It was a little futile, really, to say, well, it's not as good as their last album - Juju - and it reminds me of the one before Juju - Kaleidoscope - in the way that it appears to be recovering from something, a catastrophe, or just an outburst of energy.  It was another episode, another series of events and moments, where space and time overlap and intertwine, and ambiguity and uncertainty are the norm, and the funny thing is that now the group are no more we can see that this album, this set of songs and atmospheres, is absolutely the perfect fifth album by Siouxsie and the Banshees.  It's the perfect sequel to Juju, which was the only way in hindsight that they could have followed Kaleidoscope, which was how they healed themselves after their second record, Join Hands, which was a fractured album of pain and turmoil that followed their startling dramatic and energetic debut, The Scream.  And where it went next was, we can see and hear now that everything has happened, is exactly where it had to go.

Their albums had become living story books, set in another world, a world that reflected back at us parts of this world that we tend to avoid and ignore and escape.  Even though they appeared in the charts and had a punk rock history, so there was a sort of familiarity about the group, and Siouxsie was a  more authentic female pop star than just about anyone on the planet, the group was writing music that celebrated demented beauty and that implied, explosively, that something momentous was approaching, or departing.  They weren't by any means your average pop group singing songs of safety.  Their songs pulled silver threads from the coarse texture of daily life, poured dazzling light on the depraved actions of perverts and executioners, feared for our collective sanity, confronted the mystery of existence, created metaphysical landscapes that sparkled with a thousand lights, had inklings of a superhuman order, wrote about childhood with lyric ferocity.

They didn't make albums in the traditional rock sense.  After all, here was a rock group who had decided, not necessarily because they began the same time punk did, more possibly because of something that Edgar Allen Poe once wrote, or a substance they had swallowed on a long journey into the night, or a ferry to Calais, that they were committed to replacing God with artistic intention.  It's amazing under these circumstances that they ever appeared in Top Of The Pops.  On the other hand, all the best things that ever interrupted the gaudy flow of that show with something stunning and novel tended to share a similar high minded aesthetic, even if that was connected to a passion for a bright, empathetic pop song.

Five albums old, Siouxsie and the Banshees were compiling these intoxicating anthologies of sexual seduction and self-understanding, confronting the horrors that the mind can conjure, and it was no wonder that their music soon inspired hundreds and thousands of sad, shrouded and alienated creatures dressed in black, many of them looking as though they formed themselves out of wax and coal to mirror the look of Siouxsie, their surging, artistic and exquisitely timeless leader.  Some of us listened to Siouxsie and the Banshees for, amongst other things, the gothic thrills, they way they turned the agony of life and death into pop music.  Others took it, for better or worse, far more seriously.

All their albums could now be called Tales, or Tales from within Tales, and they tended to describe, using a pop music as framed and fired by punk, how we grow from one place to another, or one mental stat to another, because of all manner of conflicts.  They'd embraced, or resigned themselves, to outsider status, whatever their positions in the charts, whatever the size of the venues they played, and however welcomed they superficially seemed inside the rock merry-go-round.

Looking back we see how the group's heart was Siouxsie and Severin, a fluid mixture of metal and membrane, elucidation and pulse, the pair of them locked in their own rooms writing monstrous, acid his-and-her words about words and desire and terror.  Drumming in complete sympathy, sticking to the plan whatever the circumstances, keeping his head down and his arms strong, searching for the meaning of it all through rhythm, was Budgie.  He became a second heart.  Because it was set up this way, and the group remained faithful to the first urgent, precarious noises they mad however far from the nest they soared, however many bells, strings and echoes crept into their arrangements, there are guitarists that sail in, and fly out, or start with the best intentions, and find that there is more stress involved than they might have thought.

There was certain stress involved in being a guitarist in Siouxsie and the Banshees because it was often demanded of such an officer and gentleman that he produce sound that could merrily and scarily represent energy that seemed robed in death's foam, or conjure up a marble swirl, a leap into the abyss, the rough caress of a cat's tongue, or the way that love can turn to hate, or the way cloudy black worms slither into cracks across the floor, or how a lover's hand can rustle endearingly over your skin, and the way that a kiss can end with both party's perishing on each other's lips.  A Banshee guitarist was expected to appreciate how a riff, a slash and ripple of notes, might imply to the listener the sound of black branches clicking and sagging with ice, whilst also sounding like it might be something a lusty Iggy Pop might like to get his rotten teeth into.  No wonder they never lasted long.

