonderful all-encompassing symmetry of attitudes that endows everything they touch with meaningless meaning.  The Banshees look upon it as another act of subversion.  They’ve always worn their imperfections as badges of courage, managed to re-evaluate, in retrospect, those periods when they’d obviously lost their way, as journeys of adventure, as experiments necessarily to keep a band vital.  And just as they made no excuses for "Dear Prudence" when they wanted a hit and went for it under the guise of shocking their disciples out of their complacency, so they’ll continue to chart their course in and out of the charts with the same singular determination to justify everything they do in their own terms.

Say, if "Cities In Dust" isn’t mega - which, incidentally, looks unlikely - if the radio stations won’t play it, then The Banshees are doing just fine, too alternative for the mutton-heads who find them too disturbing for public consumption, an antidote to soporific pop.  If, on the other hand, "Cities does absolute business, then their fans should be delighted because The Banshees have hoodwinked the bastards into playing something that if they REALLY knew, if they ever REALLY listened, would scare them out of their daft, dull little skins.

Talking of Tim Pope, the itinerant video maker whose promos for The Banshees, Cure and Marc Almond among others are regarded as risky, risqué pieces of acid-head fantasy vividly and commercially captured, Siouxsie enthuses about the way he "presents the unorthodox in an orthodox way".  It seems to me that The banshees work in the opposite way - anything at all mundane or normal they can endow with mystery and contempt and it’s this attitude, paranoiacally protected, that surrounds The Banshees with mystique. 

They wear an invisible cloak of not caring about anything but themselves, of not fitting in, even denying the valid existence of anything but themselves if it suits them.  They are strong and silent and people respect them for it.

If pop is about image, about the senseless being made to seem sensible and the unimportant of the utmost importance, then The Banshees are the greatest pop group ever.  Everything about them is nebulous - their songs are intangible, they adhere to no doctrine, they don’t even look like they should.  For a band with an alarmingly tribal following, they don’t fit the part at all.  For a band that single-handedly inspired the Batcave-Goth-grot, they’re indirectly responsible for some of the most appalling musical garbage ever and yet they don’t look faintly goth themselves.

Severin you could pass on the street, he’s so unobtrusive, despite his penchant for Aladdin pantaloons.  He has to work hard to appear aloof, hanging around after soundcheck to watch support band the Fur Bible, Carruthers doesn’t even look like a Banshee ought - very nice, very normal.  And Budgie?  Well, you couldn’t meet a more regular bloke, no bats in his belfry although some of the sardonic humour that’s imposed itself upon the band as part of the image that becomes a way of life has rubbed off on him of late.

An hour or two before Severin was smirking backstage over a headline he’s found in a paper which was somehow appropriate to the gig ("Evening Ends in Headless Horror"), Budgie delighted in telling me about the rigours of touring.  Not only had his cassette chewed up his double-play Hendrix singles tape but he had a spot of the ol’ disco knee, a stiffening of the joints incurred by his furious drumming.  There’s no cure but massage and yet, when some drummer in a neighbouring rehearsal studio asked him how he got rid of it, Budgie replied that he’s had his knee-joints removed and plastic parts inserted.  The other drummer left impressed and determined to go under the knife.

So what is it that we see when we look at The Banshees if we don’t choose to see what’s actually there?  Sioux of course, one of pop’s most perfect creations.  It’s not that she pretends to be what she’s not, it’s just that she’s invented herself a persona that’s foolproof.  She doesn’t have to do or say anything, she just is.  The face she puts on for the world is a mask of her own face.  She hides behind the strong, striking make-up that, in fact, accentuates her personality.  I don’t think Siouxsie Sioux ever peels off to become Janet Dallion anymore because she doesn’t need to.  She can do anything and get away with it because she’s who she is, an image everyone knows but no-one knows what it stands for.

Strange how so much mystery has evolved from a little mascara, how many girls have mistaken the look for a lifestyle and condemned themselves to an existence of punky nostalgia every bit as sad and time-warped as hippies all because they imagine Siouxsie stands for something she’s nowhere near stupid enough to allow herself to become.

Sioux is, in effect. A face and a voice and you learn as much from her photos as you do from her in person.  Right now she favours a Twenties symmetrical fringe, a mini-Cleopatra (I’ve always thought Siouxsie and Elizabeth Taylor were similar) which looks considerable better in glossy black and white than real life colour.  And yet, backstage, in the street, surrounded by clones, there’s no mistaking her.  The face that launched a thousand fantasies isn’t just make-up and make-believe.  Sioux is Sioux just like God is God.

That is why, presumably, we can’t get a "Sioux" make up line in Miss Selfridge.

And so The Banshees’ reputation revolves around a silence, not a vacuum.  There are personalities here, intelligence at work, but it’s neither thoroughly strategic nor instinctive, neither wholly honest nor dishonest.  They won’t put themselves out to play the game or please others because they don’t see the point - close inspection of their personal lives, colour of socks etc. won’t hold the dimmest candle to the interpretation of a Banshees’ song.  They’re inventions, not experiences, reactions to other works of art, not private nervous breakdowns.

This is hard to understand and wholly unique - The Banshees are neither fact nor fiction. They function in their own way and when Penny Kiley pointed out a couple of weeks ago that they inhabit their own world she wasn’t far from the truth.  The fact is The Banshees can’t quite live out their fiction, they’d love to live in a world of their own but they don’t.

What they can do though, and what they often do, is to transport you, for a moment, into that world.  Their records, at there most brilliantly effective, absorb you wholly and there’s no need to question their validity.  They are experiences in themselves, as valuable as falling in love or getting punched out.  They mean something, they become part of your life.

Whether The Banshees are at their best right now we don’t know.  "Cities In Dust" suggests they may have weathered much of the self-parody which dragged "Hyaena" not into the bad but into the normal (and that, for The Banshees, is bad enough).  It bodes well for the album.

So, too, did something Siouxsie said onstage in Brighton: "I pity Cinderella."  Why she said this I’ve no idea but I’d like to fancy it was her farewell to the pantomime that The Banshees can, and have in the past, become.  She wasn’t going through the motions, despite the flu and about 20 more dates to think about.  She was up there achieving what she always claimed the Banshees were after, she was giving a show so mesmeric, so effective that it became reality.

This was what they set out to do, to emulate David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, to create that world of their own, convincing and thrilling and thoroughly real.  But Bowie killed Ziggy, it wasn’t really him and now The Spiders belong to the past and nostalgia, a part of their time every bit as concrete and factual as Profumo was in the Sixties.

Siouxsie continues.  She isn’t an act and, therefore, she can’t shed her skin to become real in retrospect, she has to pursue and maintain her desire to create and keep her world within our world.  She must continue to convince.

So, will The Banshees attain the timelessness they seek?  The irony is only time will tell and time can be their only undoing.

Steve Sutherland 02/11/85

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DESPERATELY SEEKING SIOUXSIE

In the end, after I'd asked her, tentatively, about her life and the things she likes, loves and hates about it, and she'd talked about childhood and children, crushes and dignity, about being a daughter, a fascist and a queen, about her family, her wardrobe, the arms in her hallway and what she keeps on her bed, about being happy and miserable - even about being in love - it all seemed so easy interviewing Sioux.

But as I'd waited for her in a dressing-room at the Brixton Academy, eating custard creams and Perrier, set upon by roadies and with too much time to ponder upon the warnings of her frosty spite and haughty petulance, her stern dislike of talking about herself, I'd confidently expected the whole thing would be a disastrous mistake. I'd wondered if I was right for this game at all.

She arrived, calm and attractive, only slightly late, dressed in black, with a gaudy gold Cleopatra necklace but no rings, at once polite and relaxed.  Smaller and softer then I'd expected, her round Cheshire Cat face is, as ever impeccably made-up with big grey eyes and Aztec eyebrows and bright orange lipstick that leaves a tasty smear on her plastic cup as we sip apricot brandy.

As she talks she pulls gently at her neatly-crimped bob haircut, blows Rothman's smoke with just a slight hint of soft sneer in her voice.  But if there is a stroppy, difficult Sioux I don't see it:  she's friendly and funny, a neat mimic, maybe a little shirty, but no more than is healthy.  She has a wonderfully croaky giggle and laughs a lot.

