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As zombies are doomed to haunt
a graveyard, so London's late-Seventies demi-mode will never be
allowed to rest in peace. Poor little greenies. Observe the
Street-Style exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum where a
definitive display of hybrid costume has taken its place among the
reliquaries and Byzantine caskets. Observe dummies dressed in the
outfits of coffee-bar cowboys and surfers, rude boys and fly
girls, indie kids and modernists. And do not forget to remember
Swinging London. This is a three dimensional photograph album in
which, unless you are 11, you are doomed to spy an aspect of your
former self, see how you were, re-experience past rejections,
eating disorders, drugs and skin diseases. Surprisingly, no
spectator seems to be blushing; they seem to be art students
illustrating sketch books for their personal posterity.
Glam is in the second room:
past the red feather boa and platforms; past lurex trousers by FB
One to a sign saying, "the punk legacy cannot be
exaggerated". Here string vests and army boots and clothes
by Seditionaries and there the Kammgarn suit worn by Sid Vicious
outside Marylebone Magistrates Court-- Trevira and wool with a
silver lame thread. "Imposing," said his mum. Around
the old suit of dead Sid there is a customized leather jacket
lent by Spit Edbanga and the Zandra Rhodes "punk
couture" safety pin dress that, at the time, was more
upsetting than the suicide of Ian Curtis because it meant that no
matter how much you terrorised grown-ups, they still dared to
escape from their ghetto.
Underneath, there is a neat row
of T-shirts by Modzart. These "influential designs by John
and Molly Dove" show Beatles 1975, Anarchy In The UK 1977,
and in the middle, face, eyes and lips, Siouxsie Sioux 1980.
She is 37 now. She does not
think of herself as an icon partly because she is not that
conceited and partly because it would imply petrification. An
icon is the moustache and beret of a meaningless revolutionary.
An icon tends to be dead. And she has an album out this month.
Her 14th to be exact. She is proud of it, and rightly, for The
Rapture is a good work with sophisticated songs, a melancholy
atmosphere and unpretentious orchestration. It was produced by
John Cale who produced Patti Smith's Horses and had toured with
Nico during her final narcolepsy. No, says Siouxsie, she doesn't
feel old. Well, sometimes. But then, when she was 18, she
sometimes felt as though she was 150.
Mr. Ballion was a drunk. He
drank Newcastle Brown Ale out of bottles, then whisky chasers,
and a lot of them. They are very unhelpful, drunks. Not at all
what you would describe should anyone have ever asked you what
you wanted in a father. They perpetuate fear, and leave scars,
and cultivate an anger that never really goes away. They usually
die, but this is of little help to those they leave behind.
Indeed, those around them sometimes wished he would die. She
hated him. Once she tried to poison him by putting salt and
pepper in his drink, and as he drank it, his Adam's apple bobbing
like a fairground attraction, she thought all the time, Oh my God
I've done it, I've done it.
He was verbally aggressive
rather than violent, although her sister, 10 years older, told
horror stories of knives and pokers, smashed plate-glass windows.
Blood. Her sister still hates him. But Susan knew that when he
was sober he was lucid, funny and intelligent, that he liked
books; Kipling for her, Sartre for himself. But she also
remembers the trivial things that take on burdensome importance -
the dolls' push-chair that was smashed when he fell over it
sticks in her mind. She still pushed it but it never really
worked, the wheels were buckled.
When school friends asked,
"What does your father do?" she couldn't really say
that he sat at home drinking, so she used to make things up. She
never asked them home for fear of finding him in a stupor, or
ranting, or in the middle of a gaggle of reeking public-bar
cronies. He was a Pisces and now she always associates drinking
with Pisces; his eyes would turn into fish eyes.
A violent streak ran in the
family; neither her father nor her mother, Elizabeth, Betty,
possessed any front teeth because her father's brother, Johnny,
had gone berserk one night and smashed them both in the face. The
Ballions had met in the Belgian Congo, she speaking French, he
milking serum from poisonous snakes as part of his work as a
laboratory technician. Her husband's drinking, or
"disease" as it is sometimes also called, meant Betty
had to work full-time as a bilingual secretary. She never talked
about "it" and he was an "it" as far as the
family were concerned.
Younger than the others, Susan
was left to keep her own counsel, and look after herself as best
as she was able. The garden at their home north of Petts Wood
grew into a jungle - high hedges, a crisis of roses - until the
neighbours ganged up and complained. The Ballions must prune
their hedges, they insisted.
