Includes scans of LPs, cassettes, CDs, promos, imports, limited editions and adverts.  Also includes track listings, catalogue numbers, release dates, chart positions, credits, liner notes and reviews.

And so Neddy began his odyssey.  Over garden fence, from pool to pool, stamina slowly sapping away with each chlorine-purified plunge, the reality of his disturbed mental state irrepressibly exposed to all who encountered him along the way.  Come the last hurdle - a community pool swarming with children whose ecstatic shrieks deafened his frayed senses - he finally reached breaking point.  Close to drowning, his body shattered, his mind teetering on the brink of meltdown, his spirit drunk on the euphoria of having nearly completed his epic quest, all Neddy Merril could think to do was...

scream noun 1 a loud and shrill cry or noise.  2 as in the scream; the most famous work by Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch.  3 as in the scream; the debut album by Siouxsie And The Banshees which has nothing to do with a painting by Edvard Munch and everything to do with a 1968 film entitled the swimmer starring Burt Lancaster in the role of Neddy Merrill.

Think of it as a scream of exhausted jubilance after a troubled, arduous journey.  For Neddy Merrill, the agonising climax of one day swimming to destiny.  For The Banshees, a celebratory roar marking the culmination of over two years gob-drenched hard graft which began on stage at London's 100 Club on September 20, 1976:  the first night of a two day Punk Festival where 'Suzie & The Banshees' were bottom of the bill.

Not so much a band as an idea, this first Banshees prototype was little more than a violent tempest of social disaffection looking for a focus.  At the eye of the storm stood their 19 year-old singer Siouxsie Sioux (born Susan Ballion);  a refugee from the suburbs of Chislehurst in Kent, raised on Bowie and Bolan, rescued by the surly libertinism punk rock readily advocated.  Beside her, 20 year-old bassist and partner-in-crime Steven Severin (born Steven Bailey); a kindred glam spirit from Bromley who owed his nom-de-plume to a line from The Velvet Underground's 'Venus In Furs', just as Siouxsie owed hers to the Native American Indian tribe.

Together, Sioux and Severin persuaded nefarious rock 'n' roll swindler Malcolm McLaren into letting them share the 100 Club bill with the Sex Pistols, The Clash and France's Stinky Toys.  They'd gotten the gig:  now all they needed was an actual band to play it.  With just three days notice, future Adam Ant sideman Marco Pirroni (guitar) along with future Pistol and punk martyr Sid Vicious (drums) were hastily press-ganged into allegiance.  'Cry Of The Banshee', a low rent Hammer-style yarn about witchcraft in Elizabethan England starring Vincent Price, provided inspiration for the hitherto elusive group name.  As for actual 'songs', after toying with the theme tune to 'Captain Scarlet' (a later live favourite) or a calculated desecration of The Beatles' 'She Love You', they settled on a 20 minute improvised dirge based around 'The Lord's Prayer', stirred up with snatches of 'Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles' and 'Twist And Shout'.  Irreverent, chaotic and uncompromising, it was the perfect overture to The Banshee's live career.

By the Silver Jubilee summer of 1977 - and following Sioux and Severin's place in television history amidst the Pistols entourage on the notorious Bill Grundy interview in December '76 - a more coherent realization of The Banshees had finally taken shape.  On drums, Kenny Morris; an awestruck attendee of their 100 Club debut.  On guitar, John McKay.  The band's sound would be shaped by Siouxsie's obsession with horror in all its genres - from Edgar Allen Poe and Herbert Van Thal's yearly 'Pan Book Of Horror Stories' to the soundtracks from 'Psycho' and 'The Omen' which she played Morris and McKay as a musical pointer.  "I wanted to do something that thrilled me the way that films that had an edge did," she explains.  "A slight disturbance.  It makes you think, it makes you aware, it makes you know you're alive.  Getting away from opium, the state of nullifying and numbing things, I love it when the senses are tingling.  It's what I like, it's what attracts me."

McKay responded to Siouxsie's brief with the clattering disharmony of 'Suburban Relapse' and the foreboding death marches of 'Metal Postcard' and 'Overground', his abrasive chord shapes gelling perfectly with the primordial rhythm section of Severin and Morris.  Still punk rock, but with it's own avant-garde 'X' certificate score.