The Banshees' best quality seems to me that they can be all things to all men, you get what you want from them.  They've managed to be, intermittently, pop and rock and punk without notable change but by just being The Banshees.  I realised as I waited that I'd seen them three or four times before I was fourteen.  They didn't change my life but they'd had their moments:  spiky, strange pop like Happy House and Hong Kong Garden, the new instrumental, Quarter-Drawing, the glacial tenderness in Melt, the glistening charges of Dazzle, Cascade and Slowdive and the graceful chimera of Israel and Swimming Horses.  Although Siouxsie's hollow lyrical obsessions - desires and disgust, skin, flesh and bone, sin, death and terror - were not my own, and they could, at times, be very obvious.  The Banshees have always kept their decency, dignity and distancy intact, despite the occasional delve into the pompous and ponderous.  In particular, The Scream, which prowled and thrashed like some demented and chained animal, yearning for a complete abandon they never quite allowed it, disturbed everything about it with one elegantly scything sweep, a music of vicious tensions and impelling threat and fury which no other group has equalled and which they themselves have never regained.  With my favourite line, "You may be a lover but you ain't no fucking dancer", echoing in my head, I mention it all seems a long way away now.

"Nine years does sound like a long time, but in reality it doesn't seem so long.  I don't remember it all very well.  It's still exciting, yes, it's a passion and it's addictive.  The implications are pretty awful but I think the Banshees are exempt from generalisations like that anyway.  I still think when we're on Top Of The Pops we stand out so strongly.  I feel no-one dare come near us.  Of course those days were exciting, everything was new, but I'd like to think there was more to come.  Everything was a lot narrower then, it was obvious how you looked, what you did, where you went.  It's a lot more subtle now, how we do things.  I think the tension's still there, though."

How seriously do you take it?

"I don't know really... I take it seriously in that it's vital to have that kind of self, you know, that this is important, this is what we're giving.  I think the Banshees go in stages of being sarcastic, being deadly serious or being bemused by it all."

What do you do best?  What are you offering?

"...Different-ness.  Also we offer dignity, we're not desperate to maintain the momentum of hits, front pages, people pathetically flooding everything with their image.  That's why we refused to play Wembley, it wasn't dignified, it's the audience that becomes complacent, not us.  But these bimbos who do the solo career, and films... ambition's become an excuse to be a creep.  The most important thing, I think, is to make your own world and atmosphere, times that take you away from the planet, moments writing or singing or performing and you become unaware that you're on a stage or in a studio.  You can't create those moments, they arrive.  The most genius we've ever created has come through chance and I like that.  It's important too that there's still doubt, doubts that its working."

Do you think we know you -  from the songs, the pictures, the interviews?

"I think people have a good idea of my ideal but that's not all of me.  I'm very jealous of that side.  If everything about me was public knowledge I'd probably pull my eyes out.  There's a way of being open, giving bits of yourself without it sounding self-obsessed, always, 'I' 'I' 'I' you know?"

Do people treat you as an icon?

"Obviously it happens but you ask yourself which is the lesser of two evils.  It's not that I like it, but I'd rather me than some other fool.  Some of them are really nice, though.  A girl in New York gave me this rag-doll of me, really ugly with dislocated arms and legs like this (she pulls a face as an ugly illustration).  She meant it to be my alter-ego, I think so I could bash it around.  I use it as a pyjama case on my bed."

Do you like being Siouxsie?  Doesn't it become a barrier?  You must frighten people off...

"Not really, nothing can shake my friendships.  I know I used to frighten people, looking back, but now I don't really know.  I think a lot of the time they think 'No it can't be her, it couldn't be'.  What you said about 'preparing a face to meet other faces', I think that's important to do.  Usually it's the thought of going out that's the worst part.  Sometimes it makes me gnash my teeth but I'd go mad if I couldn't pop round to the shops.  I can enjoy the fame when I'm in the mood.  If I want to be worshipped.  It's a lovely feeling being treated as a queen.  I can't get enough of it sometimes (laughs)."

I always liked you more than the group.  It seemed you knew exactly how you wanted to live and what you wanted to be.  Like Crisp said, true style is reinventing yourself, deciding what the style of your values and character should be and pursuing it until you become it.  In the same way as you decided you were a star.  "Living with subtlety," you put it, with dignity.  You seemed to be a very modern, exotic creation.  Did you do that at all?

"Probably.  I don't know... I haven't thought about that.  I think everyone should have the pride, though.  I think too I always had a very strong opinion of myself from a very early age, everything was cut and dry, about what was right and wrong."

Morally you mean?

"Or immorally."

What first appealed to you about the way you look(ed)?  How did you get this style of presenting yourself?

"Well I always liked dark-haired ladies.  I always thought of a beauty or goddess as someone like Carolyn Jones rather than a Jane Fonda.  The twenties appealed to me very much, old photos, Man Ray especially, that very... I like the black eyes! (laughs)  When I was fifteen or sixteen I used to go out of my way to have very unattractive hairstyles, very short, geometrically very ugly, cropped and very frightening to the opposite sex... I think I always knew the way I wanted to live yes, that was completely as a fascist.  I mean, I call myself a fascist personally, I like everything my own way.  A very popular thing to say at the moment, I'm sure.  Not politically, but I won't tolerate people around me if they don't agree with me (laughs)."

Did you like being young, were you happy?

"No, not really."

Were you strongly affected by your upbringing?

"Yes, I think everyone is, but I think you can escape from it.  I was brought up in Chislehurst, Kent, it was alright.  Not a big family, but close.  I've got, erm, just a mother, my father died when I was fourteen.  I like all my life so far.  If there hadn't been any dissatisfaction at the beginning, I wouldn't have bothered to go about satisfying myself.  When I left home I always wished I had severed everything to do with home.  Everything.  Completely.  But because it wasn't one hundred per cent bad I felt obliged to go back every now and then.  I always regret that.  You have to be pretty ruthless.  A weakness, yes, I suppose it is.  I was very close to my brother.  I saw him just recently actually, but he came to me!  He runs an off-licence.  My mum's quite proud of me, mmmm, but she'd have been proud of me if I'd been a secretary, she'd be calm in her mind about that.  I mean, there's always something there that I couldn't get from anyone, anywhere else which again... are secrets."

You said your sister was quite an influence...

"My oldest sister is ten years older than me.  When I was six or seven she went to Art College, her and her friends were pretty outrageous, they used to take me along.  I was allowed to see what little girls shouldn't see at a very early age, like comprehending words like 'Homosexual' and knowing that the friends of hers I liked best, who were most entertaining and funny and who dressed the best, were her homosexual friends.  At that age most people aren't even thinking about their own gender, let a lone a deviant of someone else's.  She was a dancer, she lives her own life.  I remember she used to make her own clothes and they used to have these bells round the necks, ridiculous bug bells.  She gave me one and I wore it everywhere.  I remember having my first heeled shoes when all the other kids had horrible, flat Clarks shoes.  She brought me a pair of sparkly-heeled shoes for my birthday.  I was continually dressed in things that were three sizes too big for me and being told I could grow into them... And I remember I was fascinated by these tap shoes a friend of mine had.  I forced them onto my feet and they were far too small, 'cos she was two years younger than me.  I said I couldn't get them off so that I could walk down the street in them.  I gave them back, though.  In the end."

As we talk about what she does with the rest of her days, Siouxsie says she likes theatre and films and reading ("except Barbara Cartland").  Truman Capote, Ray Bradbury, Beethoven, Prince, Blood Simple, Eartha Kitt, Performance, Steven King, requiems, Talking Heads videos and artwork all get a mention.  This year's favourites?

"Nightmare On Elm Street - Here's Freddy! - brilliant.  I like really good family films like that.  I really enjoyed the Philip Glass opera and we went to this brilliant Tchaikovsky evening at the Albert Hall.  They did the 1812 with the mortar effects and we were sitting right by the cannon and I wanted it to be louder and louder and there were loads of these old dears going, 'Oooerr' (perfect Dick Emery old lady impression), all these old ducks clutching their hearts.  It was brilliant.

She likes going to the gym - "if I didn't I'd probably hit someone I'd regret hitting.  I become so ratty, like when I'm woken up early" - and has a need sometimes "to be a complete drunkard, a complete wreck, completely loud, to purge myself" and still feels she can be rash and have adventures.  "I can't get a half fare on the bus obviously, but yes, there are moments, but I don't feel like noting them.  Keeping secrets is very much part of that."  Siouxsie likes sleeping, sitting in the front row at the cinema ("I wouldn't mind being in a film but only if it was brilliant") and fast drivers.

Siouxsie hates duties, waiting, and bad passengers ("like our guitarist John Carruthers") and "People who aren't completely appreciative of what they're doing.  Drunks who aren't lushes, who don't celebrate their drunkenness or people who are completely sober.  And I hate it at the cinema when you can't have a drink, or go for a piss or put your feet up.  Or when someone laughs at something that isn't funny.  I gnash my teeth at that.