Order was required but order,
in fact, hardly existed, for demons and "pervery" were
all around. The sight of a man exposing himself was common up and
down those Chislehurst streets; it was rare _not_ to see a
flasher at Bickley station. There was one, in particular, Rolf
Harris they called him, who rode his bicycle with his penis
resting on the crossbar. Events took a more offensive turn,
however when, at the age of nine, Susan was sexually assaulted by
a man at the sweet shop. "I was too young to realise that I
had been attacked - but my friend's father called the
police." It wasn't until much later that she found out how
common it was. In 1986 she wrote a song about it, Candyman. Yes,
she says now, they were knee deep in wankers.
At school she didn't like boys
so much. In games of Kiss and Chase other girls would allow
themselves to be caught and kissed; if any unfortunate caught up
with Susan she rammed grass in his mouth. Later, in clubs, if men
goosed her she swivelled around and punched them.
Alcohol finally delivered Mr.
Ballion to his Maker and when it did Susan, at 14, felt guilty
because her wish had come true. They laid the body out and her
mother finally cut the hedge.
What did she inherit from him?
A love of books and a hatred of the medical profession. A bunch
of quacks he called them. She agrees. But Mr. Ballion put her off
marriage and the idea of a family; and, of course, excessive
drinking, in herself and in others, always unnerved her. Later,
on the road and in the pop business, whe thought that heroin
addicts were the same as drunks - slumped, hopeless and boring.
Her sister was at art college
and sometimes took her to the end-of-term shows - her sister knew
arty men - men whose flamboyance and homosexuality attracted
Susan because there was no threat. She was conscious of this.
Conscious of being comfortable around men for the first time.
"I thought, this is so brilliant. Nobody is hitting on me
and you don't see men fighting and drinking too much and it all
going wrong."
She took to dyeing her hair,
inspired by the glam, but more extreme. Crazy colour. Black.
Blonde. Eyes painted like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.
She liked Nico and Patti Smith and Catwoman. All her heroes were
heroines. And so, somewhere between doing the Strand and hearing
Patti Smith's Horses album for the first time, Susan became Siouxsie.
"I wanted to be
important," she remembers. "To mean something."
She went on the bus in a see-through shirt, demanded a half fare
and got one. She walked into Pips wine bar in Bromley leading her
friend Berlin on a dog collar. ("We were," he recalled
later, "up camp tree.") At one party, in Bromley, where
sulphate was snorted off a turntable, she is remembered as
sporting a plastic apron, a leather whip, and very little else.
Her mother was slightly
worried. "Take a pully," she would say as her daughter,
mind on the Velvets, style deranged by Cabaret, left the house in
fishnets and stilletos and crystal clear plastic. "Take a
pully. It might get cold." Later, her mother was proud of
Siouxsie's success and, to Siouxsie's irritation, would invite
the fans into the house for tea.
She thought she might be a
model but she was too weird. She thought she might be a secretary
but she ended up working in clubs. And everything about her said
don't fuck with me because she looked tough and she took it
further than everyone else. Siouxsie had a score to settle.
Then, on December 9, 1975,
having debuted at St. Martin's Art School, the Sex Pistols played
at Ravensbourne Art College in Bromley. Simon Barker saw them and
told his friend Steve Bailey that they were good, like the
Stooges. Word spread, from Steve to Billy Idol to Sue Catwoman to
Siouxsie, who were like-minded anyway, united by daring
accoutrements and inclination toward gay clubs. They started to
go to the gigs, looking fabulous, men in enough makeup to
frighten the neighbours, women with blue hair and a demeanour
that looked as if the pill was about to wear off. As a fashion
phalanx they became known as the Bromley Contingent, and were as
important, in their own way, as the Sex Pistols. Certainly they
moved the style and attitude forward. Old couldn't believe it;
young wanted it.
The following year The Bromley
Contingent followed the Pistols to France and Siouxsie was
punched by an Arab. She was wearing a topless bra, black vinyl
stockings and a black armband with a swastika on it. She liked
Salon Kitty and disliked those who banged on about being in the
war; the swastika was joke camp not death camp and she did not,
then, appreciate the panorama of implications. "The Nazis
were not only anti-Semitic but anti-anyone different, anti-anyone
like me." The regalia backfired. The National Front started
to pay attention and she was horrified.
