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IS SHE STILL ALL THE RAGE
As Siouxsie Sioux embarks on her
first solo album, Chris Sullivan finds out if age has mellowed the first
lady of punk.
On a warm day in May, in the bar of
a quiet London hotel, Siouxsie Sioux is still turning heads in a
tight-fitting Gaultier dress, with oriental make-up on her alabaster skin
under her trademark black hair. Siouxsie was one of the founders of
British punk, performing at the legendary punk festival at the 100 Club in
1976 and, with the Sex Pistols, appearing infamously on the Bill Grundy
Show. Then, in the 1980s, hers was the face that launched a
million Goths. She, like the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood is a
great British institution.
"I was certainly confused by
all the lookalikes," chuckles the remarkably affable diva.
"And I didn't really know how to handle it at first. At one
point I was scheduled to be the Queen of Goth. But I refused to be
categorised. Once people start asking me to conform in any way it is
like a red rag to a bull - I rebel in the exact opposite direction."
But one cannot rebel for ever.
What happens when an icon of disaffected urban youth approaches middle
age? Do they (like Johnny Rotten) present nature programmes on
television, or do they (like Joe Strummer) move to the country to walk the
dog? Siouxsie did indeed move with her husband and long-time musical
collaborator, Budgie, to a converted farmhouse in the South of France in
1992. But, although she dutifully tended her expansive garden,
resting on her laurels was never an option.
Siouxsie is in London preparing for
her solo album. "I'm meeting with loads of different collaborators,
but I don't want to talk about it too much in case I jinx it. It was
the Dreamshow that encouraged me to do this album because I loved working
with all these different people so much."
The Dreamshow consisted of Siouxsie
performing live at the Festival Hall in London in October 2004, backed by
a classical orchestra, the Japanese Kodo drummer Leonard Eto, a percussion
section, a brass section, backing singers and her band. The event
was a sell-out, and the DVD of the show topped the music charts much of
last year.
Siouxsie and the Banshees first
appeared on stage on September 20, 1976, supporting the Clash and the Sex
Pistols. Even by punk standards, they were unconventional.
"I was just starting to play
the bass and Siouxsie wanted to sing, so together with Billy Idol we had
an idea for a band," says the founder Banshee, Steve Severin.
"Then Malcolm (McLaren) said he was putting on this punk festival at
the 100 Club and he needed to fill a slot. So Billy said: 'We'll do
it!'"
But, days before their debut, Idol
dropped out and in stepped Marco Pirroni (later of Adam and the Ants) on
guitar, with Sid Vicious on drums. "The Clash let us rehearse
in their space in Camden," recalls Severin. "But after ten
minutes Sid got bored and said: 'OK, let's just make a racket. Who
cares?' So we made all this noise while Siouxsie recited the Lord's
Prayer. It was horrible."
Off stage Siouxsie was even more
striking. I remember the singer, along with Sue Catwoman, Lynda the
dominatrix, Idol and the rest of what would become known as the Bromley
Contingent, holding court throughout that hot summer of 1976 in Louise's,
a lesbian club in Soho.
As much influenced by the glam
antics of David Bowie and the raw power of Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and her
crowd would turn up in impeccable outfits that were dazzlingly original
and certainly not what one might term punk. But it wasn't until the
Sex Pistols' infamous Screen On The Green appearance, that Siouxsie
offered a taste of what was to come, taking to the stage clad only in
shiny PVC underwear, fishnets and a cup-less bra that exposed her breasts
and stole the Pistols' thunder. As the former Banshees manager Nils
Stevenson told me: "I knew from that moment she was going to be
huge."
Born Susan Janet Ballion, Siouxsie
was raised along with her older brother and sister in suburban
Chislehurst, Kent. Her parents had met in the Belgian Congo; her
mother was a bilingual secretary, her father was a laboratory technician
who milked venom from poisonous snakes and died when Siouxsie was just
14. "I was always quite aware of us being different," she
recalls. "I didn't have any deep friendships at school because
it was all silly girls talking about their boyfriends, so I started coming
up the West End with my older sister, a go-go dancer, and hanging out at
Let It Rock, Malcolm and Vivienne's shop before they opened Sex. I
must have been about 17."