"I hate opera too, all that (imitates opera pomp) 'I walked to the door/But you were not there/Or there/Or there'.  So ridiculous.  I find it hilarious but not for three hours."

She hated school simply because she hated getting up early, says her oldest friend is "Steven, which goes back ten, eleven year.  We have an unspoken understanding that's very special.  No-one from before, no.  I've thrown away lots of address books, scratched them all out."  Siouxsie finds it easy to be happy and easy to be miserable and when she's miserable she sleeps a lot and makes a bowl of soup.  The things that cheer her up are Vivien from the Young Ones, Richard Pryor, Mae West, Eraserhead and people falling over in the street by accident.  Just thinking about this makes her laugh.

How does she treat herself?

"I like treating other people, buying them things.  I enjoyed getting my flat exactly how I want it.  I got Michael Kostiff to do it, he does shops and stage sets.  I've actually got arms coming out of the hallway holding candles which are the lights on dimmers - that came from Repulsion, which I've always loved.  It's as uncluttered as possible, wooden floors, white walls, some red walls and black cupboards with red knobs on (laughs).  And mirrors in the hall that make it look like it goes on forever.  It didn't cost a bomb.  I want to get a huge house with a huge garden, now that I've got enough to last me."

We play Insignificance and find talking about crushes is the most fun Siouxsie's had in an interview.

"Who would I like to sleep with... It depends on their manners.  Jason from Jason and the Argonauts.  When I was seven I had this terrible crush on David McCallum from the Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Patrick McGoohan in Danger Man and Diana Rigg from The Avengers.  It'd be great to just bump into someone when you've popped out to buy a pint of milk, rather than be introduced to them, like Truman Capote or Luis Bunuel, who was a god.  Or sticking up for someone and then it turns out to be them and they say, 'Well thank you ma girl, come home and have some tea.'"

Would you like to have children?

"No... No, I think its too late."

It might be sweet.

"Mmmmm, I know, but that's what scares me.  It would be horrible to think you'd be responsible for this kid being fucked up (laughs).  You'd probably find it'd rebel and become a boring, officious little twit and that would be my child and I'm the child of someone who wanted a boring, officious little twit, you know (laughs).  It's too big an issue.  I think I'd prefer a girl."

Do you prefer women to men?  Neil Dunn said she thought women were so much more interesting, valuable.

"It's much harder to be a man.  There's more men that have problems because they're either too sensitive about the wrong things or not sensitive enough.  I suppose because of the men I attract I prefer men."

What sort of men do you attract?

"Ones that aren't typical.  A majority of the men I know are completely different."

Are you worried about losing your looks?

"I think there's a fear at the back of everyone's mind.  In a way I'm looking forward to growing old.  The older I get the more I hate young people. no really I do.  It's a challenge to grow old and do it well, like Margaret Rutherford or Mae West, I admire that humour and dignity.  I've never felt really young actually (giggles) so I think I'm catching up with myself.  I can be completely infantile.

Have you been in love much?

(There's a ten-second pause and I wait for the snap)  "Erm...no... but I am at the moment, and have been for, erm, four or five years..."

Do you believe in perfect love?

"Er, I think you have to work at it and a lot of that is keeping distance.  Perfect love is when you're dying to see someone, and you've got to be dying to see them or it's just a matter of course that you end up looking back thinking.  'What happened?'"

Are you still at that stage, that perfect stage?

"Erm (getting sort of heated), yeah, probably, again... it's not...stale.  It's very...erm, precious... so enough said."

It seems more than enough.

I thank her for her time and candour and try to say how nice she's been, after what everyone had told me.  "It's true I don't like interviews, but that was more like a conversation," she says and gives me another happy, becoming giggle.  Siouxsie still looks to me like someone who has learnt how to live and I'd seen a gentler side.  I had a great time.  Siouxsie made me happy.  I couldn't have asked for more.

Jim Shelley 11/85

BACK TO INTERVIEWS/ARTICLES INDEX

POP'S ROYAL COUPLE?

Ten years ago SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES were punk rebels, tearing down the bastions of rock and society.  But are they now only part of the cosy '80s establishment, the handsome heads of a new royal family?  KEVIN MURPHY asks if they're still a dark, menacing shadow over music.

The story of the Banshees has been told in myriad ways.  Their utterances have been neatly wrapped in a cocoon of intellectualism.

Those glorifying in their dissection have pained long and hard over their worth in language not normally afforded a mere pop band.

Why have the Banshees warranted such treatment?  Are their scream-filled tales hinting at more?

Those who have crossed their path and felt the lash of Siouxsie's scything tongue have hit back from the safety of their typewriters.  And in the face of such ignorance the Banshees' tolerance and mistrust has been sold as arrogance.

As articulate spokesmen for a generation of lost souls, seeking solace in a nocturnal world, the Banshees have been heralded as the initiators of a gothic movement that preens and dreams; and it hangs like a noose above their heads.

The Banshees are now ten years old and none albums old.

The years have done little to weaken their resolve.  The make-up and ideals remain intact.  Ten years have seen them elevated from acidic pretenders to establishment - a role they're constantly defending.  Their latest album 'Tinderbox' romps and swoons with all the majesty of 'Dreamhouse', and so casts off the laboured millstones of 'Nocturne' and 'Hyaena' which threatened to be laid at their grave.  'Tinderbox' is a refreshing slant on the Banshees' disturbing perspective and restores their vivid shades to pop's pale palette.

After my endorsement pf their new-found lust, I was informed they wished to restore links with Sounds and, perhaps feeling an enthusiastic ear would be a sympathetic one, I was chosen.

And so it was that at four one morning, I found myself in Cologne's Holiday Inn with Siouxsie, the Banshee's queen, perched at the end of my bed  and her prince, Steve Severin, in a near-by chair.  They had just completed three European dates - Brussels, Amsterdam and Bonn - in preparation for their first major attack on the States.

Involved as I am in the exhilarating world of rock 'n' roll, even I am not my best at such an hour, even if the animated conversation of this pair showed their resilience.  What metamorphosis was it then that has changed these mere mortals into the precious personae of the printed page?

Perhaps people take the Banshees too seriously?

"I don't think we warrant analysis," Sioux replies.

Surely simply by setting yourselves up onstage you're vulnerable to analysis?

Sioux: "It's hardly set up.  I mean, it was a very naive thing to do to form a group anyway.  Completely thoughtless and very naughty, horrible of us to unleash ourselves on people.  Completely selfish.  To an extent, you can analyse what a song is, or what a group is but there are generally a lot more important things you don't talk about."

You're always talked about in very reverential tones.

Steve: "We've been victims of some terrible purple prose.  It's nothing to do with us, it's just people tend to launch off into some very strange areas when writing about us."

Would you like to be seen as a band with humour?

Sioux:  "With fun rather than humour."

Following the birth of the Banshees, legions of pale imitations hurried in your wake, and so a generation of gothic monstrosities were spawned.

Steve:  "It was quite weird watching the support group tonight and thinking it was obvious that we must have come into their influence somewhere along the line, but in a narrow way."

Sioux:  "But it's completely humourless and ridiculous that they call themselves Christian Death.  For us to be perpetrators of the goth government, which is what's been thrown at us, bemuses us."

How do you see yourselves?

Sioux:  "Not as goths.  I can imagine The Damned influencing goths."

Steve:  "I was sitting at the side of the stage listening to their sort of thing and thinking that we were starting with 'Cities In Dust', which was a universe away from what they were doing - it's just a really happy pop song - and thinking where does it all connect?  It's really bizarre."

Perhaps it has to do with people picking up on the subversive side of your music.

Sioux:  "People are confused by the fact that we do songs like 'Tattoo' and 'Obsession', which are wrongly classed as horror, which I hate.  And into black.  I mean, the words 'black', 'gloomy' and 'doomy' have been used so much about us.  I just think those songs are the hidden side, rather than the overt side, as opposed to black.  I hate 'black' as an adjective."

Steve:  "Somehow, 'Juju' set off all this goth thing.  I think we've done one goth album and that was 'Join Hands', in 1979, for God's sake."

"The subject matter wasn't goth,"  Sioux adds indignantly.

"It has gothic overtones," explains Steve.

"Burial overtones.  Burial,"  corrects Sioux.

Steve:  "Take someone like Bowie, the things he was actually writing around 'Ziggy Stardust' and 'Aladdin Sane' were completely at odds with the way people thought about him or why they were into him.

"They pick up on superficial aspects of the way Sioux looks.  The way we might mention death every now and then.  But there's so much more to it than that.  Take 'Dreamhouse', there's nothing goth about that at all."

"There isn't... it's herbal,"  laughs Sioux.

