Whilst digging out some music press pieces on the build up to the Battersea Park gig, I ventured into November 1978 and noted that two pivotal albums were released at about the same time (NME reviewed them in the same issue). I am talking about 'The Scream' by Siouxsie and the Banshees and 'Germ Free Adolescence' by X-Ray Spex. Not only were these groundbreaking albums, they are two albums that perfectly carried the punk clarion call that this band thing was for everyone. If punk achieved anything, it broke down the stereotypes of women in rock and those two albums are two of the greatest examples of punk's achievements.
Focussing on one, 'The Scream' here, just because I fancied hearing it again on a Easter Monday (well it beats sitting through Jason & The Argonauts' again!).
Here are two contemporary reviews of a greatly anticipated album. Whilst Sioux was belting out 'The Lord's Prayer' at the 100 Club Punk Festival back in September '76, it took them an inordinate period of time to get signed and release and album i.e. until November 1978.
I challenge you to find two more diametrically opposed reviews as those that appeared in NME (Julie Burchill) and Record Mirror (Chris Westwood). I don't think Miss Burchill and Sioux were on each others Christmas card lists in December 1978!
Please excuse any typos!
New Musical Express (18th November 1978)
Good-day, second-class of '78!
And now for the last goddam time in my life-I ask you, who wants to be David Bowie when they graduate? Hands up!
Kate - dear, you're too maudlin and pretty and healthy, and the fathers fancy you more than the, daughters do. Is that any way for a teen queen to be? Besides, you cover too many markets.
Howard - you don't cover any, and anyhow you're bald and "the kids" can't "dance to
it".
Japan and Ultravox! -I will NOT tolerate over-made-up, non-starter gangs in my classroom!
Adam - you have the mark of the loser - sorry, kid, not of exotic Cain - on you, and besides, you're podgy.
Cherie - Cherie, how many times do I have to tell you, you should be in your cabaret class by now. Out, go on, take your twin with you and don't ever let me see you outside of Las Vegas again!
Siouxsie-ah, Siouxsie, come up the front here and show the boys and girls how it should be done.
One: must be skinny, wear a mass of make-up and look asexual enough to accommodate every closet's ambivalent fantasies. Two: blind the critics with words and silence and all but a few ungrateful hack swine with long memories - who don't understand and are NEVER gonna understand - will lick your soles for the privilege of sitting through an interview's worth of verbal contempt from you. Three: flirt with the all-time contraband coquette that is Fascism, however lightly (an armband, a salute, a sentence) and it will still get that ridiculously uncool yet controversial minority going. Four: get out of your depth.
And I have come to hate glamour hangover (Bowie, Eno and Pop). They hang on and on. How I wish they would drop dead and take Miss Banshee with them, just to spare me this task. But what do I care? Because like all mod muse these days, Siouxsie and her Banshees'll only end up being walked down a fashion-catwalk to be Marie Helvin Bailey. You're all just making music for models to walk to, just reward and desserts for all you self-inflated pop stars.
So I don't need my hatchet. Let's bury it and get objective.
Factoid: since the Second World War- retreated comfortably back into the realms of imagery, Germanic girls (or otherwise descended girls whom the liberated sicko. mind can twist into being Teutonic) singing songs about death, doom and decay are very artistically credible.
Things I like -about Siouxsie. "Hong Kong Garden"; the way she treats her audience like muck, knowing why the gross majority of them come to gape at her; I even kind of liked the way she danced on Top Of The Pops.
Fact: until recently, Siouxsie And The Banshees included in their stage set a song they had written called "Love In A Void". This song featured,the line "Too many Jews for my liking". This, says Siouxsie, was a metaphor for too many fat businessmen waiting to pounce, suck the youth from and cast aside new talent.
I do not see the connection. I, self-righteous square that I am, consider "Too many Jews for my liking "to be the most disgusting and unforgivable lyric-line ever written, though God knows there has been more appalling filth written within rockanroll than in every other branch of entertainment taken together.