One of these excursions sealed
Siouxsie's fate. "It was at a Roxy Music concert in October
1975 that I met Siouxsie," remembers Severin. "She had
some mad outfit that she had hired for the night and I had dyed white hair
and a 1950s Lurex jacket. It was a match made in heaven as we both
saw ourselves as carrying on the tradition of glamorous art rock - the
Velvets, David Bowie, and Roxy with a bit of Kraftwerk and Can thrown
in. We never fitted in. We weren't a punk band."
"I've always hated the term
punk and have never wanted to be lumped in with it," says Siouxsie,
who has refused almost every request to be interviewed in punk's 30th
anniversary year. "It was so lazy. But looking back,
nothing can really describe how single-minded and isolated the key people
were. Thirty years ago, walking down the street as we did was like
running the gauntlet: you risked getting the s*** beaten out of you.
But punk was the perfect name for those who needed something to belong
to. I never have. What we did was always about defying categorisation."
Maybe it was this refusal to kowtow
to what was fast becoming a commodified punk caricature that kept Siouxsie
and the Banshees (now with Kenny Morris on drums and John McKay on guitar)
unsigned for almost two years after the 100 Club engagement, even though
they were a big live draw. "By the time we were signed,"
she recalls, "I wanted nothing to do with punk. Zips, mohicans
or safety pins, they were yet another uniform sold in the back pages of
music papers."
Siouxsie and the Banshees' first
single, Hong Kong Garden - a perverse paean to a Chinese takeaway
in Chislehurst - reached No 7 in the charts in September 1978, while the
first album, The Scream, was a worldwide hit. But as the band
were recording the follow-up, Join Hands, splits were beginning to
appear. Just after its release, a fight broke out between the
Banshees in an Aberdeen record shop, and Morris and McKay walked out just
hours before that night's gig. "If you see them." Siouxsie
told the bewildered crowd that evening, "you have my permission to
beat the s*** out of them."
"I've still got a soft spot for
that album," says Siouxsie now. "It doesn't matter what
was going on behind the scenes because it was a really consolidated album
that still sounds modern today. We were lonely and isolated and that
comes across in the music. It's a very brave record."
But Siouxsie and Severin rose from
the rubble, joined by Budgie on drums and the late John McGeoch on guitar,
to record a new album, Kaleidoscope. The new record followed
two massively successful singles, Happy House and Christine,
and at that point Siouxsie seemed to be the coolest figure in Britain.
"It really felt like a solid
group at the time," recalls the singer. "Juju, our
next album, had a really strong identity and a unique sound, which the
bands that came in our wake tried to mimic. but the simply ended up
diluting. With all those other bands, the doom and the black was all
they had. They took it seriously. There was always more to us
than that. So, of course, I found the Goth tag very limiting."
In 1996, on the day that the Sex
Pistols launched their reunion tour, Severin and Siouxsie ended tow
decades of musical collaboration and disbanded the Banshees. "A
lot of people were really upset when we split up," Siouxsie
recalls. "But being in a band you live in each other's pockets,
and for stupid reasons it becomes joyless and petty grudges are held on
to."
Now, after 30 years and nearly as
many albums - 18 with the Banshees and 11 with the Creatures, the band she
shares with Budgie - is there any advise that she would give to a young
ingénue spurred on by her example? "My advise to any young
girl like me would be to dress and do whatever makes you happy, and not
let convention hold you back. A lot of people ask me now of
recalcitrance was the only reason we did what we did initially. And
I answer: 'Yes, absolutely!' It warmed the cockles of my
heart, and to some extent it sill does."
20/05/06 Chris Sullivan
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