On Dreamhouse, the guitarist is John McGeoch, who in his own rampant, earthy way knew how to produce the foam, the saliva and the cracking, for as long as it took.  He's another heart here.  He helped the group add rich depth, colour and spice to their sound.  His approach was more conventional and direct than Siouxsie's or Steven's, and the combination of his discipline and their intuition was a significant factor in how Siouxsie and Severin stitched together their shattered group after their original guitarist and drummer fled into a godforsaken night, or refused to budge from a service station on the M6 - the pair had stretched themselves to breaking point making the group's debut album The Scream, leaving S and S bereaved and livid surrounded by broken dreams and a halo of flies.

John McGeoch had moved from the house of Magazine, a group led by the mysteriously worked up and theatrically minded Howard Devoto, so he was used to playing guitar in savage, ceremonial ways that could whip up a frenzy whilst articulating anxiety and the roots of distress.  He was perfect for both the extravagantly nervous Magazine and the sensationally neurotic Banshees, not least because he could make the guitar sound like it was actually watching the listener.  He could creep into the soul of the listener whilst they were preoccupied with the preoccupations of the singer, and later the listener might find themselves more disturbed by the guitar than the words.

On Dreamhouse, Siouxsie and Severin swap their fraught blasphemous tales of violence, loss, sex, claustrophobia, their obsessions with sin and self.  All their characters are alone.  The group is alone, making an album that is alone.  Siouxsie sings his lyrics and hers with isolated grandeur, now such a great 20th century singer, with a voice that's all hers, even as she sings a song about feeling death's touch with an orgasmic thrill.  Assigned to a world that exists beyond familiar horizons, her voice remains detached, but it's a detachment that gives credence to these truly fantastic stories.  This being a Siouxsie and the Banshees album, it is not far fetched to consider the following...  No matter how much we fill our lives with places to go and people to see, no matter how we perceive our nearest and dearest, and no matter how we strive to realise our dreams, we are alone with our thoughts at the end of the day, and, suddenly, the shades are drawn, shutting out the passage of the light.  The bells have stopped ringing.  A Kiss In The Dreamhouse has ended, it was a hell of a thing, and now we wait for what happens next.

Paul Morley 18/12/08

Chilling

From ice maiden to carnival queen - Siouxsie And The Banshees on CD.

At the dawn of punk, Siouxsie Sioux was chiefly renowned for her dismissal of Bill Grundy as "a dirty old man" and for a dress sense designed to provoke an outbreak of British sexual hypocrisy.  The Banshees may have made their debut at the 100 Club Punk Festival in 1976 but their extended assault on The Lord's Prayer was as much a dare as a stab at launching a career.  Siouxsie's original invention was herself and that unflinching stare remains one of the great icons of punk's disdain.

These beginnings render it all the more surprising that, 11 albums on, the Banshees have long transcended the first flush of punk to create an unmatched legacy of dramatic and very British pop.  Polydor's release of the first seven Banshees titles on CD means that all their output is now available on compact disc bar the two "holiday projects", The Creatures and The Glove.  If Siouxsie's reputation remains that of the haughty Queen of Gothic Punk, these CDs suggest that, within the parameters of their brooding and fantastical world view, there is a good deal more to Siouxsie and her long-term partner Steve Severin than that enduring image suggests.

Although Siouxsie and Severin's punk credentials are impeccable, the Banshees were the last of the original punk clan to release a record.  By the time Hong Kong Garden entered the Top Ten in August 1978, the Banshees had already seen their fair share of touring and rapidly progressed beyond the confrontational three-chord thrash that had rendered punk a musical cliché.  Spearheaded by John McKay's sheet-metal guitar, their debut LP The Scream virtually invented the Gothic rock genre overnight and stands alongside Magazine's Real Life as a turning point in punk's movement away from rabble-rousing and into the internal landscape of the psyche.  While songs like Carcass are dated by their goose-stepping beat and stone-faced delivery, the gut-wrenching Overground and the dizzy Jigsaw Feeling demonstrate that already the Banshees were far more concerned with psychodramas of disgust than confronting society head on.

The Scream was a new take on suburban angst as Siouxsie's howling vocals intimated that the boredom and alienation of suburban life amounted to nothing less than a horror show.  On later albums, the Banshees would uncover a rich exoticism in suburban fears; on The Scream, Steve Lillywhite's thundering production ensures that they sound trapped.  Restored on CD to all its forbidding austerity, The Scream is both a declaration of intent and something of an artistic full stop.

