Monocled Alchemist

Article published in NME | 22nd September, 1979

Siouxsie and the Banshees | The Wrath Of Siouxsie and Severin | IT’S THE LAST thing we imagined happening, particularly in the totally underhand manner it did. We knew they were unhappy to a certain extent . . .”

“We were unhappy with them as well!” The equally aggrieved but more overtly hostile Siouxsie brusquely interrupts her cohort Steve Severin’s comparatively soft-spoken train of pained summations.

“In fact,” Severin continues, “during the rehearsals for this tour we were asking them: ‘Are you still happy with the situation as it stands? Do you feel like you want to do this tour? Do you still want to carry on?’

“Because tours generally — certainly this tour took a good three months of pre-planning to set up, so a lot was obviously at stake and if there were serious conflicts, then they should have spoken up at the very outset.

“But they always replied ‘Yes, we want to do it’, until it was taken for granted that the band, regardless of any possible conflicts that might occur during the tour, would see it through in its established four-piece set-up.”

Join Hands

The topic under discussion should be obvious enough. On Friday, September 7, Siouxsie and the Banshees arrived in Aberdeen for the second date of a month-long tour instigated to promote the second album release, ‘Join Hands‘.

Although Aberdeen was the second ‘official’ whistle-stop, the Banshees had performed three gigs immediately beforehand, the first two being low profile warm-ups. Even at these warm-up dates, a certain tension could apparently be noted at times.

A guitar intro would sullenly cut short vocalist Siouxsie’s between-song verbal rap. Occasional percussive slice-ups would throw the singer’s timing off. Still, this was nothing compared to what lay in store at Aberdeen.

The tensions that culminated with the rushed exit of guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris from Scotland and the Banshees’ line-up are documented elsewhere.

Another fact worth noting, though, is that the pair’s bizarre scramble for a south-bound train could clearly have crippled the band’s financial standing beyond repair, not to mention bankrupting their promoter Dave Woods.

The £50,000 (an approximate sum quoted by Severin) invested in the tour had been raised partly by Woods, but more so by the band themselves, who invested all monies earned from ‘The Scream‘ album and ‘Hong Kong Garden‘.

So far, the whole debacle has caused all parties to forfeit something close to a stiff five grand in deposits on the halls for the five cancelled gigs.

First signs

SIOUXSIE AND Steve Severin readily related their side of the story to me in the NME review cell last week. So when do they consider the seeds of dissent to have been sown, and what triggered the first signs of this antipathy off?

Siouxsie: “It was in a way there all along.”

Severin: “Yeah, in a way it was an integral part of what we did. There’s always been that kind of tension there simply because both Kenny and John literally walked into Siouxsie and the Banshees and they could never quite get over that — especially John, because he’d seen the band onstage.

“We realised this though, and were constantly trying to make him feel a part of the group while letting him express himself musically as he desired.

“Probably recording ‘The Scream’ was the first really traumatic time for the band, simply because it was our first record.”

‘The Scream’, the pair now feel, was not the achievement it should have been. Certainly something was lost somewhere between the tracks laid down in the studio and the end result on vinyl. Siouxsie takes up the topic.

“Well, me, Nils and Steve were totally aware that ‘The Scream’ as it finally came out was not what we wanted, but John and Kenny either weren’t aware of its failings or wouldn’t admit it.”

Siouxsie and the Banshees | The Wrath Of Siouxsie and Severin

Severin: “Yeah, because after ‘Staircase‘ and ‘Playground Twist‘ (the two singles following ‘Hong Kong Garden‘) John was talking about getting Steve Lilleywhite back because he felt our attempts to find another producer more suited to our sound were getting less and less successful.”

Although Siouxsie and Severin initially disagree about the degree of friction going on, the fact is that ‘Join Hands‘ was recorded in a fragmented fashion.

Siouxsie: “With ‘The Scream’ the traumas were caused because we were always there in the studio and pressures would rise naturally, but at least when we disagreed over something it would be argued over face to face right there on the spot between the four of us.”

Severin: “But with ‘Join Hands’ the process was almost completely different because it would be us going in first and recording backing tracks and then Siouxsie would go in and record her vocals.

So on one level there’d be none of that out-and-out bickering, but on the other hand the animosity would take the form of behind-the-back bitchiness.”

