Siouxsie and the Banshees

Consistently my favourite band, they're a group whose music I grew up with due to my mother being a massive fan. As such I've kind of always assumed they were a massively popular band, but the more I look into the more I realise they're a lot nichier than I thought.

I've been getting into their albums again recently, I sort of grew up with the singles more than anything else, and what always amazes me about the albums is how well constructed they are. The bands singles are absolutely amazing, but they work even better as part of a whole (Juju and Peepshow in particular feel like albums where every song could have potentially been a single). What's great about the band is that their seems to be a massive amount of musical respect between the members and as such the interplay between drums, bass, guitar and vocals are amazing. Every element gets it chance to shine and it creates this wonderfully cohesive product (the 12" Mix of Spellbound which has the band sort of breaking down into a jamming session halfway through is a great example of the different band members giving each other a chance to shine)

So anyone else a fan of Siouxsie

Is it Nocturne, Once Upon A Time or the 'Best of' with the White Cover? Because those were the three albums that got me into Siouxsie Sioux

I always assumed Siouxsie was up there with the Sex Pistols and the Clash in terms of public perception, but in reality they only broke the charts with three songs in the UK and one song in the US. The fucking side project The Creatures, which was just Siouxsie and Budgie fucking around with drums, has had as many album sales as the band proper.

Miss the Girl and Skytrain are fantastic songs by The Creatures and I wasn't meaning any real disrespect with my 'fucking around with drums' line, just trying to be cute.

The distribution issue is an odd one actually, it's only recently that you've been able to buy copies of most of their albums (the only album consistently reprinted was their, admittedly awesome, Covers album). In fact some of their big albums like Superstition are almost impossible to get on CD and it's only been through a remastery project that Peepshow and the Scream and Juju and Nocture have become commerically available again.

The obvious ones, to me, would be Juju, Scream and Peepshow because those are the albums which contain most of their singles. They're all pretty fantastic albums and if you like Spellbound, or Arabian Nights or Fireworks as songs its worth picking up the remastered albums because they contain the original 12 inch single versions of the songs which are just fucking brilliant.

I really like Hyaena (it's one of their more overly goth albums in my estimation), but it's one of their more difficult albums to get into.

To be honest given how the sound of the band transforms and morphs over the two decades they were together it's probably worth hunting down this Best of Album



And seeing which songs work for you, because in terms of tonal changes their mid period stuff is a million miles away from their early stuff and a million miles away from their final stuff

I've seen that clip a hundred times, its part of the pop culture landscape over here, and never twigged that that Siouxsie was there too. Then again the focus has always been on John Lydon's 'just a dirty word' and the subsequent meltdown.

As much as I loathe Malcolm McClaren I've got to hand it to the guy for essentially appropriating punk in such a way that he became synonimous with it