Film maker John Maybury, who
became a friend of Siouxsie's, remembers seeing her wear a
swastika at a Pistols concert in London and thinking it was
"fantastic". It should be remembered, he thinks, that
the original punks were, "naff art students having a laugh.
The swastika subsequently melded with the hindsight of political
rectitude, but then, "it was fun being obnoxious".
Steve Bailey became Steve
Severin (in deference to Masoch's assistant in his book Venus in
Furs and the Velvet Underground song of the same name). He and
Sioux planned a band with Billy Idol who deserted to join Chelsea
and then Generation X. At the suggestion of Malcolm McLaren, Sid
Vicious was elected to play drums. Siouxsie and the Banshees played for the first time at the two-day Punk Festival at
London's 100 Club on September 20, 1976. A wall of noise
illuminated the fact that no one could play. Indeed, Severin had
once refused to attend Dulwich College because music lessons were
mandatory. Siouxsie said the Lord's Prayer. The mélange lasted 20
minutes. They walked off, bored. The Clash followed them on. She
did not envisage doing it for a living. "She is nothing if
not magnificent," Caroline Coon wrote at one time. "Her
short hair, which she sweeps in great waves over her head, is
streaked with red like flames. She'll wear black plastic
non-existent bras, one mesh and one rubber stocking and suspender
belts all covered by a polka dotted transparent plastic
mac." Another observer said that the set was
"unbearable."
The next night a beer glass was
thrown, a girl's face was cut, and Sid Vicious, then 20, was
arrested. He found himself in the Ashford Remand Centre where,
for distraction, he read a book about Charles Manson that had
been given to him by Vivienne Westwood.
In December, Siouxsie
accidentally earned an immutable position in the history of pop
culture by appearing on the television show that launched the Sex
Pistol's career. Like poisonous berries, The Bromley Contingent
were peculiar in taste and unusual in hue; they always added
colour, so they were asked to accompany the Pistols on the Today
show. Siouxsie, with platinum blonde hair and Droog eyes,
presented a more interesting vista than Pistol Glen Matlock.
Presenter Bill Grundy asked her out; Steve Jones called him a
dirty fucker. It was a live broadcast. The world would never be
quite the same again.
"When we went down to the
Green Room," Malcolm McLaren told author and pop critic Jon
Savage, "there was Steve and Siouxsie getting hold of all
the ringing phones and saying, 'This is Thames, get of the
fucking phone you stupid old prat.' The EMI chauffeur came
whizzing through the revolving doors and said, "Come on boys
I've got to get you out of this straight away. There's going to
be a storm.'"
"From that day on,"
said Steve Jones, "it was different. Before then it was just
the music - the next day it was the media."
Outrage, like beauty, is in the
eye of the beholder. Wild women attract publicity but are rarely
offered any sensible business proposition because men still fear
voodoo hoodoo and hex. They are scared to make eye contact, pray
that the provocateur won't sit too close, hope that if they
ignore her she night find her own way back to the ward. Weird
witches are still seen as casting curses. Blame the crop failure
in Courtney Love.
Jayne County will be remembered
for the very wonderful If You Don't Want To Fuck Me Baby (Fuck
Off) released in 1977, but she was, in the end, a bloke. Poly
Styrene skipped out to play for a while and was banned by the
BBC, but it is no coincidence that the Slits and Siouxsie, both
aggressive, both early originators, took nearly two years to land
a record deal. The Banshees were acclaimed as a great live band
with enough songs to earn them consideration, but a contract
eluded them. Someone with a paint can sprayed "Sign Siouxsie
Now" on several record company buildings. It didn't help.
Nor did Siouxsie's habit of insulting A & R men from behind
her mike. They were turned down by Anchor, EMI, RCA, Chrysalis,
CBS and Decca until June 1978 when Polydor, who signed The Jam,
came forward. They gave them a three album deal with full
creative control - a contractual obligation that underpinned
their subsequent longevity and aided survival when all around
exploded like mines in a field. Hong Kong Garden, released in
August, went to number 3; the album The Scream to number 12.
In February 1979 Sid Vicious
died of an overdose. A note to his mum said that he wanted to be
buried in his leather jacket and next to his girlfriend Nancy
Spungen who had bled to death in the Chelsea Hotel after he
stabbed her in the stomach. As his exit came to symbolise the end
of pop's psychotic episode, Siouxsie and the Banshees prepared
for a British tour.
The relationship between
Severin and Siouxsie was cemented when the guitarist and drummer,
as Severin succinctly puts it, "ran away".