No longer an idea, Siouxsie And The Banshees had finally become a band.  Better still, a band of ideas.  BBC producer John Walters certainly thought as much when her overheard them soundcheck at The Greyhound in Croydon on a double bill with The Slits in early October.  "They were actually working as a band," Walters later commented "you could see there were certain musical patterns and they had plans.  I booked them."

The ensuing BBC session for John Peel broadcast the first week of December, coincided with music weekly 'Sounds'' iconic front page portrait of Siouxsie brandishing a microphone at arms' length in a t-shirt teasingly illustrated with a pair of breasts.  Caption:  'The Ice Queen'.

A second Peel session, including a debut airing for the exhilarating 'Hong Kong Garden', followed barely tow moths later in February '78.  Yet while Peel and 'Sounds' were quick to recognise The Banshees' potential, the major labels of the day were either ignorant or, in the case of EMI who expressed an interest on the proviso that they could "control the lyrics", plain terrified of The Ice Queen and her attendant cacophonic courtiers.

Obsessed roadie Les Mills (later to become manager of The Psychedelic Furs) soon took matters into his own hands by defacing the exterior walls of central London record company offices with 'SIGN THE BANSHEES' graffiti.  Before long, Polydor were finally jolted to attention, though not so much by Mills' handiwork as received wisdom that the group planned to release the Peel version of 'Hong Kong Garden' as a single through BBC Records.  According to John Walters, "We thought that'd be enough to get them on the fringes of the chart, and that would pull the finger out of the dyke, as it were, and the offers would come flooding in."

In the event, on June 9, 1978, Polydor got to The Banshees before the BBC could ink any deal.  'Hong Kong Garden' would remain their debut single, albeit a pristine re-recording that highlighted its infectious oriental hookline.  Named after her local Chinese takeaway back in Chislehurst, Siouxsie's lyrics were a belated venting of teenage frustration at witnessing right-wing skinheads torment its staff yet being unable to defend or retaliate on their behalf.  "I felt so helpless," she says.  "I wanted to tell them we're not like them, we don't think like that.  It's also kind of about East meeting West, or rather East being polluted by West.  I've always had a fascination with the Far East anyway.  Two very different cultures.  I find the purity of it very attractive, but there's an element of sadness when I see the two meeting, that Eastern nobility being dragged down to the level of Disney."

In spite of such sombre lyrical intent, 'Hong Kong Garden' was an irresistible punk-pop hit (climbing to No 7 in the UK that September) if an otherwise uncharacteristic taste of things to come:  'The Scream' itself, released in November.

The first notable credit by fledgling (co)producer Steve Lillywhite, 'The Scream' was The Banshees laid bare in all their uncensored, vitriolic grandeur.  Its ten tracks cherry-picked the strongest offerings from their previous fifteen months consolidating their specific Velvet Underground-meets-'Psycho' musical dynamic (or as the NME's Nick Kent put it, "The Velvet Underground matched with much of the ingenuity of 'Tago Mago'-era Can").  These included:  'Mirage', the album's only obvious chart contender, which addressed what some critics misconstrued as the superficiality of the group's image; the dissonant 'Stepford Wife' breakdown of 'Suburban Relapse'; the barbed paean to non-conformity that was 'Overground' which, according to Severin, related to the conundrum The Banshees faced when pursuing a major record deal; the expletive-spiked reinterpretation of Lennon/McCartney's 'Helter Skelter' - the song that controversially 'inspired' the Manson Family killings yet here performed as Manson may have head it in the recesses of his unhinged psyche; and the extraordinary Teutonic shudder of 'Metal Postcard'.

Arguably the album's focal track, 'Metal Postcard' would assume special significance for Siouxsie at a time when she was still being rapped on the knuckles by some journalists for having spent the summer of '76 wearing a swastika armband purely to shock.  'Metal Postcard' was were the Siouxsie of '78 coolly rebuffed any lingering doubts about her political leanings with an austere, intelligent tribute to the work of anti-Nazi propaganda artist John Heartfield.  Born Helmut Herzfield in 1891, he later anglicised his name in 1915 as a protest against German nationalism.  Siouxsie's lyrics concerned themselves with one of Heartfield's most celebrated collages, 'Hurrah, Die Butter Is Alle' ('Hurrah, All The Butter Is Gone') showing a Nazi family sat around a dinner table feasting on axe-heads and bicycle handlebars - a pointed satire on Goering's crass propagandizing that "Iron has always made our country strong.  Butter and lard only make people fat."  As 'Mittageisen', it would later be re-recorded in German and released as The Banshees' fourth single in September 1979, backed with live favourite 'Love In A Void'.