The Banshees' music has always had a uniformity, but within its spectrum there has always been room for pop.

Sioux:  "I don't think it's a deliberate strategy, but both are vital for each other to remain healthy."

Steve:  "Anything that's popular tends to have many sides.  Someone like Prince you can take on many different levels; nothing too intellectual about it, but in a way there is because it's very clever."

Sioux:  "There's a lot of lunacy in it, which I like."

Steve:  "You don't usually get lunacy without some intelligence."

Prince's sense of humour has never been questioned.

Sioux:  "No, but it would probably sit much better if we looked like Dire Straits.  The fact that we're handsome little bastards goes against us."

Why, because people don't take you seriously?

Sioux:  "They don't want to take us seriously."

When The Clash wrote "No more Elvis, Beatles or The Rolling Stones" as a reflection on the state of the music business with its antiquated regime of superstars stifling the development of fresh talent, it was taken as a slogan to be chanted by the voice of punk.

This new breed vowed to change things, and as the Banshees were amongst its hierarchy their word became folklore.  Early pieces were punctuated with scathing quips about the redundant dinosaur age, how life ended at 25.  Their music and stance were focused on teenage rebellion.

Ah, the impetuosity of youth.

The Banshees are no longer 25 and the years have seen them join the ranks of superstars they once despised.  Irony moves in such glorious circles.

Steve:  "I think it's really strange that in the last couple of years, it upset us all for a time, we've been treated as though we shouldn't be here, we'd outstayed our welcome.  But we've got through that.  The way we started and the way we've done things has always been a precedent, maybe not on a grand scale but a precedent nonetheless.  I don't know how people can take the argument for getting rid of Genesis and getting rid of Yes from ten years ago, and apply it to a different bunch of people."

Sioux:  "We haven't replace Genesis and Yes by any means."

Steve:  "People seem to miss the point that the whole reason to get rid of Genesis and Yes was because the music was f***ing tedious, not because they were ten years old.  I don't think that applies to us."

Genesis probably felt the same about you.

Sioux:  "The groups we've mentioned are men groups.  Budgie and John knew Led Zeppelin, and they probably were good, but those sort of groups leave me cold.  To me they were very much boys' groups."

But in the same way as you feel what you're doing is different they probably felt they, too, were vital.

Sioux:  "How can Phil Collins have ever felt different?"

Steve:  "I see what you are saying, but I wouldn't give people like that the benefit of the doubt.  It's another decade, for God's sake."

Sioux:  "There are different values for a start."

Steve:  "It's not as if we sitting in Santa Monica or Beverly Hills saying, We're not talking to Sounds or NME, they're slagging us off.  There is a certain responsibility to face up to all those questions, but we're not going to defend what we're doing because we're confident what we're doing is the right thing.

"It goes back to that Quantick thing. (A recent NME interview by David Quantick who confessed to them he hated 'Tinderbox' and wondered why they carried on.) I mean, we probably wont do an interview with the NME for another couple of years now.  If they're going to have that attitude, we're not going to waste our time."

Sioux:  "They've always had that attitude.  No one has actually said to our faces, from that paper especially, something we're doing now is good.  They have to rely on the ammunition that what you did last year was brilliant, but what you're doing now is shit.

"It's almost like they're the biggest dinosaurs ever: an artist makes money when they're dead, like something that went before was good but at the time they were too narrow-minded to see it."

Is one of the reasons you carry on because it's safe; you know what's coming next, your immediate future is neatly planned?

Steve:  "No.  I think our lowest point came after Robert's (Smith) departure, that was when we started to think about whether we should carry on."

Sioux:  "I'd say the lowest point was when John and Kenny left."

Is the reason you carry on to spite people like them?

"Spite keeps us going," smirks Sioux.

Have you achieved as much as you'd have liked?

Sioux:  "No, not at all.  I don't care about sales, I just want to make the definitive album for us, and we haven't done it yet."

Would you have known if you did?

Sioux:  "Yes.  I think 'Dreamhouse' came close."

If and when you achieve this, would you call it a day?

Sioux:  "I think so, yes."

But having achieved the ultimate Banshees album, you might turn around and think.  Well, if we've managed to achieve this who knows what else may lie ahead?

Sioux:  "Then maybe we might have to learn how to enjoy success, 'cos we've never managed to do that."

Steve:  "I would imagine success would give you two things - freedom and time; time to sit back and think.  But we've never achieved that; it's always been on and on."

Sioux:  "It's irrelevant whether something's going to be successful or not, it's taken for granted it's not."

So you're pessimists, ha?

"No, just realists," comes the synchronised reply.

So what is your ultimate ambition?

Sioux:  "To be as huge as the throwaway people, but without changing."

Does change mean compromise?

Steve:  "I can't think... I may be completely wrong... we've actually said we wouldn't compromise.  Maybe we did in the first few years.  The whole idea of a single is a compromise."

Sioux:  "You compromise to make it sound fab on the radio."

So if someone offered you enough to play Wembley Stadium, say, you would?

Steve:  "Oh Lord, yes."

If your idea is to become the biggest then surely any compromise is justified?

Sioux:  "No.  It's important to be the way we've always wanted to be."

Steve: "No one should ever step into a group unless they think: a) they hate every other group; and b) that they can be better than everybody else.  That's the reason we started.  We want to be happy at the end of it.  We don't want to be Madonna."

What's wrong with Madonna?

Steve: "I don't think she's very happy."

Sioux:  "I think that kind of thing inspired Bowie to write 'Fame', the uncontrolled fame and overkill."

Steve:  "There's not a lot of honesty in what Madonna writes.  What we completely lack is selfish ambition.  The sort of ambition people like Patsy Kensit exude is totally alien to us."

Sioux:  "My ultimate goal is to mean as much to someone as my favourite pop star meant to me when I was 16 or 17."

If you'd felt like that you'd have given up nine years ago, for that's exactly what's happened.

"Really?" Sioux asks, somewhat surprised.

Being huge, but on your own terms, seems to be the stumbling block.

Sioux:  "There's always a catch.  We want to have our cake and eat it... and that's what I want."

Do you ever worry that the whole Banshees corporation will get too large, too impersonal and ultimately cause your demise?

Steve:  "It's one of the first things we talked about with our old manager, Nils.  He wanted a Banshees logo on top of a skyscraper, eventually.  One of the things he did after seeing our first shambolic gig was to say, I want to see you on Magpie.  And we thought, Brilliant, we'd love to be on Magpie playing this nonsense.  That attitude permeates everything we're doing."

Why don't you do things like Saturday Superstore?

"We were on the Wide Awake Club and made some marzipan bumblebees," Sioux explains proudly.

Do you like all that?

Sioux:  "I prefer that to a music programme.  I think we're much better out of context."

Why don't you do more, is it because you're not asked?

Sioux:  "No, it's just I don't like doing any promotion."

That's the game you have to play though.

Steve:  "I re-evaluated all that when I saw George Michael on The Aspel Show, he was really, really good at that.  I'm not particularly keen on their music or what they're doing, but it was more honest than most of those type of people."

Do you resent him?

Steve:  "I don't resent anybody, we both want our just deserts, basically."

And you haven't had them?

Steve: "I think people have worked a lot less hard and been a lot less inspired and got a lot more out of it than we have."

You've constantly appeared frustrated that people have tended to lump you in with other pop groups.  What would you regard as the prime difference between, say, you and the Bunnymen?

Sioux:  "I can sing."

Is that important?

Sioux:  "To be honest that's not the reason.  I don't like male singers that get all their cues from Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed or Bowie."

But, with respect, you're  a woman so there is that vague chance that it might sound a teensy, weensy bit different.

Sioux:  "Well, I've based myself on those four and I don't sound like them.  I think if McCulloch had based himself on Eartha Kitt, it may have been more interesting."

Sioux purrs a glorious Catwoman purr.

"She's brilliant.  What a dame."

Will Susan Dallion (real name) become redundant?

Sioux:  "No.  I'll just be able to live completely in my own head.  I'll desert everything."

How long will you keep it going?

Sioux:  "I can imagine myself at least 2,000 years old, with banks of cats and banks of stone male statues.  The best question that most women ask is, Would I ever do a TV interview without any make-up?  And I say, laaaawwwd no!  Well, unless I was feeling especially vindictive and I'd turn everyone to stone, if they saw me."

What excites you?

Sioux:  "Just things like when I see a rabbit on the motorway and point it out, but no one else sees it.  Once I get over nerves, every concert's exciting."

As a concession to their humble plans for world domination, they're shortly embarking on their first extensive tour of America.

Do they have much respect for the natives?

