Siouxsie Now & Then

THE ICON TALKS TO EMILY MACKAY ABOUT HER NEW SOLO ALBUM AND SEE THIS ARTICLE, WHERE WE RECALL THE START OF HER AMAZING CAREER

Some stars are happy on a pedestal, frozen into the iconic images of their glory days. Siouxsie Sioux is not one of those people. While contemporaries like Deborah Harry or John Lydon grow increasingly embarrassing, hopping on the nearest bandwagon or celebrity TV gig, the unbelievably youthful-looking Siouxsie has kept to her own course, stretching and pushing the boundaries of her beloved trademark sound but never overreaching into the gimmicky or merely fashionable.

From the start Siouxise and her Banshees were the thinking person’s punks, rejecting the norms of the era before they’d even had times to solidify, outraging the outrageous and later defining post-punk and goth without ever being defined by them. They went on to refine and develop their initial aggressive racket, and explore dancier byways in The Creatures, and come to celebrated, mature elder status with The Rapture.

In all the hoopla surrounding the 30-years anniversary of punk, you won’t see Siouxsie hosting many nostalgia concerts, appearing as a talking head on I Heart Punk or competing in Celebrity Goth Island. And yet there are more exciting young bands today drawing on the Banshees dark post-punk template than there are Sex Pistol or Buzzcocks soundalikes, Her Dreamshow topped the UK music DVD charts in 2005, the year she …

by Emily Mackay
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