Elsewhere, 'Jigsaw Feeling' and the saxophone squealing finale 'Switch' touched upon issues of fractured personalities and alternate lives colliding, thereby anticipating The Banshees Mk II and the likes of 1980's 'Christine' and 'Eve White/Eve Black', both inspired by real-life schizophrenic Christine Sizemore, subject of 'The Three Faces Of Eve'.  Which left only 'Nicotine Stain', an urgent fuzzbox rush wallowing in an ashtray of catarrh and self-loathing, and the opening exorcism of primal Banshee waling, 'Pure'.

The album's sleeve and inner artwork further acknowledge the film that had inspired its title (even though it didn't share it).  Yet in doing so, The Banshees risked tempting fate.  In the final frames of 'The Swimmer', when Neddy reaches his 'home', he finds it locked and abandoned, his wife and children long gone.  Merrill's journey's end is one of tragedy and despair, and for a while, it really did look as if in the aftermath of their exceptional debut LP, The Banshees' trajectory was to reach a similarly bleak conclusion.  Second single, March '79's eerie murder-waltz 'The Staircase (Mystery), only made it as far as No 24 (its promotional video maintaining the 'Psycho' motif by imitating Hitchcock's famous scene where Norman Bates sends Detective Arbogast tumbling to his death).  Rushed into making a follow-up album within the year, the resulting 'Join Hands' proved to be a decidedly problematic sequel.  But that really is another story.

Even though within a few years The Banshees would become, in Siouxsie's own words, "almost a different band", 'The Scream' would cast an indelibly prophetic shadow upon their future; from 1983's cover of 'Dear Prudence' (plucked from the same Beatles album as 'Helter Skelter', 'The White Album'), to the following year's dramatic orchestral reworking of 'Overground' (1984's 'The Thorn' EP).  Coming full circle, when embarking on 2002's one-off 'Seven Year Itch' reunion tour, it was The Scream's opening brace of 'Pure and 'Jigsaw Feeling' which began every performance.

More than merely one of the great debuts of the post-punk era, in its abyss of angst and angularity, The Banshees' introductory howl still exudes a pitch black allure, a captivating claustrophobia that, to this day, had yet to be equalled.  Already, history has proven 'The Scream' incapable of being silenced.  Long may it continue to pierce the senses.

Simon Goddard 2006.

And so Neddy began his odyssey.  Over garden fence, from pool to pool, stamina slowly sapping away with each chlorine-purified plunge, the reality of his disturbed mental state irrepressibly exposed to all who encountered him along the way.  Come the last hurdle - a community pool swarming with children whose ecstatic shrieks deafened his frayed senses - he finally reached breaking point.  Close to drowning, his body shattered, his mind teetering on the brink of meltdown, his spirit drunk on the euphoria of having nearly completed his epic quest, all Neddy Merril could think to do was...

scream noun 1 a loud and shrill cry or noise.  2 as in the scream; the most famous work by Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch.  3 as in the scream; the debut album by Siouxsie And The Banshees which has nothing to do with a painting by Edvard Munch and everything to do with a 1968 film entitled the swimmer starring Burt Lancaster in the role of Neddy Merrill.

Think of it as a scream of exhausted jubilance after a troubled, arduous journey.  For Neddy Merrill, the agonising climax of one day swimming to destiny.  For The Banshees, a celebratory roar marking the culmination of over two years gob-drenched hard graft which began on stage at London's 100 Club on September 20, 1976:  the first night of a two day Punk Festival where 'Suzie & The Banshees' were bottom of the bill.