Steve:  "No. None whatsoever."

Why bother going then?

"Cos there's always a load of misfits," Sioux adds mischievously.

Steve:  "It seems to be a catchphrase wherever we go; like Amsterdam's nice, it's a shame it's full of Dutch people."

Do you fall in love easily?

Sioux:  "I try not to.  It takes up too much time."

Isn't it exciting?

Sioux:  "Not if you're looking at the watch."

Does the idea of three kids and a house still repel you?

Sioux:  "Yes."

Why?

Sioux:  "It's boring, very boring, 'Specially when you think three kids were three babies before that.  Yeeeuuuuccch! Hate babies.  I think babies are the ugliest things ever."

"Three adopted boat children might be fun," chips in Steve.

"Put them on a stick," adds Sioux with glee.

Is it hard work being a Banshee?

Sioux:  "It's easy as pissing to us.  Some people have got blocked bladders, though."

Finally, what ambition do you have beyond the Banshees?

Sioux:  "I'd like to be a brilliant hermit."
Steve:  "That's the question you should ask John."

Kevin Murphy 10/05/86

BACK TO INTERVIEWS/ARTICLES INDEX

"JUST BECAUSE I'M SITTING DOWN DOESN'T MEAN YOU HAVE TO LOOK LIKE ARMCHAIRS."

PERCHED ON A HIGH STOLL THAT CAN BARELY CONTAIN HER.  SIOUXSIE SIOUX HAS NOTICED THAT SOMETHING'S NOT QUITE RIGHT ABOUT THIS NOTTINGHAM AUDIENCE.  TOO STILL.

ANOTHER GLORIOUS BOMBARDMENT OF THE TORRENTIAL ECSTASY THAT STILL REMAINS UNIQUE TO THE BANSHEES AND THE UGLY CAUSE OF THE CROWDS INHIBITIONS BECOMES OBVIOUS.  SEVERAL BULBOUS BOUNCERS, OUT FOR A NIGHT'S PAID PUMMELLING OF THESE WEIRDO MUSIC-LOVERS, ARE GETTING INCREASINGLY OUT OF ORDER, KIDS HALF THEIR SIZE ARE BEING MANHANDLED FOR THE MEREST TWITCHING LIMB.  SIOUX'S ADDRESS BECOMES MORE BARBED.  THE BLOBS ARE COMPARED TO GENITALIA.  FINALLY. DURING  'MELT!', STEVE SEVERIN FLAMES ON, FLINGS HIS BASS AND STEAMS IN, HAVING TO BE RETRIEVED BY ROADIES.  THAT BAND START THE SONG AGAIN TO HERO'S CHEERS AND FIRE IT WITH THE EXTRA FEELING DANGER ALWAYS BRINGS OUT IN THE BANSHEES.

Afterwards the group are incensed as tales, like one kid dragged down the stairs by the ankles, head bouncing on each step, are related.  Only compensation is the fact that one of the worst offenders has been sacked on the spot and the other got 50 lines.  "They're such pigs", rumbles Sioux.  "If people have paid to come in they should be allowed to do what they want.  Everything was alright before the bouncers started.  It's so frustrating", she says, looking at her plastered leg.  "If I hadn't got this one I'd of been in there too."

I always hoped ZIGZAG was a bit like a little monitor valve in the heart of the Banshees.  Corks! Nearly a decade since they first clawed a loving weal across erogenous zones and set off a dazzling exotic beast through the sea of shit-mediocrity.

There've been ups and downs, but the '85 Banshees still spit, scratch and scream in luscious, pulsing technicolour.  Big screen dervish rhythms or haunted wail, they're deadly awesome.

After a period of calm, they're back with a fat hit, album-less tour which will still sellout and the inevitable drama-danger as Sioux refuses to buckle to a nobbled kneecap.

Last time I was on a Banshees tour it was the '81 'Juju' jaunt, when I flogged t-shirts with the legendary Birmingham Billy (fan club man, salesman and art director).  

Certainly a different angle.

Now I'm standing in the multi-tiered wedding cake gleam of Nottingham's Royal Concert Hall, itching to hear the new stuff and check out Smith's guitar-successor John Carruthers.

SIOUXSIE enters the dressing room after the soundcheck, stuff-legged and on crutches.

You already know that she's in plaster cos she dislocated her kneecap onstage at Hammersmith Odeon.

"It went round here", she says, pointing to the side of her leg.  "There was nothing but a big hole where my kneecap should have been."

A night in hospital and she was back onstage the next day.  Lesser mortals would've blown the whole tour.

The difficulties are many.  Not constant agony but "It twinges".  Getting about assisted by crutches, sitting for long van journeys and natural onstage muscle movement are all not so easy.  Painkillers are necessary.

But the injury has actually added somewhat to the Ban-show.  Leaning on her skull-cane, Sioux is helped to her stool by roadie Joss and tour Manager Pete Petrol (remember Spizz Oil?) who are dressed up in highly-silly skeleton suits (later the Bone Bros wobble out and gyrate during 'Cities In Dust'!) Now her lungs aren't springing about the stage Sioux's voice has never sounded better.  The band are boiling too.

Though I've seen the Banshees around 40 times, this was the first with JOHN CARRUTHERS.  Throughout he scythed and shone.  Accusations of reeling off the hits flew out the window as they charged through almost as much new stuff as old.  The set changed every night.  In Nottingham 'Dazzle', 'Cascade', 'Melt!', 'Painted Bird' and the hit-string nestled among half a dozen previews off the new album.  Oh and they did 'Night Shift', with my favourite live moment of all time (the feedback-squeal lightning flash before the final chorus). I swear the earth moved.

Plans to do the interview after the show dissolve.  Sioux's bushed and the chaps are planning an outing to the Cult gig over the road at Rock City.  A fair few punters caught both gigs.

Backstage banter reaches a hilarious peak as Budgie discusses himself and his group with a freelance music journalist who hasn't a clue who he's ear-bashing (at first).  Pleasantries and plonk disposed of, the merry throng trip back to the hotel and spend the rest of the night on the floor of the bar... playing a serious and noisy game of Subbuteo soccer where you make little plastic man score goals.  Budgie emerges the victor, around 8am, as puzzled business-men scratch their toupees

Next morning it transpires Sioux has been up with the lark and scooted down to London to see the knee doctor.  Steve and Budgie don't materialise until shortly before they're due to leave for Wolverhampton.  So this month is the general picture.  Next month the grist from the swimming horses' mouth.

The acquisition of a new Banshee can look like a daunting task.  The candidate has to possess the necessary ability to tackle a wealthy back-catalogue, but a straight note-for-note copy of the former guitarists would not be tolerated. He has to have that special flair for invention and atmosphere plus the necessary touch of psychosis.  Then if he doesn't add a personal corner to the terrible triangle of Sioux, Severin and Budgie, forget it.

John certainly fits the bill musically and also seems to possess the same sometimes cruel wit and streak of latent berserkness as the others.

He admits joining the band was "a bit strange at first" but reckons he didn't have to undergo any major character-surgery.

"Budgie and Steve have established a working relationship, I had to tag along with it to a certain extent.  It still sounds like me though my playing style has changed a lot."  he made his debut at Brixton Academy and also played the St James Church gig.  But the current tour is by far the biggest.

"This tour's a bit of a warm-up for America.  We'll be doing three months over there.  Usually we just do 10 days - you're just getting warmed up and you have to go home again.  I hate it.

"We knew two months before the tour started that the album wouldn't be out in time, but we decided to do it anyway."

Wise move.  Even in these hard times where gigs are pushed to magnetise punters' rhino, the Banshees pack 'em in with ease (and get away with playing most of an album that isn't finished yet).

"I'm enjoying myself immensely on this tour," says the newest Banshee the morning after.

When John got a call asking him to try out for the Banshees he was attempting to breathe life into a sinking Clock DVA.  He'd actually split from the old lineup the night they ended up playing a Paris club being used to film the Stones' 'Undercover' video.  Legless on Keith's Jack Daniels, John ended up having a fight with DVA's singer, getting whacked in the face with a trumpet and sharing a hospital surgery with a man wearing a wedding dress, DMs and clutching a dead pigeon with a porcelain doll's head fixed onto its own!

He had ten days to learn 40 Banshees songs before gigging commenced.  In at the deep end - like playing Milan in a riot.  Cue Banshees anecdote...