None of it comes anywhere in sight of Siouxsie, though. She is well into her twenties; so ignorant youth is no excuse, however lame. Therefore she must be either evil or retarded - well, can YOU think of any other way out? To shock? No the pain and dreadful implications of this sentence could only be justified into a means of outrage by aforementioned retard.
Though I know that for a critic to tell the Banshees where to go is as de trop as liking, say, The Runways' I am still particularly disgusted by the way Jewish writers (Viv Goldman) and otherwise extremely moral writers (Chris Brazier) l;Iave drooled over the silly cow, letting her getaway with that line as long as she promises "Oh, it was an I unwise choice, I'll change it as soon as I can think of something better!"
Well, take your shocking song and stick it up your rude white ass, Sioux, because here's a review that don't believe in running with the pack:
Oh daddy please, pretty please.-won't you beat up that nasty girl and make her fade away? She hurts my ears and she-bores me and the only reason she hasn't been written off yet as a corny 'art-rock' act is that she once used to hang around some, ah, punk band.
Standing alone, the Banshee sound is a self-important threshing machine thrashing all stringed intruments down onto the same jow level alongside that draggy sub-voice as it attempts futile eagle and dove swoops around the mono-beat. Their sound is certainly different from the normal guitar-bass-drums-voice consequence. But it's radically stodgy as opposed to that light-fantastic ,Public Image trip on their single (bass-thump almost out of earshot, felt more as a vibration than heard as a sound, guitar getting as high and light as it takes to sound as little like a guitar hero as possible). Imagine that great
sound then think of the exact opposite and you have Siouxsie And The Banshees: loud, heavy and levelling, the sound of suet pudding.
Start with an instrumental circa "Warsawza".
Instrumentals are pretentious as shit, I don't care who does them. Chuck Berry never felt the need to, so screw you, Sioux. Follow it with moody modern black-and-white ear-horror-films to impress the impressionable. The . Banshees unite sub-glam flowering poesie ("Amorphus jigsaw pieces tra la la”) with unpleasant but true sociology topics (going mental, self-mutilation, Fascism, cancer): subjects which have only been dealt with in any number by "punk". I am bored by and abhor the way the Banshees mess around with the two greatest genres of the decade and make both forms emerge bloodied, limping and sorely in need of a G.C.E.Eng Lang frame of reference.
I quite enjoyed singing along to "HeIter Skelter" (least awful effort here, and even that was written elsewhere), and "Carcass" got me a bjt jittery until l saw the joke, giggled and yawned. The rest (barely) struck me as endless plain noise totally bereft of melody.
I just jeard Sioux on Hullabaloo, whining away in that horrid Chislehurst-climber accent about how "Summer Nights" being Number One for seven weeks was actually brain-washing. Never mind dear, you can always sleep guilt-free and tight at night in the sound knowledge that none of your recordings are ever going to put people in that loathsome position, huh?
I wish they were showing clips from that capitalist, corporation-made, youth-exploitation film Grease on the TV right now. I could do with some send-up, affectionate, overground food for thought after sitting through all this "So I just sit•in reverie/Getting on my nerves" wood-worm brain-rot hen-type-brooding from Siouxsie's boys. I'll tell you what. I said I would be as objective as ’tis possible for an intelligent person to be. So, against all odds (I hate her voice, her band, her image), I do think that Siouxsie could be quite a smart girl if only she didn't work so hard at being marvellous for fools.
Her words for "Switch" and "Nicotine Stain" (she.should write more lyrics alone) contain a certain germ which is rendered totally ineffectual via drone, pretension and conceit. Her words for the stunning "Suburban Relapse" are flawed only in the tune that John McKay sets it to and, natural19, by the singularly awful Banshee sound.
Ah well, kid, take it to yourself and examine your subconscious. Maybe you'll love it. Me, I keep seeing Siouxsie up there in her swastika armband making nothing but a fashion accessory out of the death of millions of people.
And I honestly don't think that a rilly sensitive person like myself can ever see beyond that.