The following year's Join Hands indicates that while only PiL could match the Banshees' chilling wail of noise, they'd left themselves little room to manoeuvre.  McKay's guitar still seesaws disturbingly and Severin's ear for compelling bass riffs is apparent on Placebo Effect, but while Siouxsie turns domestic claustrophobia into Gothic nightmare on Premature Burial and Mother, her vocals are oddly unwieldy.  While Hong Kong Garden had displayed an ability to combine a playful sense of unease with driving pop melody, on Join Hands there are only riffs.

The departure of McKay and drummer Kenny Morris a mere four days after its release suggests that the Banshees' two halves had indeed reached an impasse.  The next album Kaleidoscope featured the now long-serving Budgie on drums and guitar work from John McGeoch and Steve Jones.  The Banshees' embattled state obliged Sioux and Severin to rediscover their pop flair and the album's tow singles, Happy House and Christine, display a renewed ability to surround Siouxsie's icy mixture of fatalism and sarcasm in the kind of melodies that even a punk's parents might hum.  The inventiveness of a piece like Red Light, driven along by the clicks of a camera shutter, proved that the Banshees were considerably more than a one-trick pony.

1981's Juju finds McGeoch firmly ensconced on guitar, Sioux and Severin devoting themselves to an exhaustive exploration of the power of idols and the Banshees reborn as a magisterial hard rock band.  On moody songs like Arabian Knights, Siouxsie unveils a new sensuality while the Banshees display the brooding authority of the Stones circa Paint It Black.

Juju confirmed the Banshees' staying power even if their frequent assaults on the singles chart has never own them a mass following like that of The Cure.  Most early Banshee albums have their indigestible moments and the argument that they are the best singles band gains some credence from the Once Upon A Time collection where early singles like The Staircase gain contrast from later stabs like the eerie Israel.  A sequel is now surely due.

A Kiss In The Dreamhouse (1982) found the Banshees further investigating the kind of offbeat textures that Brian Jones brought to the Stones in the mid-'60s.  Songs like She's A Carnival and Cascade make gorgeous use of strings while Siouxsie's voice acquires a hidden warmth for studies in erotic extremity like Melt! and Obsession.  Dreamhouse probably remains the Banshees' finest hour.

In 1983, the Banshees marked time with the live Nocturne, a well-recorded resumé of the band's capacity for Sturm und Drang lightened by the occasional exchange with the audience ("What time tunnel did you crawl out of?" Siouxsie asks one particularly nostalgic punk fan).  McGeoch had flown the nest immediately after the Dreamhouse and Nocturne misses his magisterial authority despite Robert Smith's capable but understandably muted understudying.  Smith soon departed in turn and the Banshees spent the mid '80s trying to capture their old fire.

The Banshee's origins and Siouxsie's forbidding stare have made it hard for them to escape their punk associations while their use of horror imagery has occasionally blinded fans to the questions of power and threatened innocence their unsettling narratives explore.  These CDs lend their work a fresh clarity and trace a remarkable evolution which serves as a reminder that, for its bravest exponents, punk was always more a question of daring than a set of conventions.

The Scream 4/5
Join Hands 3/5
Kaleidoscope 3/5
Juju 4/5
Once Upon A Time 4/5
A Kiss In The Dreamhouse 4/5
Nocturne 3/5

Mark Copper

Webster's New World Dictionary defines arcane as "hidden or secret, understood by only a few, esoteric," and Siouxsie & The Banshees' A Kiss In The Dreamhouse certainly fits that description.

Recorded in August of 1982 and release in October of that same year, this album was sorely overlooked the US.   Its also a pretty much forgotten about album - so much so here that Geffen didn't even issue it when they re-issued the Banshees' discography.   The album itself was successful for the band, reaching No.11 in the British charts, and the singles for "Slowdive" and "Melt!" went as high as No.41 and No.49 respectively, but where or if the album or its singles charted in this country, I have no idea.

The title for A Kiss In The Dreamhouse was derived while Steve Severin was watching a television program about a rich and very exclusive whorehouse in America in the twenties and thirties where you could meet perfect replicas of the stars of the times.   It was also a perfect title for an album that was so unlike their previous efforts.