"We were playing in this lunatic asylum.  They had this big fenced-in area where the loonies go for a walk in the day-time.  We were doing the soundcheck and they were watching in white straitjackets, dancing to the stuff.  They were locked in for the gig, but we got 2,000 people and there were loads more trying to get in outside the fence.  They started coming over the fence and the coppers started using batons, so the Italian kids started throwing molotov cocktails at the coppers.  They got the CD canisters out and started blasting the kids.  You could see the massive cloud of gas coming towards you, but we thought somebody had turned the smoke on.  We were playing in a complete fog, everybody was crying.  Sioux's voice packed in afterwards because she got tear gas in her throat.  She was sorting the coppers out - threw the mike, hit a copper, got it back and carried on singing.

"Actually I'm glad Sioux's sitting down for a bit.  She used to do all sorts of tricks, like in the middle of a difficult number she's come and pull me across the stage!"

And then there's the time Budgie ended up on a glucose drip in hospital after a vodka attack convinced him to sunbathe in the middle of the road... but enough!  Tell us about the new album (which John had a good hand in writing).

As yet untitled and scheduled for January release, the album has nine new songs, most of which have been previewed on the tour.  'Cannons, 'Lands End', (already classic 'Switch'-type epic), 'Sweetest Chill', Candy', 92 Degrees', Parties Fall', 'This Unrest' and 'Lullaby'.

Rumours of the group slashing their way through a bevy of producers actually turn out to be just a rejection of US biggie Bob Ezrin ('Berlin', 'Alice Copper') cos he wanted RACK 'N' ROLL and a mutual decision not to use Hugh Jones cos the songs came out too clinically clean.  Drum tracks were laid down hugely in Berlin, the rest in London and the group ended up producing themselves with engineer Steve Churchyard.

John:  "There's a lot more depth in it than 'Hyaena', which was a bit abstract for a Banshees album.  All the songs were written before we went in so it's very concise in structure.  There's a few genuine love songs on this album, but they don't sound like love songs.  Sioux approaches it from a different stance."

The three new tracks on the 12" - 'Cities In Dust', 'An Execution' and 'Quarterdrawing Of The Dog' - seem to have a fixation with suffering in ancient times and primitive methods of inflicting pain.  What is Sioux intoning during the aural holocaust of 'An Execution'?

"She was reading this book about Countess Bathory, called 'Was Dracula A Woman?' or something.  She used to bath in the blood of virgins in the vain hope it would keep you young.  She's got some really weird tortures.  This one is where they get this guy who's been done for stealing or something.  They cut this horse open, stuck the guy inside and sewed it up with just his head sticking out.  he got eaten away by the stomach acid.  It took about 4 days for him to die."

Yummy! Go on...

"Because Sioux's got this image she gets fans sending her books and things.  She's got a rather morbid sense of things like that.  We spent 3 hours one night just talking about the worst tortures you ever heard.  Sioux knows some brilliant ones.  There's a Japanese one - a wooden pyramid going up to a point, they sat the guy on it with the point up his arsehole and attached weights to his legs.  Just went right through the bloke and cut him in half.  Real slow agony."

Eee...

And with that ring-searing image inducing shudders and seat-rubbing, we must leave them.

By the time most bands reach their first decade the self-parody is setting in and past glories are being stretched wafer-thin.  SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES are still on course like an apocalyptic herd trashing a path through the spikes.

GOAL!

Kris Needs 12/85

BACK TO INTERVIEWS/ARTICLES INDEX

Following the filming of a video for their new single 'Cities In Dust', an un-petrified Steven Severin whispers some thoughts on the Banshees' art of videology.  From Banshees to ashes and dust to...

"Siouxsie wrote the lyrics for 'Cities In Dust' after we'd played in Naples and had been to visit Pompeii.  The video, which was shot in Fulham, plays with ideas of different layers of lava, with the boys as statues, and Sioux singing.  It's a continuation of the 'Dazzle' video.

"There's a lot of thought goes into what we do with our videos, but you are limited by the fact that it's basically a promotional device, just a way of presenting the song.  We try and get away from emphasising 'the band', and the faces of the band, but there's not a lot you can do.  However you try, you can't help depriving people of their imagination.  With most videos, you don't even notice the song, because there's too much going on visually."

As with past videos, the band are using Tim Pope's post-take editorial skills to add dazzle to the final product.

"We've tried to make this one more of a film than a video - it's the first time we've actually sat down and worked out a storyboard beforehand.  In general we've been limited by the size of the budget we have.  Our videos tend to be quite expensive, not because of the settings, but because of the special effects we use."

Opening up the video cabinet of Dr Severin's own visual tastes reveals some strangely bearded inclusions.

"I like Talking Heads videos, and ZZ Top's are always enjoyable, but most music videos are completely lacking in imagination.  I mean Cyndi Lauper, and the Pat Benatar dance troupe!  Who makes those sort of things?"

Indeed, you have to be very careful where your eyes wander, as the video inspired, axe-through-the-bathroom-door songwriting on the last Banshees album proves.

"Around the time of 'Hyaena' we were watching a lot of video nasties, and obviously when you're writing songs you draw on all sorts of elements for ideas.  You can't keep on listening to music for your inspiration.

"But as far as 'Hyaena' is concerned, the ideas that we used on that album are totally dead.  For the new one we actually worked out the songs in a rehearsal studio instead of going straight in to record.  So this one's a lot harder, it's got a lot of strong songs and melodies on it, but there's plenty of horrible stuff as well."

Enough to make your eyes pop out of your ears, for sure, but you have to wait for the new year.

Roger Morton 1985

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This is Budgie's account of an incident that happened to the Banshees in the summer of 1982 while recording 'Obsession', a track from 'A Kiss In The Dreamhouse'.


It was a strange twist of fate during the recording of 'A Kiss In The Dreamhouse' that compelled the band to switch studios that day in July.

We entered the control room of Abbey Road's Studio 2 and were immediately confronted with the mixing desk. An old fashioned affair, it was a type our engineer had only read about, with heavy manual faders, huge knobs and switches, and a mess of old cables coiling off to the tape machine.

The body of the studio was reached by a long staircase. Descending the wooden steps one became aware of an undisturbed atmosphere of lingering memories.

A line of cupboards along one wall, when opened, revealed oddly shaped pieces of rusting iron and several chains of varying thickness; percussion instruments or torture implements?

Fluorescent strips flickered on, bathing the old studio in a dim reddish-blue haze. Microphones were set up as we prepared to begin recording in the studio that had spawned, amongst other things, The Beatles' double 'White Album'.

As sometimes happens with our recordings, we will use what ever is available in the situation we find ourselves in. The hypnotic beat for 'Obsession' was a simple footstomp and handclaps with Siouxsie picking out the melody on a set of bells which were gathering dust in one corner.

The percussion implements were dug out from their resting place in the cupboard and the mood intensified as we began taping the sound of a faint wind wisping around the studio.

It was while we were putting the guitar part to tape that it happened, something so peculiar that it would almost change the arrangement of the song.

Psycho guitar was stabbing out from the speakers, when suddenly the tape machine began to slow down. Slower and slower, almost to a dead stop, and then just as mysteriously it began to correct itself.

Nobody tampered with the machine, which after its brief spasm, was now working perfectly. The effect it had on the guitar part was wonderful; but what had caused it? There was no logical explanation.

Could it have been the passing spirit of somebody who once used the studio, somebody who was viciously murdered or perhaps died there years prior to this incident?

We will never know what happened but the results can still be heard on 'Obsession'.

Trick or Treat? A supernatural thing?

Happy Hallowe'en Budgie.

02/11/88

BACK TO INTERVIEWS/ARTICLES INDEX

I stroll casually in the opposite direction and we walk in ever-decreasing circles until finally there's no escape from eye contact, and the dreaded third sound.

"Terrible weather for this time of year, eh Siouxsie?"

Who said that?  I scan the room for suspects, just as everyone else is looking at me.  The bad penny drops with the sound of my voice.  How could I have said something so stupid, so assinine, so English?  Sioux smiles as Severin arrives, closely followed by a pair of billowing pantaloons.  We all gaze out the window.

Then we spoke of the rain.

It's assumed that, when two or more Englishmen meet to converse, they only talk about the weather because they are too ignorant or too polite to recount anything more important before tea time.  This, as The Banshees know, is bullshit.  "Tinderbox", The Banshees' new album, is not.

"Of course not," says Sioux making herself comfortable on the sofa.  "On reflection almost all the songs seemed loosely based on the weather.  People being affected by it, or events happening because of it."

The band has moved from "Dazzle" to drizzle, an awkward step, or perhaps a giant leap through the stratosphere.  Ian McCaskil swallows a drum kit as Siouxsie clears the lump in her throat.

"You see, in England, the weather is terribly important.  WE are all at its mercy all of the time because it is so unpredictable.  There is a mental illness whereby you can get physically depressed if you don't get the right amount of winter sun."