John McKay and Kenny Morris
left their tour passes on their pillows and hopped on a train
from Aberdeen. The show opened with The Scars followed by The
Cure. The Cure continued to play and the Banshees failed to
materialise. Then Siouxsie appeared on stage. "Two art
college students have fucked off out of it...If you ever see them
you have my blessing to beat the shit out of them."
Robert Smith (of The Cure)
temporarily helped out as guitarist; Budgie (formerly of the
Slits) was employed to play drums. Budgie is a strange little
person, not least because of his equanimity around disorderly
sisters; a man who can survive the Slits can presumably survive
anything. Like the parakeet after which he is named, he is small
and colourful and appears easy to please. "I got the
nickname when I was sharing a flat with Holly Johnson and Paul
Rutherford in Liverpool. Some guy was tormenting a budgie in a
cafe and I went to its defense. Other guys had racing pigeons but
I used to breed budgerigars - I had a great one called Bobby - as
a kid I was called the Bird Man of Morley Street."
He had intended to study fine
art and took a course at Liverpool Polytechnic. His father, a
joiner, sometimes asked him if he was ever going to get a proper
job. Budgie loves the band - sees it as show-business rather than
pop music. He still enjoys walking into an empty theatre before a
soundcheck. He likes rootlessness and the unexpected; touring
makes him remember when the fair used to roll into town - strange
and different and slightly dangerous.
Two years ago he and Siouxsie
were married, although she says that, to some extent, she is also
married to Severin. Budgie kind of stole her from Severin, but
they all got over it. They live in France near Toulouse. They
have a garden, and cats, and books. They might have children, now
that she has recovered, a little, from her own past.
The early Banshees albums,
eerie, echoey, urban and accessible, appealed to a thanatoid
sub-sect of punk that looked like Morticia Addams in a frightwig.
Unhappy Darling? Perfectly. These, the pallid and purple, liked
the Sisters of Mercy, Aleister Crowley and frightening films
about the undead. In 1981 they collected in the Batcave in Soho
where Siouxsie songs - Mirage, Love In A Void, Christine - wove
in with those by Bauhaus and The Specimen. Thus Siouxsie was
reincarnated into Goth Goddess and so her career survived.
Billy Chainsaw, her personal
assistant, affirmed this cross-pollination by frequenting the
Batcave and, at one point, throwing a wedding ceremony in which
his bride wore black, the cake was popularly believed to have
been cut with a chainsaw, and Billy, also in black, was unable to
wear a hat because "my hair was too big".
Chainsaw, who left shift work
in a factory in Birmingham to work for Siouxsie in 1979, now also
edits a magazine, Purr. Created by and appealing to the people
that ebb and flow in his world, it is a confident mixture of
illustration and underground writing and a reminder that this
sub-culture has sprouted long roots. Purr's second issue featured
an exclusive story by Hubert Selby Jr; its third the last story
written by Robin Cook. A booklet illustrated by Edward Gorey is
to come.
Siouxsie had gone off punk
anyway when they gave it a name. She knew that once it had been
recognised it would be limited in how it was perceived; the point
would be missed because its strength lay in the broadness of
sweep that was an attitude and a spirit. You are qualified, she
still thinks, because you are good at something, not because you
possess something that tells somebody else that you are good at
something. She has long distrusted the judgement of others and
the diktats of definition.
When she was small she could
never understand why, because she was a girl, certain duties were
assigned to her; now she faces "the misconception that being
a female commodity stops at the age of 25". This she must
dismiss, just as she knows she must wear what she likes. What is
mutton dressed as lamb anyway and who cares? "I haven't
reached the stage when I think, ooh, I better tone it down. I
like people who can handle their age, take it and throw it back,
like fuck you."
She has little time for people
who think they know her because of what they have read and little
affection for a music industry where "success" has
become tawdry and ephemeral and sales are so rarely related to
quality or content. She is caught up in a conundrum - she knows
that creativity is often enhanced by limitation but resents the
fact that Polydor will not spend more money on promotion - money
that could be spent, among other things, on making touring more
enjoyable. "It is to do with what people are told," she
says. "We have never hired a shit-hot marketing team. I
don't want to be a product."
But a product, in some ways,
she is - a trademark even. The Banshees are seen to sell a
predictable number of albums much as an author tends to sell the
same number of novels, and, depending on who else is touring that
year, they say they can be pretty sure to fill a 6,000 capacity
hall in London, 3,000 in Europe and up to 15,000 in America.
