Siouxsie and the Banshees – 06 – Nocturne

November 4, 2026 //
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Live album released in 1984 – features Robert Smith on guitar, Steve Severin – bass, Budgie – drums, percussion, Siouxsie Sioux – Vocals

  1. Intro – Rite of Spring
  2. Israel
  3. Dear Prudence (only recently a single)
  4. Paradise Place
  5. Melt!
  6. Cascade
  7. Pulled To Bits
  8. Night Shift
  9. Sin In My Heart
  10. Slowdive
  11. Painted Bird
  12. Happy House
  13. Switch

-=-=-=-

Encore:

  1. Spellbound
  2. Helter Skelter
  3. Eve White / Eve Black
  4. Voodoo Dolly

Okay this is really interesting – the concerts this album was recorded at were a year after the departure of guitarist John McGeoch whose skills are across the three albums that make up the bulk of this set, Kaleidoscope (1980), Juju (1981), and A Kiss in the Dreamhouse (1982). The Cure’s Robert Smith was drafted and played guitar on the entire Dreamhouse tour.
Those three albums aren’t necessarily orchestrated, but lean heavily on instruments outside of the guitar/bass/drums they keep to in concert. Sioux’s voice is in prime form throughout – her range is often diminished in live recordings, but she was in top form on these nights, especially on songs like Melt and Slowdive.
The drumming on Dear Prudence elevates it beyond the single version. Budgie is in top form and Smith’s guitar takes the lead on Paradise Place and he wails. Severin’s bass intro to Cascade, which feels a bit like The Cure’s A Forest, pulls the listener right in.

Pulled To Bits is an interesting choice – they rock it hard, but it’s only appearance at that point was as the b-side to standalone single Playground Twist.

Night Shift sounds appropriately cavernous for a song about serial murder. Siouxsie sounds appropriately embedded in the character of the Yorkshire Ripper. It’s truly disturbing in a way the studio version doesn’t match. Sin In My Heart which follows Night Shift on Juju also follows it here. Budgie and Smith’s interplay is really impressive as the song opens. Severin’s bass is quite restrained. However, it’s a real joy when Slowdive kicks in next – the variety of percussion and something screechy from the guitar bring the goods. As they do for Painted Bird, Happy House (another recent single at the time), and the main set’s closer, Switch (from debut album The Scream).

And then there’s the encore:

Spellbound, Helter Skelter, Eve White/Eve Black and the closing Voodoo Dolly.

Spellbound had been the first single from Juju in 1981 and had been something of a hit. I know when I saw them on the Hyaena tour in ‘84, that was the main song I was waiting for. And as with the rest of Nocturne, they’re absolutely on top of it. Helter Skelter made its first appearance on The Scream and had been in their set from very early on. It ratchets up the intensity of the performance beautifully. Eve White/Eve Black was the B-side of Christine (released in 1980, a few months before Kaleidoscope) and takes on that song’s same subject, Christine Sizemore, a woman with multiple personalities (whose story is told in The Three Faces of Eve. It’s another song that’s mostly played at 11 which makes the opening of Voodoo Dolly a little jarring, but live, Voodoo Dolly starts quietly, but the instrumentation – especially Budgie’s toms – gets more and more intense. Smith inhabits the increasingly violent guitar parts with occasional bursts of feedback until it feels like the strings might come off. At almost nine minutes, it’s a most fitting close to the show.

And someone has kindly posted a playlist of the full concert on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5BFJgXr2uDDvQnN-h-iNEzMj7Rp7MKOL

Next up: Hyæna

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Categories Rock, 80s, rock and roll

The Glove – Blue Sunshine

October 2, 2026 //
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Siouxsie and the Banshees catalog – Side Project – The Glove

 Blue Sunshine (1983) is the only album from the Robert Smith/Steve Severin project The Glove. Instrumentally, the album sounds like its key influences, but Smith, under contractual limitations, only sings on a couple of tracks.

Tracklist:

  1. A1 Like An Animal
  2. A2 Looking-Glass-Girl
  3. A3 Sex-Eye-Make-Up
  4. A4 Mr. Alphabet Says
  5. A5 A Blues In Drag
  6. B1 Punish Me With Kisses
  7. B2 This Green City
  8. B3 Orgy
  9. B4 Perfect Murder
  10. B5 Relax
  11. Mouth To Mouth (b-side of Like An Animal)
  12. Tightrope (b-side of Punish Me With Kisses)
  13. Like An Animal (Club? What Club?) (a-side of Like An Animal 12”)

It’s all very interesting and something of a carnival in atmosphere. Lyrically the songs are mostly about sex in its weirder forms. This is not surprising, coming as it does off of the Banshees’ A Kiss In The Dreamhouse and The Cure’s Pornography.
I remember trying to enjoy this when I first had the CD in about 1990, and as a fan of both bands. The untreated vocals of Jeanette Landray (known otherwise as a member of the Top of the Pops dance troupe Zoo), don’t feel anything like either Smith’s or Siouxsie’s, but she can also sound like something out of a fun fair, though I’m not sure what specifically in her vocals suggests that.

Punish Me With Kisses sounds the closest to what the Cure would be doing a couple of years later with the more upbeat songs on 1985’s The Head on the Door.

Listening to the album on Tidal brings back some serious memories – I really wasn’t sure what to make of it at the time. While Jeanette’s vocals are a weird addition to the worlds Smith and Severin occupied, I’ve also  delved into to the demos (available on a deluxe edition from a few years ago that a friend kindly pirated for me). On those Smith’s vocals just sound a little weird. The demos are low-fi by design and are always meant to be a starting point, and in this case, they’re very bare bones.