The clouds that loomed on The Banshees' horizon are beginning to disperse, but there are questions to be asked.  When aren't there?

The essence of pop is the present tense.

The tension between the perfect and the plu-perfect.  After 10 years in fish-net tights, Siouxsie's hairspray hasn't turned to paste, but the past may be eclipsing the here and now.

"Oh not you as well!" she cries.  "People are always asking me what it's like going for 10 years, but LOOK!" she points to a cassette of the album, "our own record company still can't spell our name right!  It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue like an old book... yet.  Bancheese!  Bantrees!  I just find all this speculation amusing.!

Mr Severino, the elegant and dapper man about town, tries to loosen the stranglehold of his tunic button.  He doesn't share Siouxsie's reverie.  He doesn't share his ciggies either.

"People are always telling us that we've betrayed the ideals with which we started," he remarks in whispered tones.  "I don't think anybody knew what we originally set out to do in the first place.  I think people are confusing us with their idea of what punk meant.

Banshee And The Siouxsies are now face-to-pallid-face with the burden of a decade's worth of punk nostalgia - ideas that turned sour and are now being shovelled into the band's open grave.  Steve graciously nods his head in accord.

"We're carrying the can now that every other band born out of the punk dream has gone up in smoke.  It's never been OUR cross to bear."

There are certain things NOT created to last a decade:  Datsun cars, A-Ha, sherry trifle, tower blocks, The Thompson Twins, and Skylab to name but a few.  The Banshees are being written into this list of planned obsolescence.  Yet one blast of "The Sweetest Chill" is enough to grind all dismissive phrases into a fine maloderous powder.  In a way they have dug their own snake-pit by their cloak and dagger tactics.  What looked to some like beasts from beyond have now become a household name - as harmless and domesticated as a vacuum cleaner... almost.  To be a punk hero you have to pray for self-immolation.  To be a legend you have to die standing on your feet.  To be a Banshee you just have to be.

"Sometimes you end up believing in other people's distorted expectations," Sioux curtly explains, puffing a smoke.  "Over the past two years, we've had to constantly justify our existence.  The people who harp on about our age are the ones with the hang-ups - problems that they try to foist onto us."

The Banshees have always improvised attitudes of subversion without ever coming out and saying so.  They see the contradictions in their career, hear the mistakes, say "So what?" and look the other way in casual silence hoping their bogus intrigue doesn't blow up in their face.  Under heavy fire, The Banshees catapault frosty mono-syllables or just keep a tacid and torrid silence to keep the attitude intact.

And so we speak about the rain, always back to the rain.

It's past tea-time now, but there's still a polite question to ask - How's the knee Sioux?  "Sick of people asking about it.  It's just taking a very long time to heal - mainly because I carried on with the tour."

There is also an impolite question to ask:  was continuing the tour with a cane a publicity stunt, or did the show just have to go on?

"It must have been show fever," she answers coyly.  "or maybe just lunacy."

The day after the accident, there was already a bootleg album available with the sound of Sioux going "crack", "OW", "crash".  That's entertainment - Siouxsie determined to prove she was can and able, even if it meant that, a week later, she trapped a nerve in her back; compounding the medical treatment, doubling the dose of pain killers, and trebling her recovery time.

"My leg kept twitching like one of those dead frogs that are made to leap with electrodes.  It was horrible."

Ah, the cane mutiny - excitement from excruciating pain...

"Dramatic pain and emotional pain, are quite exciting.  Once you've got over the shock, you can forget about it.  It's just tedious and boring, waiting for something to heal."

Siouxsie's words are always weighed and measured with care and calculation before their release.  We talk about doctors, masseurs, and masochism.  We talk in ever-increasing circles.

"It's surprising how much trivial things have become so important and so supposedly interesting.  You only have to look in the newspapers - they are filled with it.  Pop stars are now just part of the trivia."

And does Siouxsie feel trivial?

"NO!" cannons back the reply.  She half smiles, wiping imaginary bloodstains off her skull-headed walking stick.  Siouxsie is right.  Reagon was right too - Star wars is the answer to world domination, but it's got nothing to do with satellites or lasers.  Trivial pursuit will be our undoing.  The globe will soon float upon a nauseous wave of fatuous tit-bits spewed up by every orifice of the media until we drown in it.  Countries won't be taken by force, but through apathy.  The Banshees have their part to play in the life and death struggle against TV quiz shows, but they will also play a part in the inevitable defeat.  A point driven home when Nicholas Parsons introduced the band for the Tube's 100th Birthday edition.  Another sale of the century.

The group's bright sparks in their "Tinderbox" are drawn from tattered shreds of similar incidental material - film, fact, and fungus, all salted with childhood fears and adult neuroses.

From innocence to experience.  The Banshees have learned to scrape meaning from nebulous ambiguity, creating voodoo mystery with a charlatan's spell that is part instinct, part strategy, and a large amount of happy accident.  This time the ingredients work - "Tinderbox", unlike "Hyaena", never turns paradox into self-parody.  Siouxsie And The banshees spent years trying to be something they weren't - a truly eccentric and macabre cluster or persona where a Wilde Charlie Manson roams with Bette "Bay Jane" Davis.  Now the band are just trying to be.

The myth and the mask are not worn, they're lived and are, therefore acceptable.  They loathe the idea of being commonplace and will stare hard and say anything to separate reputation from repetition.  They tell me that the expected is now the unexpected, and make every effort to convince me that they are predictably unpredictable.  Just like the weather.

Confused?  You're supposed to be.  The Banshees epitaph should read:

EVERYTHING MEANS

Nothing is meant.

But this is premature.  The band hasn't finished yet.  If anything, the timely arrival of John Carruthers (the latest pearl in a string of guitarists) has strengthened bonds, and hardened their resolve to remain relevant.  While their legions of fans stay donned in goth-frocks, and mascara while swinging in The Batcave.  The Banshees' formula of studied and studded nightmare puts them in another class - the class of '86.

"I started writing because I used to get so frustrated when I couldn't say what I wanted to well enough in conversation.  I think maybe I sill do..."

the band's amalgam of fear, fantasy, and ritual is as difficult to define as Alexie Sayle's hairline.  Be vague and remain enigmas.  The duo do confess, however, to more tangible fears:  Severin lives in fear that one day birds will fly at him and peck out his eyes, while Sioux's phobia is equally chilling... and cut from movies.

"Maybe it's because I live on my own, but I'm frightened of waking up in the middle of the night and finding a man standing over me... especially a man with an axe!  I also frighten myself at night by thinking:  What if someone was to break down the door and they had a knife in their hands and an inane grin?"

Freud would have had a heyday - or perhaps just a headache.  Sioux's eyes light up as we talk about "The Shining", Hammer Horrors, and "the Return Of The Living Dead" ("Now that's fun!").  She laughs without reservation for the first time - the perverse has become an innate part of the band's verse.  Sioux and Budgie have often been spotted at their local bookshop flicking through obscure medical text books, looking at plague victims, and the grotesque results of rare tropical diseases.  Here's a woman who's not easily unnerved - the last anything shocked her was the discovery that Rock Hudson was gay!

"People think I'm mad to live on my own, but I couldn't live any other way.  I'm not frightened of loneliness, just being alone.  I'm a very private person."

Here's an understatement!  Entering Sioux's private purlieu is more difficult than getting into Wapping.  What's in her room?  Does she keep tropical fish?  What does she use them for?  What... Tap, tap, tap.  The portcullis slams shut.

Do you think it will snow tomorrow?

Severin's eyes glint as Siouxsie holds her ivory-handled cane aloft for all to admire, informing me she finds it invaluable for warding off fans, strangers, and stray questions.

"Degville's got a plastic one of those he's been brandishing about lately," offers Severin with sardonic venom.

"Agh!  Ever the imitations..." Sioux signs.  "There are hardly any stars around anymore.  Prince is a good example of what a star is.  He had that element of enhancing glamour with content.  Bands now need to be told they are stars.  Real stars don't need to be told.  They know.  David Byrne knows, as does Alan Vega."

The Lady in Waiting believes in stars, or at least in astrology.  There is a destiny that shapes our ends, but Sioux is withdrawn about what fate has in store and what is on sale.  She will shuffle the Tarot pack, but never put the cards in the table.

This conspiracy of silence extends well past a casual interview.  Siouxsie has just been on holiday, and not even the rest of the band know where.  The weather was nice.

