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:
- A1 Like An Animal
- A2 Looking-Glass-Girl
- A3 Sex-Eye-Make-Up
- A4 Mr. Alphabet Says
- A5 A Blues In Drag
- B1 Punish Me With Kisses
- B2 This Green City
- B3 Orgy
- B4 Perfect Murder
- B5 Relax
- Mouth To Mouth (b-side of Like An Animal)
- Tightrope (b-side of Punish Me With Kisses)
- 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.
