Category: Siouxsie & The Banshees

A GUEST POSTING by MIDDLE AGED MAN

1. Pure

Your first single is a top 10 hit, which song will you choose to be the opening track on your first album? Well this is 1978 and you are a punk band, so obviously it’s not going to be the hit single, no it’s a short slow wordless mournful piece that has very little in common with the rest of the album, but does a great job of establishing that the album ‘The Scream’ was not going to be an easy listen and provides the perfect opener for this ICA.

2. Hong Kong Garden

The ‘Pop Song’ as Siouxsie described it during the ‘Join Hands’ tour, was my first and most people’s exposure to the band. At the time, unless you were a John Peel listener and at that time I was too young to stay awake during school nights, Top of the Pops was the way to hear and see new bands and it was on this show that I first heard and saw the band, compared to what was to follow it was ‘poppy’ but in comparison to the rest of the tv show weird and aggressive, according to Wiki it reached number 7 in the chart, only bettered by their cover of Dear Prudence some 5 years later, so Siouxsie was right to call it ‘Pop Song’

3. Playground Twist

Their 3rd single, manages to make children playing/playgrounds a sinister experience. I remember at the time John Lydon ( billed as Johnny Rotten) was appearing on Juke Box Jury and Playground Twist was one of the singles reviewed and he ducked it by saying the audience should decide whether it was a hit or miss. I found the show on Youtube last week and it is from a different world, alongside Rotten were Alan Freeman (fair enough), Elaine Paige (West End musical singer) and Joan Collins (who at the time was starring in soft porn movies like The Stud) reviewing the latest new singles, the most shocking aspect is seeing both Rotten and Freeman smoking on screen, it is well worth a watch.

4. Night Shift

A track from their 4th Album JuJu which is probably my overall favourite and for me this is the standout track. John McGeoch’s guitar playing is perfection combining a lovely riff with intricate note playing. He was a perfect replacement for the Banshees, managing to maintain their aggressive guitar led sound whilst adding a new layer of delicacy, subsequent guitarists never quite managed to achieve this balance,

5. Skin

From their 3rd album, recorded following the abrupt department of John McKay (guitar) and Kenny Morris (drums) during the Join Hands tour, and features guitar on this song from non-other than Steve Jones (Sex Pistols), although to be honest you wouldn’t know it from the playing. Siouxsie’s vocal is a vicious condemnation of the use of animal fur for clothing opening with ‘Mink, seal and ermine smother fat women’

6. Painted Bird

From A Kiss In A Dreamhouse and the album where, for me, were the guitars become less dominant and Siouxsie starts to sound like a regular singer. I always thought the song was about Siouxsie herself, but apparently it’s about The Painted Bird  – a 1965 novel by Jerzy Kosiński which doesn’t sound too pleasant a read.

7. Helter Skelter

A great example of a band taking a song and making it their own, it fits seamlessly into the Banshees sound and closes the first side of The Scream. I didn’t know it was a cover until I read the songwriting credits (from the days when you would pore over every detail of a record and its sleeve) and to be honest I have never heard the original to this day and don’t want to, in my mind it will always be a Banshees song.

8. Israel

A constant reminder that Budgie is probably the most powerful drummer I have experienced live, I can still feel the vibrations through the wooden floor of the De Montford Hall in Leicester as he pounded away.

9. Paradise Place

A scathing commentary upon plastic surgery from the late 70’s when it wasn’t the norm or accepted in the way it is today and shows that Siouxsie when angry could write lyrics that are as good as any from the era …

Do you notice my eyes, are they in the right place?
There’s a Mantovani backdrop to pucker up a tummy tuck
A voice soft as lint mashed up with shades of pink
Hide your genetics under drastic cosmetics

10. Icon

The most Siouxsie and the Banshees of Siouxsie and the Banshee songs. Starting with a slow guitar riff, no notes just chords, with thunderous drums and vocals that are not quite singing as we know it but are full of aggression and leave you in no doubt that there isn’t a chance of compromise.

Bonus Track

Exterminating Angel

After the Banshees split up, The Creatures appeared with just Siouxsie and Budgie as members. This is the most Banshee song they recorded and is magnificent and is the only song I know on this subject matter and one that Siouxsie attacks with pure vengeance.

MIDDLE AGED MAN

Today’s featured 7” piece of vinyl was seemingly named as ‘Single of the Week’ in August 1978 within the pages of all four of the main UK music papers – Melody Maker, NME, Record Mirror and Sounds, something I find hard to believe given that the papers projected themselves towards slightly different audiences and it was incredibly rare for all of them to simultaneously champion one band or singer.

But such was the fate of this:-

mp3 : Siouxsie and The Banshees – Hong Kong Garden

In an era when many a new band sounded fresh and exciting, particularly to my teenage ears, there was something about Hong Kong Garden that made it stand out even more so, that, of course being the Oriental sounding opening. The reviews in the music papers, to their credit, did nail things very well, offering the sort of soundbites that could be added to a poster if it was being used to attract further custom:-

“a bright, vivid narrative, power charged by the most original, intoxicating guitar playing heard in a long, long time”.

“strident and powerful with tantalising oriental guitar riffs”.