Not so much a band as an idea, this first Banshees prototype was little more than a violent tempest of social disaffection looking for a focus.  At the eye of the storm stood their 19 year-old singer Siouxsie Sioux (born Susan Ballion);  a refugee from the suburbs of Chislehurst in Kent, raised on Bowie and Bolan, rescued by the surly libertinism punk rock readily advocated.  Beside her, 20 year-old bassist and partner-in-crime Steven Severin (born Steven Bailey); a kindred glam spirit from Bromley who owed his nom-de-plume to a line from The Velvet Underground's 'Venus In Furs', just as Siouxsie owed hers to the Native American Indian tribe.

Together, Sioux and Severin persuaded nefarious rock 'n' roll swindler Malcolm McLaren into letting them share the 100 Club bill with the Sex Pistols, The Clash and France's Stinky Toys.  They'd gotten the gig:  now all they needed was an actual band to play it.  With just three days notice, future Adam Ant sideman Marco Pirroni (guitar) along with future Pistol and punk martyr Sid Vicious (drums) were hastily press-ganged into allegiance.  'Cry Of The Banshee', a low rent Hammer-style yarn about witchcraft in Elizabethan England starring Vincent Price, provided inspiration for the hitherto elusive group name.  As for actual 'songs', after toying with the theme tune to 'Captain Scarlet' (a later live favourite) or a calculated desecration of The Beatles' 'She Love You', they settled on a 20 minute improvised dirge based around 'The Lord's Prayer', stirred up with snatches of 'Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles' and 'Twist And Shout'.  Irreverent, chaotic and uncompromising, it was the perfect overture to The Banshee's live career.

Five months on - and following Sioux and Severin's place in television history amidst the Pistols entourage on the notorious Bill Grundy interview in December '76 - a more coherent realization of The Banshees supported Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers in Croydon on February 24, 1977.  On drums, Kenny Morris; an awestruck attendee of their 100 Club debut.  On guitar, Pete Fenton.

Their set now boasted the first tentative batch of Banshees originals.  Though never properly recorded for posterity, they bore short, sharp titles like 'Scrapheap', 'Psychic' and 'Bad Shape', the latter exemplifying a morbid fascination with physical dysfunction and bodily disgust central to the early Banshees repertoire (ditto 'Carcass').

By the Silver Jubilee of '77, Fenton would be replaced on guitar by John McKay, but not before taking part in a demo at Riverside Studios.  The session would include 'Make Up To Break Up'; a macabre critique on cosmetics which inverted the title of an old Stylistics hit (1973's 'Break Up To Make Up') while name-checking another budget exploitation movie, 'The Devil's Rain' starring William Shatner, Ida Lupino and the founder of the Church Of Satan, Anton La Vey.  It seemed horror in all its genres still exerted a considerable influence upon The Banshees' art, be it in the writings of Edgar Allen Poe and Herbert Van Thal's yearly 'Pan Book Of Horror Stories' to the soundtracks from 'Psycho' and 'The Omen' which she played Morris and McKay as a musical pointer.  "I wanted to do something that thrilled me the way that films that had an edge did," she explains.  "A slight disturbance.  It makes you think, it makes you aware, it makes you know you're alive.  Getting away from opium, the state of nullifying and numbing things, I love it when the senses are tingling.  It's what I like, it's what attracts me."

McKay responded to Siouxsie's brief with the clattering disharmony of 'Suburban Relapse' and the foreboding death marches of 'Metal Postcard' and 'Overground', his abrasive chord shapes gelling perfectly with the primordial rhythm section of Severin and Morris.  Still punk rock, but with it's own avant-garde 'X' certificate score.

No longer an idea, Siouxsie And The Banshees had finally become a band.  Better still, a band of ideas.  BBC producer John Walters certainly thought as much when her overheard them soundcheck at The Greyhound in Croydon on a double bill with The Slits in early October.  "They were actually working as a band," Walters later commented "you could see there were certain musical patterns and they had plans.  I booked them."

The ensuing BBC session for John Peel broadcast the first week of December, coincided with music weekly 'Sounds'' iconic front page portrait of Siouxsie brandishing a microphone at arms' length in a t-shirt teasingly illustrated with a pair of breasts.  Caption:  'The Ice Queen'.