Thus, certain financial forecasts can be made by a record company
unwilling to take risks. No, thank you very much, the Banshees
will not be on a punk compilation with Sham 69 or any other band
with whom they have never been associated. Nor do they wish to
send out the same songs in a different package. "I want to
be out there in the marketplace but I'm not doing it that way;
that cheapens it," she says. "So I am seen as a prima
donna bitch."
Lasting isn't important. She
shrugs. They formed for a night. If this party finishes she will
find another one somewhere else. But it's not over yet. "In
hindsight we have been very lucky we weren't huge for a short
amount of time." She would also like to be rich. "A
million would do." A million would mean that she could make
the albums but not be forced to release them. She likes making
the albums.
The German installation artist
Rebecca Horn seems to have been responsible for the interior of
the Pump House in Rotherhithe; indeed, there is a possibility
that, when particularly depressed, she made the whole of
Rotherhithe. This vast dilapidated building houses a dark
landscape where a discarded wheelchair and barbed wire fuse into
subterannean passages and where, crumbling walls and old graffiti
open out into a space where, for no apparent reason, there is
light and warmth and people are selling army surplus. Around the
outside there are lines of rusting Beetles and no visible
entrance or exit. The Pump House is known in the film industry as
a place where low-budget films are made. "Very poor
catering," says one experienced regular. Very poor catering
is right. Chips from a van and a piece of fruit cake. A lurex
curtain reveals a podium full of Banshees: Budgie and Severin are
wearing silver shirts and feathers; Siouxsie's wearing a
gold-sequinned trouser suit. The podium is revolving, round and
round, and a disco ball spits out those shimmying globs of light
that cause convulsions. "Can we have quiet, please, this is
a set not a party."
A bald Australian man named
John Hillcoat studies a monitor. Hillcoat has been employed to
make the video for Stargazer, the second single to be released
from The Rapture. He is an interesting choice. In 1909 he
released the extraordinary Ghosts Of The Civil Dead, a film about
high security prisons in Australia. Since then there have been
videos for Nick Cave and the German avant garde noise band
Einsturzende Neubauten. The Banshees saw his film, Blume, for the
latter, a finely focused use of simple but surreal images made by
a film maker who knows that narrative must never be lost to the
palette of the editing suite. The chaos of hi-tech quick-flash
graphics and digital effects does not appear in the work of
Hillcoat - he allows an idea to breathe. His videos are short
films and they are different.
His promo for the Banshees' O
Baby involved a baby beauty pageant in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Hillcoat, who is fascinated by the macabre, both covert and
overt, knew that the imagery would be of frills, curls and
uncanny posturing as children from 10 months upwards competed for
titles such as Tot Personality and Miniature Miss Talent.
Research had also revealed a subtext, a dangerous undercurrent
where fanatic mothers had lost control and beaten their daughters
up for losing.
Siouxsie flew in and Hillcoat
noticed that she was keen to record the scene backstage to tell
the truth of this glitzy scenario. It was, in the end, a pop
video, not a documentary, but she knew that silence was the
Candyman's currency.
She had attended her mother's
funeral the day before. So, on the set in Flagstaff, the Siouxsie
mask was useful, a defence and a device that aided work.
"She was very strong," says Hillcoat. "The
consummate professional."
Behind lurked a bereavement
that had been appalling. There had been cancer and, in Siouxsie's
view, a series of medical mistakes. Then, suddenly, the telephone
call to France that warned of finality. "I booked the flight
but I was too late," she says "That was the worst
thing, not saying goodbye."
John Maybury once persuaded her
to remove the Siouxsie face for his Court of Miracles film series
- he recognised that she was "a lovely looking woman,"
but that it was not her habit to take advantage of this. In
Rotherhithe, the mask is the pancake face of traditional Chinese
theatre for a narrative set in Hong Kong. Red flashes across her
profile; thick black streaks slash over a crimson mouth: Siouxsie
is definitely here. She is wearing the sparkly slacks, being
photographed, thinking that this work with Hillcoat marks a new
start for them, that the album will be a turning point. But there
has been a moment, in the dressing room, between coats of paint
as it were, when the bare face of Susan Ballion was revealed. A
strong jaw, dark eyes, high cheekbones - it is still and sad and
beautiful and you wouldn't know it was her.
http://zikzak.zikzak.net/~spike/siouxsie/index.htm
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