If knee be well, The Banshees plan their first extensive tour of America next month to coincide with the album's Stateside release.  Hecklers have been screaming that the USA spells sell-out, but they should know better.  Siouxsie doesn't compromise - except when it suits her.  Think of it, the band's first organised shot at riches, mass acclaim, Oreo cookies, and marble jacuzzies...

"I tried one of those once," says Sioux, "but it was in a gym - not the most luxurious of settings.  I think that making it in America would be wonderful simply because it would afford me the freedom to get away.  I'd build my own castle."

Siouxsie Hearst The Third?

"I'd love to see Prince' mansion - it sounds brilliantly ambitious".

The Banshees have a greater supply of ambivalence than ambition.  They want the reward without the prefix of work - although the band does go through stints of unbridled discipline when their record company needles them enough to provoke a reaction.

"Besides," explains Severin, "we're an incredibly English pop group and the lure of somewhere like America is neither strong nor attractive.  It's too sunny.  We wouldn't write any great songs if we lived in a place where we could enjoy ourselves all the time."

There are compromises to be made when deciding between comfort and confrontation.  The Banshees want both.  They recently flew off to LA to shoot a scene for a new film by Richard "Tightrope" Todd and were filmed performing "Cities In Dust" in some seedy Hollywood bar.  The band felt they needed the extra exposure, despite Sioux's worries about falling into the Bauhaus ravine of ignomony.  Remember "The Hunger?  Sioux does.

She also remembers Sting's performance in "The Bride" and has steered clear of acting.  Sioux can't act someone else - she has trouble enough being Sioux.  People still believe that the gothic diva finishes whooping it up on stage, goes home, removes her make-up, puts on rubber gloves, and magically becomes Janet Dallion - housewife extraordinaire.  Yet there#s no pretence, no varnish, just Sioux - act and fact tangled and congealed at a point somewhere between Little Miss Muffet and Lady Macbeth.

"We never want people to take it for granted they can have a piece of us to take home."  Indeed, they should take the plastic replica home instead.  Most of "Tinderbox" was recorded in May last year, and appears only after the dismissal of two producers who were suffering from the ill effects of mixing disease.  It's hard to tell if the two gentlemen concerned are gits, or scapegoats.  The Banshees have always needed a great deal of external assistance to pull together the strands of their warped and elusive fabric - the fibre that keeps them suspended above the hubbub of the hit charade.

The band have always known what they want, but are rarely sure how to get it.  With more trial than error, this time they have hit the target.  If the patchy "Hyaena" was a loose-leafed greetings card from the local morgue, "Tinderbox" is a guilt-edged invitation to experience the band's live performance.  Siouxsie And The Banshees request the pleasure of your company to celebrate an evening that will envelope, devour, and excite with an awesome power.  Remember "Night Shift" and "92º" and kiss your soul goodbye.

Sioux blames the stifling pressure of 'cabin fever' for the claustrophobic meanderings of "Hyaena".  Nut surprisingly after spending months in a windowless studio with only brown hessian walls to climb.  Severin attributes the album's faults to an over-written sense of perfection.  His perfect single contains a rousing chorus, lots of handclaps, one-fingered pianos, and thousands of backing vocals.

"I love the sound of stilletos on the pavement," Sioux exclaims with enthusiasm.  "We'll have to get it in one day.  As a child I remember having a slight obsession with shoes that made that noise.  I remember stealing my girlfriend's tap shoes for a day just walking through the streets."

Sadly the knee precludes Sioux's penchant for exotic footwear, and life without heels is described as depressingly low:  "I just like being taller than other people.  I have a pair of red and white thigh-length lace up boots with heels so high I can't even walk around in them.  I just lounge around with them in the home."

This is the closest she comes to a closet revelation.  Siouxsie has been in love for three years now, but the mere mention of the word brings on a cold front and Medusa stare.  Why, I wonder has she never been able to write a love song without ominous strings attached?

"I have."  The air is getting a touch frosty.  Are there, I wonder, plans for a baby Banshee?

"No," she fingers the handle of her cane.  "I haven't felt the tug of mother nature's udders yet.  This is becoming like a Sun interview!"

A chainmail veil is drawn over the subject.

Perhaps it will be sunny tomorrow.

There's already an irridescent ray of hope for the future.  As Sioux says:  "There's a heart in the old beast yet," and maybe even a new trick or treat.

I leave the studio accompanied by the gentle sound of tapping against the pavement.

It's raining again.

CARRUTHERS strikes a light and leads Ted Mico on a journey through TINDERBOX.

CANDYMAN
Well, this is about child abusers.  Certain people have suggested that it's also about drugs and drug-pushers, but it isn't really.  Or at least it could be - Sioux's lyrics are always ambiguous.  Even in Berlin where we were recording, we heard about the shocking rise in child abuse.  If there's one thing Sioux really hates it's children being used against their will.  It's a prime concern of hers.

THE SWEETEST CHILL
This is about a visitation from a lover's spirit who is already dead - someone who comes back from the grave and greets her as a lover.  I don't think Sioux wrote it from personal experience, but you never know.  Whenever she tries to write a love song it always comes out from a very different standpoint.  It's not exactly Bonnie Tyler, though Sioux can do a great Bonnie impersonation.

THIS UNREST
This is an extension of the nightmarish feeling you get when things are getting on top of you.  It comes from a very "Night Shift"/"Jigsaw Feeling" feel.  The music swirls like a dream - a score for "Nightmare On Elm Street".  have you ever dreamt of being eaten alive?

CITIES IN DUST
As everyone must know, this song was inspired by a trip to Pompeii on our last Italian tour.  There were perfectly preserved figures still asleep who had been caught in the lava flow.  There were some people caught in very strange positions!  We found a book called "Pornographic Pompeii" and used one of the figures as a label on the single.  For centuries the Catholic church banned the pictures, and when the single was released, WH Smiths, and Woolies banned it as well!  Some things never change.

CANNONS
In Spanish medieval times, if it hadn't rained and the crops were suffering then they pointed a cannon into the sky in the hope of bursting the clouds.  Bang!

PARTIES FALL
This is about people who go to thousands of parties and talk to everyone and lave the party and fine they haven't a friend in the world.  In London there's a while vacuous circus of meeting pop stars and film stars and then departing and feeling sorryv for yourself.  We're never sorry for wankers.

92º
It's very near to blood temperature - the temperature of murder.  The crime rate in America goes up by 200 per cent everytime the weather hits that figure.  We've always been fascinated by scraps of information like that.  People go apeshit at that temperature - any hotter and it's too uncomfortable to kill anyone!

LANDS END
There's a funny story here.  We were in Berlin recording this track when, half way through, the Lands End tragedy happened.  The lyrics don't really correspond to that - it's more a lover's leap for eternity.  Strange though, when we wrote "Cities In Dust" the Columbian volcano erupted as well.  We're worryingly topical without intentionally meaning to be.

By the way, have you noticed that most of the songs are bout the weather?

1986

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STEVE SEVERIN (THE BANSHEES)

A is for... Absinthe - Arsenic - Anguish - Aztecs
B is for... Baudelaire - Barbiedoll - Bardot - Bunuel
C is for... Candelabra - Cleavage - Carcrash - Casanova
D is for... Derringers - Dogstyle - Duels - Droogs
E is for... Espionage - Edgar Allan Poe - Entrepreneurs - Edie
F is for... Flesh - Fiction - Fanmail - Fops
G is for... Guillotine - Ghosts - Gingerbreadmen - Goddesses
H is for... Howard Hughes - Handcuffs - Heresy - Highwaymen
I is for... Intrigue - Infidelity - Impact - InOut
J is for... Jack-in-a-box - Jetset - JFK - Japan
K is for... Keeler - Kinkyboots - Kiss+tell - Knifepoint
L is for... Lolita - Lingerie - Lechery - Life
M is for... Marsielles - Monroe - Murder - Massage
N is for... Nazis - Nixon - Nubiles - Nurses
O is for... Opium - Orchids - Oilshieks - Orphee
P is for... Perfume - P.I.E. - Poppies - Playboys
Q is for... Quicksilver - Querelle - Queen Charlotte - Don Quixote
R is for... Rasputin - Rouge - Ragamuffins - Roman Empire
S is for... Scandal - Swordsticks - Servants - Syphillis
T is for... Two-way mirrors - Torment - Tongues - Tower Of London
U is for... Underage - U.N.C.L.E. - Uproar - Up Pompei
W is for... Wet Dreams - Wicked Witch of the West - Whores - Wire
X is for... X-ray Eyes - Xcommunication - Xplosives - Xploitation films
Y is for... Yen - Yellowbelly - Yo-ho-ho - Young Blood
Z is for... Zorro - Zen - Zoos - Zip-a-dee-doo-dah

1985

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