For the Banshees, A Kiss In The Dreamhouse would be the first album to wholly play down, if not entirely rid itself of the trademark top heavy power chords and full drum sound, and treated us to such sounds heard only previously on the 'Fireworks' single.   A hint of what was next to come.   "Obsession" and "Slowdive" feature a trio of strings that can best be described as horrifically appropriate.   "She's A Carnival" features a calliope organ, in "Green Fingers" a recorder, tape loops in "Circle," mandolin-styled guitar in "Melt!", not to mention organ, harmonica, chimes, bells and other such doo dads throughout.   The subject matter of passion and sex dominate of course, and I've often wondered if "Melt!" is about AIDS; if so, it most certainly is the first song to ever address the issue.

Favorite tracks are the creep(y)ing jazz of "Cocoon," the claustrophobic moodiness of "Obsession" and the uninhibited burst of joy in "She's A Carnival."   Actually there are just too many outstanding tracks here for me to spotlight.   That's why I've chosen it as a past blast.   

Shane

More press...

Oh the air was shining
Shining like a wedding ring
Barbed like sex
I felt 10,000 volts
My chest was full of eels
Pushing through my usual skin
I opened up new wounds
Pouting, shouting

Oh love, like liquid falling
Falling in cascades
Oh love lorn victims
Laughing in cascades

The sun was rich
Rich with a song of sin
My breath melted my words
Into strange alphabets
Tormenting my tongue
Pouting, shouting-

Oh love, like liquid falling
Falling in cascades
Oh love lorn victims
Laughing in cascades

The heartbeats were echoing
Echoing the revolver
Emptying into my mouth
I pulled a face from my pocket
And smiled a Leper's grin
I felt somebody close
Pouting, shouting-

Oh love, like liquid falling
Falling in cascades
Oh love lorn victims
Laughing in cascades

Severin - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
McGeoch - Guitar & Keyboards

Hibiscus head
In a flower bed
A finger hewn
Planted and sewn
Oh magic in her hands
She could make anything grow
Magic in her hands
She had green fingers

It's curious
Where animals don't go
Mandrake
Rooted deep into the soil
Where the sun won't fall
But it flourishes
See the pretty maids
All in a row
Magic in her hands
She could make anything grow
Magic in her hands
She had green fingers

It's reaching
And groping
A clammy handshake
Clawing the ivy
Crawling the tightrope
Along the lattice work
With this hand I thee wed
With this hand I thee bed
With this hand I

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
McGeoch - Guitar & Recorder

Do you hear this breath
It's an obsessive breath
Can you feel this beat
It's an obsessive heart-beat
Waiting to be joined with its obsession

I close my eyes
But I can't sleep
The thin membrane can't veil
The branded picture of you
The signs and signals show
The traffic lights say go
Again you baffle me,
Pretending not to see...me

I broke into your room
I broke down in my room
Touched your belongings there
And left a lock of my hair
Another sign for you
You screamed into my face
Get the hell out of my place
Another sign for me?
Can you forgive me?
For not understanding your ways

You know sometimes you take it all too far
Then I remember
It's a game between you and me
A divine test for us two
It's all in my imagination
Yes they even say that our mission 
Is only my obsession

Do you hear this breath
It's an oppressive breath
Suffocating in the poison
Of your obsession

Can you feel this beat
It's a possessive beat
Your pulse stops in the claws
Of your obsession

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice & Bells
Severin - Bass
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
McGeoch - Guitar
Caroline Lavelle - Cello
Anne Stephenson - Violin
Virginia Hewes - Violin

In the heart of the night
She smiles like Mardi Gras
Spinning in a dizzy haze
Her circus head giggles
It's a friendly disease
Catching colours from the air

So with your hands upon the hips
Of the dancing flesh
She's a carnival
And when it's lip to lip
In a surprise time kiss
She's a carnival

Mosaic eye, gypsy eye
Glowing as it dazzles
She's a portrait of a poison
For you to quench your thirst
A portrait of a poison

So with your hands upon the hips
Of the dancing flesh
She's a carnival
And when it's lip to lip
In a surprise time kiss
She's a carnival

Severin - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
McGeoch - Guitar

Pretty girl of 16
Has fun and runs crazy
Ruined girl of 16
Now a mother grows lazy
Next a 16 year old baby
Like mother grows lazy
And her stomach is churning
Whilst her eyes keep on turning
Round and around
Getting no higher from the ground
Round and around
the circle has an empty sound