A second Peel session, including a debut airing for the exhilarating 'Hong Kong Garden', followed barely tow moths later in February '78.  Yet while Peel and 'Sounds' were quick to recognise The Banshees' potential, the major labels of the day were either ignorant or, in the case of EMI who expressed an interest on the proviso that they could "control the lyrics", plain terrified of The Ice Queen and her attendant cacophonic courtiers.

Obsessed roadie Les Mills (later to become manager of The Psychedelic Furs) soon took matters into his own hands by defacing the exterior walls of central London record company offices with 'SIGN THE BANSHEES' graffiti.  Before long, Polydor were finally jolted to attention, though not so much by Mills' handiwork as received wisdom that the group planned to release the Peel version of 'Hong Kong Garden' as a single through BBC Records.  According to John Walters, "We thought that'd be enough to get them on the fringes of the chart, and that would pull the finger out of the dyke, as it were, and the offers would come flooding in."

In the event, on June 9, 1978, Polydor got to The Banshees before the BBC could ink any deal.  'Hong Kong Garden' would remain their debut single, albeit a pristine re-recording that highlighted its infectious oriental hookline.  Named after her local Chinese takeaway back in Chislehurst, Siouxsie's lyrics were a belated venting of teenage frustration at witnessing right-wing skinheads torment its staff yet being unable to defend or retaliate on their behalf.  "I felt so helpless," she says.  "I wanted to tell them we're not like them, we don't think like that.  It's also kind of about East meeting West, or rather East being polluted by West.  I've always had a fascination with the Far East anyway.  Two very different cultures.  I find the purity of it very attractive, but there's an element of sadness when I see the two meeting, that Eastern nobility being dragged down to the level of Disney."

In spite of such sombre lyrical intent, 'Hong Kong Garden' was an irresistible punk-pop hit (climbing to No 7 in the UK that September) if an otherwise uncharacteristic taste of things to come.  Only on its B-side, the Baudelaire-influenced groan of 'Voices', did their inaugural 45 hint at the Banshees' inner heart of darkness, one that wouldn't be properly unveiled until November '78 with  'The Scream' itself.

The first notable credit by fledgling (co)producer Steve Lillywhite, 'The Scream' was The Banshees laid bare in all their uncensored, vitriolic grandeur.  Its ten tracks cherry-picked the strongest offerings from their previous fifteen months consolidating their specific Velvet Underground-meets-'Psycho' musical dynamic (or as the NME's Nick Kent put it, "The Velvet Underground matched with much of the ingenuity of 'Tago Mago'-era Can").  

Of the pre-McKay period, only the bloody butcher metaphor of 'Carcass' would make it to the final running order.  As for the remaining nine tracks, over half had been previewed during those decisive Peel sessions:   'Mirage', the album's only obvious chart contender, which addressed what some critics misconstrued as the superficiality of the group's image; the dissonant 'Stepford Wife' breakdown of 'Suburban Relapse'; the barbed paean to non-conformity that was 'Overground' which, according to Severin, related to the conundrum The Banshees faced when pursuing a major record deal; the expletive-spiked reinterpretation of Lennon/McCartney's 'Helter Skelter' - the song that controversially 'inspired' the Manson Family killings yet here performed as Manson may have head it in the recesses of his unhinged psyche; and the extraordinary Teutonic shudder of 'Metal Postcard'.

Arguably the album's focal track, 'Metal Postcard' would assume special significance for Siouxsie at a time when she was still being rapped on the knuckles by some journalists for having spent the summer of '76 wearing a swastika armband purely to shock.  'Metal Postcard' was were the Siouxsie of '78 coolly rebuffed any lingering doubts about her political leanings with an austere, intelligent tribute to the work of anti-Nazi propaganda artist John Heartfield.  Born Helmut Herzfield in 1891, he later anglicised his name in 1915 as a protest against German nationalism.  Siouxsie's lyrics concerned themselves with one of Heartfield's most celebrated collages, 'Hurrah, Die Butter Is Alle' ('Hurrah, All The Butter Is Gone') showing a Nazi family sat around a dinner table feasting on axe-heads and bicycle handlebars - a pointed satire on Goering's crass propagandizing that "Iron has always made our country strong.  Butter and lard only make people fat."  As 'Mittageisen', it would later be re-recorded in German and released as The Banshees' fourth single in September 1979, backed with live favourite 'Love In A Void'.