“ catchy, original….coupled with an irresistible sing-along chorus”.

“I love every second”.

The introductory notes come courtesy of a xylophone. The song had originally been aired on the John Peel Show on Radio 1 some six months earlier, with a quite different sound courtesy of a toy glockenspiel. The drums were also quite different….

mp3 : Siouxsie and The Banshees – Hong Kong Garden (Peel Session)

Ah, the drums. The instrument that played a huge part in making Hong Kong Garden one of the earliest smash hits of the new wave era – it’s #7 placing made it one of the few to go Top Ten in those days. Polydor Records had hooked the band up with an American producer named Bruce Albertine and had hired the expensive Olympic Studios in London for the sessions. The band didn’t like the results and the decision was taken to work with a little-known producer in a tiny basement studio in London. The producer got it done and dusted in two days, concentrating on the drum sound, insisting that Kenny Morris play the bass and snares first of all and then cymbals and tom-toms later on. These were matched up, with a bit of echo added, thus giving the song a bigger, fuller and more ambitious sound, arguably making the first new-wave single that didn’t sound just one step up from a great, live sounding demo.

The producer’s name was Steve Lillywhite and Hong Kong Garden was his first hit in that role….the first of many hundreds.

You can get a real sense of the difference that Lillywhite made by flipping it over to the b-side:-

mp3 : Siouxsie and The Banshees – Voices

This was salvaged from the Olympic Sessions with Bruce Albertine. It is distinctly average……(feel free to differ!!!)

The band would return to the studio with Steve Lillywhite to record debut album The Scream. As it was a separate session, and in a different studio to where they had first worked on the single, the decision was taken to leave Hong Kong Garden off said debut album. An act of artistic merit, but something of a commercial folly.

JC

Here’s another quiz question I’d have got wrong.

Siouxsie and The Banshees released 30 singles between 1978 and 1995 – how many of then went Top 40?

The answer is 18……my guess would have been much higher than that, I’d likely have gone for 25 as I can’t recall too many flops.

Turns out that a number of the songs I had always assumed had been chart hits were nothing of the sort – Metal Postcard (Mittageisen), Israel, Slowdive and Melt! all stalled in the 40s as too did their admittedly limp version of The Passenger.

Possibly even more surprising is that just five of their singles have cracked the Top 20, of which two were cover versions, including what proved to be their biggest selling 45 back in 1983:-

mp3 : Siouxsie & The Banshees – Dear Prudence

This got to #3 and it was all over the music press that it was a cover of a song by The Beatles that had originally appeared on The White Album. I was glad to have been furnished with such info as, back in 83, I hadn’t heard the original. And here’s the thing…….36 years on, I still haven’t! This isn’t the time nor place to go into great detail as to why I have no great affection for the works of Harrison, Lennon, McCartney and Starr – the songs I do know of theirs tend to be the ones that got heavy rotation on the radio as I was growing up (i.e. the hit singles) and Dear Prudence, which wiki tells me was written for Prudence Farrow, the sister of the actress Mia Farrow, was an album track only.

The hit came when the Banshees were going through a difficult but extremely productive period. John McGeoch, whose guitar work was so important to their sound, had succumbed to the rigours of touring, and combined with the first signs of what would become full-blown alcoholism in later years, had suffered a nervous breakdown on stage in Madrid in late 82 which led to him being fired and Robert Smith being asked in as his replacement. He accepted but only on the basis that he could continue to perform with The Cure.

1983 was some year to try to keep up with everything that was happening.

Siouxsie and Budgie resurrected The Creatures two years after the hit debut EP and found themselves enjoying a Top 20 debut album in Feast.

Steve Severin and Robert Smith were the principal members of The Glove but their two singles and album from that year were relative flops.

The Cure enjoyed the fruits from the singles compilation Japanese Whispers with The Walk giving them their first Top 20 hit and its follow-up The Love Cats doing even better by reaching #7

The Banshees spent much of the year recording Hyaena, although it wouldn’t be released until May 1984; they kept their own profile up amidst all this activity with the release of Dear Prudence as a stand-alone 45 in September and Nocturne, a live album from two shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London performed on successive nights on 30 September and 1 October.

It’s no real surprise that Robert Smith, on the point of complete exhaustion, left the Banshees just before Hyaena was released and the extensive promotional work that was associated with it.

Looking back, there’s a case to be made for an ICA from that year, comprising the side projects, the live album and the one-off single. It would, by its nature, be a patchwork affair, but there would be more than enough to keep most satisfied. Instead, I’ll stick to just offering the two tracks from the 12” single:-

mp3 : Siouxsie & The Banshees – Tattoo
mp3 : Siouxsie & The Banshees – There’s A Planet In My Kitchen

The former is a paean to inky designs on the skin and is something of a grower…..the latter has a wonderful title – the ‘tune’ doesn’t quite match its majesty and it could well be the most out-there thing the band ever did!

All tracks were produced by Mike Hedges, who himself would have a busy year working with The Beat, The Undertones, Southern Death Cult as well as The Creatures and the Banshees, all the while basking in the glorious work he’d done the previous year on Sulk by Associates, an album which has a big influence on the three songs on Dear Prudence

JC