For Siouxsie and the Banshees, 1980's Kaleidoscope was a do-or-die release. Guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris, collectively half the band, had taken off. The remaining members, the eponymous Siouxsie and founding member Steve Severin, decided to quickly reform the band and, in less than a year, release a new LP. To refill the Banshees' depleted ranks, the duo tapped former Sex Pistol guitarist Steve Jones and former Magazine guitarist John McGeoch. For the engine room, the drafted ex-Slits drummer Budgie. The result was a an expansion of the S&B sound that wed their trademark bleak proto-gothic tones with hints of lush synth arrangements and psychedelic flourishes. It was a strong indication of Siouxsie and Co.'s move towards the more elaborate and dreamy instrumentation that they'd pursue for the next three decades.
But Siouxsie hadn't completely forgotten the angular, rhythmic post-punk sound of the early S&B work. She and Budgie, love interests and well as bandmates (they'd later marry), started a side project called The Creatures. Unlike S&B increasingly dense sound, The Creatures would feature a more minimal, but not necessarily spartan sound.
One of their early was a fantastically brutal cover of the Trogg's much abused "Wild Thing." The Creatures paired it down to a tribal beat, Siouxsie's voice, and little else. The result is something more haunted than celebratory, more haunted than horny.
The Banshees would remain the primary focus of Siouxsie and Budgie. The Creatures would appear only intermittently throughout the years until Sioux and Budgie divorced in the mid-00s, ending The Creatures' sporadic career.
For my money - and I'll admit that, given the state of my bank accounts, that's not saying much - The Scream, Siouxsie and the Banshee's debut album, is one of the great "missing links" between chaos of punk and the angular post-punk that followed. Because Siouxsie and company later became one of the foundation groups of Goth, The Scream's best qualities are misinterpreted as failings - its thrashing guitars, for example, aren't praised for their energy but criticized as the undeveloped beginnings of a more lush later style. Though that linear historical view doesn't give The Scream enough credit. The LP was the band's debut, but it wasn't really a novice effort. SS&B had been a going concern for years before a label snatched them up. When any shambling gang of lad's with even the slightest chops was getting signed, SS&B was getting passed by. The upside of the benign neglect was that the unit one hears on The Scream was a well-practiced, road-tested outfit with a strong set of fully evolved tunes. The reason it sounds so odd in retrospect is that it was ultimately a sort of evolutionary dead end. The group went Gothic. They ditched the jerky proto-Gang of Four sharp corners and the grimly tangled vision of modern social life that shared more with Elvis Costello's concept of emotional fascism than it did with the Romanticism of Goth.
Anywho, here's some great footage of the band from 1977. The sound quality os atrocious, but the footage is neat if only because it shows everybody looking so damn young.
The music blog The Quietus has an interview with punk early-adopter and queen of the proto-goth scene: Siouxsie Sioux, much of it focused on her long history with the BBC. This sometimes stormy relationship began before Sioux ever took the stage as a singer: During the Sex Pistols' notorious appearance on Bill Grundy’s Today show, it was Sioux who became the target of Grundy's dirty-old-man comments, which in turn inspired the Pistols' history-making f-bombs. The interview spans her entire career and includes several video clips of BBC performances. It would be worth alone for this gem of a sentence in the interview's biographical intro:
Born Susan Ballion in Kent, she nearly died of a stomach disorder not long after her father – a scientist who milked snakes of their poison to develop serums – succumbed to an alcoholic’s death.
I have no pets. I own several ties, but rarely have a reason to wear any of them. I sing in the shower but can never remember the words, so I make them up as I go along, and they always end up being songs about showering. I collect slang dictionaries.