Elsewhere, 'Jigsaw Feeling' and the saxophone squealing finale 'Switch' touched upon issues of fractured personalities and alternate lives colliding, thereby anticipating The Banshees Mk II and the likes of 1980's 'Christine' and 'Eve White/Eve Black', both inspired by real-life schizophrenic Christine Sizemore, subject of 'The Three Faces Of Eve'.  Which left only 'Nicotine Stain', an urgent fuzzbox rush wallowing in an ashtray of catarrh and self-loathing, and the opening exorcism of primal Banshee waling, 'Pure'.

The album's sleeve and inner artwork further acknowledge the film that had inspired its title (even though it didn't share it).  Yet in doing so, The Banshees risked tempting fate.  In the final frames of 'The Swimmer', when Neddy reaches his 'home', he finds it locked and abandoned, his wife and children long gone.  Merrill's journey's end is one of tragedy and despair, and for a while, it really did look as if in the aftermath of their exceptional debut LP, The Banshees' trajectory was to reach a similarly bleak conclusion.  Second single, March '79's eerie murder-waltz 'The Staircase (Mystery), only made it as far as No 24 (its promotional video maintaining the 'Psycho' motif by imitating Hitchcock's famous scene where Norman Bates sends Detective Arbogast tumbling to his death).  Rushed into making a follow-up album within the year, the resulting 'Join Hands' proved to be a decidedly problematic sequel.  But that really is another story.

Even though within a few years The Banshees would become, in Siouxsie's own words, "almost a different band", 'The Scream' would cast an indelibly prophetic shadow upon their future; from 1983's cover of 'Dear Prudence' (plucked from the same Beatles album as 'Helter Skelter', 'The White Album'), to the following year's dramatic orchestral reworking of 'Overground' (1984's 'The Thorn' EP).  Coming full circle, when embarking on 2002's one-off 'Seven Year Itch' reunion tour, it was The Scream's opening brace of 'Pure and 'Jigsaw Feeling' which began every performance.

More than merely one of the great debuts of the post-punk era, in its abyss of angst and angularity, The Banshees' introductory howl still exudes a pitch black allure, a captivating claustrophobia that, to this day, had yet to be equalled.  Already, history has proven 'The Scream' incapable of being silenced.  Long may it continue to pierce the senses.

Simon Goddard 2005.

Originally released in November 1978, The Scream defined post-punk; slightly too late and far too tuneful to fall into the original punk category, it bridged the gap between the fuck-you attitude of the Pistols and the more sophisticated sounds which were starting to emerge as the 80s approached.  Listening to this re-mastered version, it's startling how close some of the songs come to Roxy and the new romanticism of Duran Duran - Switch even has a saxophone on it for chrissakes.

Beautifully packaged and with an extra disc, this is a must have item for Siouxsie fans.  The first two singles Hong Kong Garden and The Staircase (Mystery) omitted from the original album are here sounding cleaner than ever.  Who else was using the glockenspiel in 1978?  Plus two Peel sessions, live favourite Make Up To Break Up and five prototype versions of album tracks including Mirage a hypnotic pop tune with angular guitars and lyrics that may well to be to blame for all goth dancing since.  "My limbs are like palm trees swaying in the breeze", indeed!

A startling original album which sounds as ambitious now as it did 27 years ago.  All the aggression of punk with a modernism and style completely of its own.  Songs like Nicotine Stain or the superbly powerful Suburban Relapse could only be Siouxsie & The Banshees.  

4/5  

Suzy West

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

Harmful elements in the air
Symbols Crashing everywhere
Reap the fields of rice and reeds
While the population feeds

Junk floats on polluted water
And old custom to sell your daughter
Would you like number 23
Leave your yens on the counter please

Hong Kong garden

Tourists swarm to see your face
Confucius has a puzzling grace
Disorientated you enter in
Unleashing scent of wild jasmine

Slanted eyes meet a new sunrise
A race of bodies small in size
Chicken Chow Mein and Chop Suey
Hong Kong garden takeaway

Hong Kong garden

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
McKay - Guitar

Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
McKay - Guitar

Send me forward, say my feelings
But all the signals, send me reeling
Jigsaw feeling