Julie Burchill
Record Mirror (14th October 1978)
SIOUXSIE'S STAMPEDE
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES: ‘The Scream’ (Polydor)
And after the misdirected swastika flaunts, the sign Siouxsie jaunts, the periods of ‘apparent’ record company disinterest after the sign-up hassles. Polydor’s victory after the single… The Album.
The Banshees album.
The months have not diluted the energy and the vitality of this music.; nor have they blunted the obvious enthusiasm. All that has been retained and the band have been allowed to develop as musicians; they are now a finely honed unit, they could stand ground with ANYONE.
And Siouxsie. One of the more individual girl singers of the new age, she establishes herself as the premier female vocalist this decade, no trouble.
The material. Probably the tip of a gargantuan creative iceburg, there are 10 porky-prime cuts from an irrepressible S and ‘s repertoire, landed with perfect production. The overall feel is clean, lively, electric, professional.
So: Siouxsie and the Banshees and the songs and the sound. Insuperable formula, great album. For a debut – a murderer. A trendsetter – maybe not, but it attains new standards. It is an important record, of that there’s little doubt.
Of the goods, there’s at least one fully-fledged mater stroke, plus a whole troupe of fine and vital rock and roll moments, all delivered within the highly distinctive and stylistic framework that IS Siouxsie and The Banshees.
Into the maelstrom: ‘Pure’ is the curtain raiser, a succinct bow to the world of the instrumental atmospherics, Siouxsie’s considerable voice is utilized not as a lyrical mouthpiece but as part of the musical subsoil. Also it tends to reflect the downer overtones present elsewhere on the album, as evidenced by ‘Suburban Relapse’, the mock sadism of ‘Carcass’ and the always ominous ‘Helter Skelter’.
This opening cut gives way to a chugging and insistent bass and drum rumble, and as McKay’s guitar joins in the action, the Banshees lurch full tilt into a desperate, holocaustic ‘Jigsaw Feeling’… and proceedings are underway.
‘One day I'm feeling total / The next I'm split in two / My eyes are doing somersaults / Staring at my shoe’.
Lyrically, this is a scene seller, and the whole album’s preoccupation with spiritual, mental and physical breakdown is so intence, it could well be viewed as a loose concept or project album.
The theme is developed by ‘Nicotine Stain’ which views the dreaded weed from two contrasting and thoughtfully conceived angles; as an aid to mental stability (never soother) and as a procurer of health disease.
‘It’s just a habit / When I reach to the packet for my last cigarette / Till the day breaks / Then my hand shakes…’
The violent repercussions of this downer concept are examined in ‘Carcass’ (which, I suspect, is tongue in cheek) and ‘Helter Skelter’. The later clambers from a discordant axe slash intro to a rampant, stampeding creature which recaptures the frenzied essence of the original Beatles; memories of the Manson campaign are still painfully vivid.
He final excesses of claustrophobic depression are on ‘Suburban Releapse’ and then to the album’s meisterwork ‘Switch’.
Unlike so many of her contemporaries, Sioux has a voice which she USES. On ‘The Scream’ she excels herself… and she wipes the floor with all competitors.
Also, The Banshees are working to the hilt: the arrangement on this finale is, at the very least breathtaking, as it drifts through a legion of phases and tempos without ever sounding fragmented. The album’s frame of mind is perfectly reflected in the work of McKay, Severin and Morris; constantly shifting, restless, controlled aggression, they are as essential as Siouxsie.
‘Switch’ is an accurate and bitter observation of the final process.
This is side-swiping, poignant social comment. Even taken at its most basic level, ‘The Scream’ is stirring rock and roll which draws from the past but points to the future, REAL music for the new age. It’s a mature and polished work. It is vital, it’s moving, it’s a landmark.
But – hell – for a while it seemed The banshees were never gonna hit vinyl, and suddenly, hey ho, the album.
Vinyl salvation. So buy it, nick it, borrow it, tape it. HEAR it. Christ, what else could you do with that four quid? Save it for a rainy day?
Don’t make me laugh.
+++++ CHRIS WESTWOOD.