Bitchiness

This bitchiness Siouxsie in particular considers a factor in the group’s ultimate fragmentation, coupled with a disinterest in Banshee projects on McKay and Morris’s part that manifested itself in everything from refusal to participate in interviews through to non appearances at ‘Join Hands’ mixing sessions.

Siouxsie: “I was involved very much in the final mixes whilst John and Kenny weren’t — partly as a matter of policy, but more because . confidence in themselves as far as matters of judgement were concerned.”

Morris and mcKay by this time were living together. Severin recalls: “John and Kenny would be away, just disappear for three or four days at a time, then turn up to hear the mixes done in their absence and you could hear them just out of earshot muttering ‘They’re not doing it right’.”

Siouxsie never one to beat about the bush expands: “I think that it is of paramount importance that you get across that they’d worked up a nice little marriage with each other and that they’d travel up their own arseholes with each other and console each other!

Venomous words

That’s when the trouble really started, when they became really, really fucked up!”

Venomous words, but wasn’t the Morris-McKay pact perchance a show of force to balance out a potential Siouxsie-Severin pairing?

Severin quickly replies: “Not at all, because Sioux and I are no way a unit unto ourselves. It was the whole operation and John and Kenny went off on their own. They’d antagonise Nils and Dave Woods on a business and touring situation, just everyone was alienated.”

Siouxsie: “Even our sound man was closer to them than the rest of us put together.”

Still on the subject of this pact that Morris and McKay appear to have instigated, if there was no direct enemy to confront within the band set-up, then what was the basic thrust for their antagonism?

Siouxsie again answers: “I think basically it was an inferiority relationship; two people feeling inadequate, feeling less important and joining together to build up a single strength.”

Siouxsie and the Banshees | The Wrath Of Siouxsie and Severin

Yet John McKay, although a late-comer, immediately established himself as a vital ingredient in the shaping of the band’s music. His guitar playing formed a dominant textural dimension to the spartan overall sound, while his riffs and chord progressions provided the vital form around which the other three Banshees functioned.

Severin views McKay’s work with the Banshees in retrospect thus: “As far as coming up with the tunes, it was John certainly. But when it came to matching the lyrics with the music then it was down to us. All arrangements were always a group effort.”

Yet ultimately what strikes one as so bizarre is the undeniable fact that the Siouxsie-Severin-McKay-Morris axis from its very inception up to the last days before its sudden splintering, appeared to be the perfect example of a practical group democracy.

Every aspect, from the long, lean stretch without a record deal through to the Polydor deal, commercial success and the stolid adherence to facing the media as a four piece, shaped the Banshees as a band whom the most rabid of their detractors had to appreciate for their hardline commitment to a unity of intent, purpose and vision.

Superficial

Now, with the participants sliced in twain in a manner that the remaining pair pair can only view as sabotage, t’s fairly easy to sympathise with Siouxsie’s venomous declarations and, in particular, Severin’s very real shocked sense of betrayal and pained bemusement.

As far as Siouxsie is concerned, that former unity of intent was in one vital respect superficial.

“A vital factor of the Banshees for me and Steve was always that there be an element of risk involved. It goes back to that original 100 Club gig in the sense that when we did that, we laid all our cards on the table.

We went up on that stage knowing full well that we’d probably come off looking complete clowns. And although that gig was a one-off and we never wanted to repeat the same thing again, we still wanted to create a situation which embodied that same feeling of taking risks, of going out on a limb, of working against the odds.

Siouxsie and the Banshees | The Wrath Of Siouxsie and Severin

“But John and Kenny could never bear to take that gamble, to break stride. John is just utterly humourless, a dilettante who would never dare make a fool of himself. And Kenny was just into the group on a voyeuristic level, wanting to be part of a ‘punk phenomenon’.”

Severin: “From now on I’d be very very wary of having permanent members after this tour. It could very easily be a case of me and Sioux working on a short-term basis, using interesting players to create something quickly, something very spontaneous.

“That’s the feeling I have now, possibly due to having been jilted by two people we’ve worked with solidly for two years and who I really thought I knew. But the more I think about it the more I see it as being the one sure way of staying fresh, of destroying the idea of a group as a marriage.” (Nick Kent)