One day I'm feeling total
The next I split in two
My eyes are doing somersaults
Staring at my shoes

My brain is out of my hand
There's nothing to prevent
The impulse is quite meaningless
in a cerebral non-even

Send me forward, say my feelings
But all the signals, send me reeling
Jigsaw feeling

Five fingers do my walking
Ten toes unravel knots
Amorphous jigsaw pieces
falling into slots

Send me forward, say my feelings
But all the signals, send me reeling
Jigsaw feeling

So I just sit in reverie
Getting on my nerves
The intangible bonds that keep me
Sitting on the verge....
Of a breakdown
Of a reaction
Of a result
Complete me, defeat me, maybe

Severin - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
McKay - Guitar

Got to give up life in this netherworld
Gonna go up to where the air is stale
And live a life of pleasantries
Mingle in the modern families

Overground from abnormality
Overboard for identity
Overground for normality
Overboard on identity

This limbo is no place
To be a digit in another space
In another crowd
I'm nameless bound

Overground from abnormality
Overboard for identity
Overground for normality
Overboard on identity

Overground I'll be worse than me
Overground it's clear to me
I'll be worse than me

Severin - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
McKay - Guitar

Someone's in cold storage
Seeking Heinz main-courses
Craving for a raw love
He'll hide you from the cleaver
He'll hang with you forever
Longing for a fresh meat

By hook or by crook
You'll be first in his book
For a impaled affair
By hook or by crook
You'll be last in his book
Of flesh oh so rare

Be a carcass be a dead pork
Be limblessly in love
Be a carcass be a dead pork
Be limblessly in love

Someone's left in cold storage
thawed in Heinz main-courses
Carving for a new tin
He got you with the cleaver
He'll hang you up forever
Anticipating new skin

Out of the frying pan
And into the fire
58th variety

Out of the frying pan
And into the fire
Mother had her son for tea

Be a carcass be a dead pork
Be limblessly in love
Be a carcass be a dead pork
Be limblessly in love

In love with your stumps
In love with your bleeding
In love with the pain that you now feel
as you become a carcass
you became a carcass
carcass carcass car crash

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
McKay - Guitar

When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again.

Do you, don't you want me to love you
I'm coming down fast but I'm miles above you
Tell me tell me tell me come on tell me the answer
You may be a lover but you ain't no dancer

So look out!
Helter skelter
Na la la la la la
Helter skelter
Na la la la la la
Helter skelter 

Will you, won't you want me to make you
I'm coming down fast but don't let me break you
Tell me tell me tell me the answer
You may be a lover but you ain't no fucking dancer

When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop

Lennon/McCartney - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
McKay - Guitar

I'm just a vision on your TV screen
Just something conjured from a dream
Seen thro' your x-ray eyes
A see thro'  scene
The image is no images
It's not what it seems

My limbs are like palm trees
Swaying in the breeze
My body's an oasis
To drink from as you please
I'm not seeing what I'm meant to believe in
Your non-excuse for human being

It's not plain to see
That I'm playing with me
A photo fit of loose ends framed in 3-D
Seen thro' your x-ray eyes
A see thro' scene
The images no image is
It's not what it seems

Severin - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
McKay - Guitar

Reunion begins with a glass of mercury
Whilst television flickers
With another News Bulletin
Flints light up the eyes
Of the seated family

Metal is tough, Metal will sheen
Metal won't rust when oiled and cleaned
Metal is tough, Metal will sheen
Metal will rule in my master scheme

With a clockwork jerk
Pluck cogs from fob watches
For dinner on Friday
Then recoiling say 'excuse me
Must go recycle
My precious machinery

Metal is tough, Metal will sheen
Metal won't rust when oiled and cleaned
Metal is tough, Metal will sheen
Metal will rule in my master scheme

It's ruling our lives
There is no hope
Thought I'd drop a line
The weather here is fine
But day and night
It blares
Commanding through loud speakers

Metal is tough, Metal will sheen
Metal won't rust when oiled and cleaned
Metal is tough, Metal will sheen
Metal will rule in my master scheme

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
McKay - Guitar

It's just a habit
When I reach to the packet
For my last cigarette
Until the day breaks
Then my hand shakes
But it's just driving me insane
When the smoke gets in my brain
I can't resist it