Father inflicts discipline
Boy rebels against him
He leaves for the big town
For love and adventure
But the words he first heard
Unlike his instincts run deeper
Now boy beats his children
If they disobey him
And the cat riddled with worms
Chases his tail round
And around

The endless full circle for the next in line
The endless full circle
Take the red line, the green line, the silver or blue
Any line you can think of except for the yellow
Take a trip with your family and see where they go
Give them a free ticket it's the best thing to do
And if you wind up on the circle line
Hell, it's not from lack of options
Then if you run into the yellow
Well that's up to you

Round and around
Getting no higher from the ground
Round and around
The circle has an empty sound
The endless full circle for the next in line
The endless full circle are you the next in line
Round and around

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
McGeoch - Guitar & Keyboards

You are the melting man
You are your situation
There is no time to breathe
And yet one single breath
Leads to an insatiable desire
Of suicide in sex

So many blazing orchids
Burning in your throat
Making you choke
Making you sigh
Sigh in tiny deaths

So Melt!
My lover, melt!
She said melt!
My lover, melt!

You are the melting man
And as you melt
You are beheaded
Handcuffed in lace, blood & sperm

Swimming in poison
Gasping in the fragrance
Sweat carves a screenplay
Of discipline and devotion

So Melt!
My lover, melt!
She said melt!
My lover, melt!

Can you see?
See into the black of a long, black car
Pulling away from a funeral of flowers
With my hand between your legs
Melting

Severin - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
McGeoch - Guitar

On lead poisoned wings
You try to sing
Freak beak shrieks are thrown
At your confusing hue
The peacock screaming eyes
Show no mercy no mercy

Painted bird
It's absurd
Just a tainted bird
Hurting their twisted nerve

The flock will make you choke
On this sadistic joke
And the whippoorwills
They make a din
In laughing unison
You're Hitchcock carrion
Carry on

Painted bird
It's absurd
Just a tainted bird
Hurting their twisted nerve

I hear you sorrow
Maybe tomorrow
You'll lose your sorrow
When a fated weather will cleanse away
That painted feather
And all that sorrow

A coquette in fur purr for the painted bird
Confound that dowdy flock
With a sharp honed nerve
Because we're painted birds by our own design
By our own design
There's no more sorrow

Have you heard
About the painted bird
Just a tainted bird
Hurting their twisted nerve
We've lost our sorrow
Now it's tomorrow
No need to hide your feather
Under a fated weather
No more sorrow

Now we're painted birds
Mocking that twisted nerve

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass & Organ
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
McGeoch - Guitar

Here in my cot
Where my cot loves me
I'll stay here a while
In the cotton wool cocoon
'Till the chrysalis is ripe
'Till the time is right
With this feeling of insecurity
I have to shrink back inside
Run and hide

Back in the cocoon
Hugging my knees
Watching my insides
The skinned glow worm writhings

Lying in blankets
I've been here a while
Tapping out rhythms
Against the mattress and wall
The heat melts the sheets
Another layer is peeled
Tapping out rhythms

Just my cot, the wallpaper and me
I've been here awhile
Tapping out rhythms
Still finding charms in the memory
Of those constrictor arms
Glowing in the dark in my luminous green
A pearl beaded lizard
Bathed in a gossamer scent
With my heat detector lip-pit
Pulling at the newly formed tissue

Lying in blankets
I've been here awhile
Tapping out rhythms against the mattress and wall

Waiting to loose the bandages
Waiting for new appendages

Lying in blankets
I've been here a while
I've been here too long
Banging out rhythms
Listen for other tapings
Banging out rhythms
Back in the cocoon

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Budgie - Drums & Percussion
McGeoch - Guitar & Keyboards

Get your head down to the ground
Shake it all around
A dirty sound
Put your knees into your face
And see if you can race
Real slow

It's a slowdive
When you die slow
Oh it's a low jive
Do the slowdive

Now you jump back like a hound
Emit a howling sound
Dig those limbs into the floor
And holler out for more

And you revel in the dips
When your backbone slips
Taking honeysuckle sips
From your rolling hips
It shifts and it shifts
It's a slowdive when you die slow
When you come alive it's a low jive
Do the slowdive

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass & 6 String Bass
Budgie - Drums, Percussion & Harmonica
McGeoch - Guitar
Anne Stephenson - Violin
Virginia Hewes - Violin