Mouth To Mouth is probably my favourite song on the CD release, though it wasn’t on the original album. 

I give it 7/10. Joe Sam says: Check it out.

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Categories 80s, Music

The Creatures – 02 – Feast

August 9, 2026 //
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After their initial EP Wild Things and the drug-infused LP A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, Sioux and Budgie decamped to Hawaii. Here the local instruments and culture infused the first full Creatures LP. This pattern would inform Boomerang,recorded in Spain and Hai recorded in Japan.

That said, in the several years since I last wrote up a Banshees album, I’ve not been able to write anything cohesive about this one. I’ve loved it for decades, especially Gecko and Dancing on Glass. But my usual track by track just never coalesced into a review.

The single, Miss the Girl (like The Normal’s Warm Leatherette), was inspired by JG Ballard’s Crash, but I was never grabbed by the A-side of the 12” I had. Their cover of Mel Torme’s Right Now on the B-side, however, ended up on many mix tapes.

I give it 3 1/2 stars and say ‘Check it out.’

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Categories 80s, Music

Blondie – Autoamerican

August 4, 2026 //
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Released: 1980
Produced by Mike Chapman

Side A:
Europa
Live It Up
Here’s Looking at You
The Tide Is High
Angels on the Balcony
Go Through It

Side B:
Do the Dark
Rapture
Faces
T-Birds
Walk Like Me
Follow Me

Autoamerican is probably my favourite Blondie album. I certainly played it the most, and I didn’t really keep up with them after. It’s my favourite despite the two inescapable singles. While The Tide is High and Rapture did boffo business (both hit #1 in the US), at least three other songs would have done well as singles (IMHO), T-Birds, Do the Dark, and Live It Up. (The previous two albums, Eat to the Beat and Parallel Lines had 10 singles released between them.) The crazy thing about Autoamerican is that it shouldn’t work, at all.

From the atmospherics of opener Europa, through some disco, some new wave, the reggae and hip hop of the two singles to Lerner and Lowe’s Follow Me (from Camelot), there’s nothing holding the damn thing together.

Live It Up is almost punk in its lyrics, but closer to disco in execution.
Here’s looking at you is closer to jazz. The Tide Is High started life as a reggae song. Angels on the Balcony is a ghost story with a pop interlude. And side one closes with Go Through It, which is almost country. Those rolling drum fills are gorgeous.

Do the Dark is sort of a disco rock thing. Rapture is the song we all know and love – first hip hop (ya don’t stop, go out to the parking lot) song played on MTV. Of course it was white folks doing it because it would be several more years before Yo! MTV Raps hit the scene.
Faces is a slow beautiful strangeness about the underclass on the Bowery (the neighborhood where CBGB was located), a tribute to the folks living on the street there.

T-Birds, about roller derby of all things, is still (45 years later) my favourite song on the album. It’s rock and roll (with an amusing spoken interlude) that simply works. Walk Like Me continues the rock and roll – its hard edge makes it possibly the one song on the album that wouldn’t have been out of place on Eat to the Beat (or Plastic Letters).

And then the whole thing drops into a little echo chamber with their take on the Lady of the Lake’s song, Follow Me, from Camelot. It closes the album out beautifully.

As I said, it shouldn’t work – but it manages with panache.

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Categories 80s, Rock, rock and roll

The Who’s Tommy

April 9, 2026 //
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When I lived in that commune in Marin back in the 70s, we had a deck where we did aerobics. My clearest musical memory of that deck is of running in place and listening to the soundtrack to Tommy which we had on a reel-to-reel tape, for some reason. I don’t recall that we had any other tapes to play on that machine. (I also recall that that tape broke and someone spliced it.) My clearest song memories are of Elton John’s Pinball Wizard and Tina Turner’s Acid Queen. Oddly not Clapton’s recording of Eyesight to the Blind (the album’s only cover, though other Mose Allison songs were in the running, according to the Pinball Wizard episode (part 1 of 2, here, though the investigation of Tommy itself is in part 2) of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs – the impetus for this blog entry) or several other memorable tracks. I’m sure Cousin Kevin and Uncle Ernie affected me given my own experience of abuse at Synanon and were worthwhile things to excise from my brain until later.

The key thing is that here was one of my formative experiences of rock and roll. We listened to a lot of music in the commune, but my other memories are of the MOR stylings of San Francisco’s KFRC, the only good station we could get in that far north. Silly Love Songs, Boz Scaggs’ Lowdown and Lido Shuffle, Love Will Keep Us Together, Knowing Me Knowing You, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart were all in heavy rotation in the year before I left in the Fall of ‘77. None of these had the sheer force of The Who’s music, even in the weird forms it took on the film soundtrack. I’d have the LP later on, and the original Who album as well. The original rock opera never grabbed me in the same way, though Daltrey’s rendition of Acid Queen certainly made its own impression.

I’m sure I’ve seen the movie all the way through at least once, maybe twice. All Ken Russell movies are strange, but the 70s stuff is out of this world. (Noting that his Altered States [1980] is one of my all time faves.) That said, watching a few clips on YouTube is enough to assure me I don’t really need to watch it again. In addition there are a dozen or so recordings of The Who performing Tommy in its entirety – this started no longer after their LP was released and continued through most of their subsequent tours, it seems. In general, I’m more interested in how they handle their other songs live than these. There was also a stage musical that I’ve never checked out either. That said, I’m now downloading the soundtrack and the original album.

Weirdly, my current book club reading is Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union which has an interesting plot point about a possible messiah that speaks in an odd way to Tommy’s own messianic aspect.

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Categories 70s, Fiction, movies, Music, Podcasts, Rock, rock and roll, Writing, yiddish
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