Wallow in the ash bath
Soaking up the fumes
And see the nicotine stain
Start to spread

I'm so congested
Cos north, south, east, and west
Catarrh rests on my chest
Congealed and twisted
Cough up and shift it
But I can feel my lungs collapse
Sinking deep into my lap
I'm so useless

Wallow in the ash bath
Soaking up the fumes
And see the nicotine stain
Start to spread

I'm so useful
If you don't want to fight
Just give your foe a fright
Say you'll drop me
On every country
See all will be stone dead
When the nicotine stain spreads
Just light me

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
McKay - Guitar

I'm sorry that I hit you
But my spring snapped
I'm sorry I disturbed your cat nap
But whilst finishing a chore
I asked myself 'what for?'
Then something snapped.
I had a relapse
A suburban relapse

I was washing up the dishes
And minding my own business
When my string snapped
I had a relapse
A suburban relapse

Should I?
Throw things at the neighbours
Expose myself to strangers
Kill myself or you?
Now memory gets hazy
I think I must be crazy
but my string snapped
I had a relapse
A suburban relapse

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
McKay - Guitar & Saxophone

Different lives
In different places
Familiar problems
Same old faces

Shuffle lives
Into wrong categories
Cross the wires
And fuse humanity

Watch the muscles twitch
For a brand new switch

Scientist G.P.s
With patient guinea pigs
Curing their head aches
With drastic side effects
     
Doctor rectorates
Condescending from on high
For all hallucinators
See druggist in the sky
    
Vicar experiments
But 'tis blasphemy
Dismissing thoughts of progress
As the mark of devilry

People walk
And even talk
People listen
Then they halt

Something blows up
Won't come down
Shattered muscles twitch
Too late to switch

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
McKay - Guitar

Staircase lying face up
Stair cat sat on the mat
Looking down

Slide down the banister
Take the escalator
Slide down the banister
Or try the elevator

I was standing on the landing
Now I'm standing in the hall
Looking up

Wont someone assist me
Solve this mystery
Somebody assist me
Arrange the symmetry

Muffled footsteps on the carpet
Spiral steps start spinning
Around me

Which floor which ceiling
You're off balance
Which floor which ceiling
It's all upside down

Staircase lying face up
Stare cat sat on the mat
Looking down

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice & Piano
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
McKay - Guitar

Spots and warts and blemishes
Deep receding crevices
Seem to disappear
With foundation on my face
Foundation on my face!

Shadow conjures cheekbone
Hides a nasal disgrace
A disfigured atrocity
J J Jutting out of place
Jutting out of place!

Make up to break up
Make up to break up
Make up to break up
Make up, break up, make up to break up

Girls with eyes like swimming pools
Are the ones that I despise
'Cos I need lots of colour
To hide my bloodshot eyes
Hide my bloodshot eyes!

Now to paint by numbers
Over the cavernous pit
Lots of glossy red
To hide my pale cracked lips
Hide my pale cracked lips!

Make up to break up
Make up to break up
Make up to break up
Make up, break up, make up to break up

Now comes the break up
From the make up
Just like the devils rain
C C Colours run insane
Colours run insane

Foundation starts to tremble
My nose a grotesque abstract
My mouth a gaping gap
My eyes are shooting blood
My face is cracking up
My face is cracking up

Make up to break up
Make up to break up
Make up to break up
Make up, break up, make up to break up

Sioux - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
Fenton - Guitar

Too many fools blocking my motion
Clouding my eyes, must be the potion
Spots in my eyes, must be the lotion
Spots in my eyes, must be the lotion

Love in a void
It's so numb
Avoiding love
Its so dumb
Love in a void

Too many bigots for my liking
Too many critics, too few writing
Rabid dogs that aren't biting
Rabid dogs that aren't biting

Love in a void
It's so numb
Avoiding love
Its so dumb
Love in a void

Jaded reputation on which you're staking
Lots of money for the making
For all the stars they're just faking
For all the stars they're just faking

Love in a void
It's so numb
Avoiding love
Its so dumb
Love in a void

Severin - Lyrics
Sioux - Voice
Severin - Bass
Morris - Drums & Percussion
McKay - Guitar