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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 80s, Rock, rock and roll

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

Siouxsie and the Banshees – 05 – A Kiss in the Dreamhouse

May 15, 2020 //
4

Released: November, 1982
Lineup: Sioux, Steve Severin (bass), John McGeoch (guitar), Budgie (drums)

Tracklist:
Side 1:
Cascade
Green Fingers
Obsession
She’s a Carnival
Circle

Side 2:
Melt!
Painted Bird
Cocoon
Slowdive

This album has a really strange provenance. In many ways, it’s distinctly not goth at all, and in fact Wikipedia cites its genre as neo-psychedelic, though it has no connection to the west coast neo-psychedelia of the Paisley Underground, for example. There was a lot of tension between the band members themselves as well as their recently fired manager, Nils Stevenson (who the song Obsession might be about). There’s a great interview with Siouxsie that appeared in Uncut about the making of this album.

Lots of drugs, including LSD, but also an insistence that the sound be something new. Roping in real strings and bells to augment the sound rather than using synthesizers. The results are heady and beautiful and unlike anything else in their catalogue.

Lyrically, the songs lean on the emotions of new love, which is not surprising given the newness of Siouxsie’s and Budgie’s relationship. Oh love like liquid falling/Falling in cascades.

Green Fingers seems to be all about someone who can ‘make anything grow / magic in her hands’, but concludes with a repetition of ‘With this ring, I thee wed’. Musically it’s lush and growing and almost slithering out of the speakers.

Obsession, a slow waltz with instrumentation very low in the mix, is indeed about someone’s obsessive behavior, but told almost sympathetically from the point of view of the obsessive, not the object. It bears a strange resemblance to Throbbing Gristle’s Persuasion.

The album picks up speed with She’s A Carnival, which might be my favourite song on the album, except that its swirling mood stops quite suddenly to be replaced in the last minute with a circus organ sort of thing. Those first two and a half minutes are so sweet, though.

Circle is the only song that harkens back to an earlier sound. The minimal repetitive instrumentation with monotonous trap drum as the only percussion backs a song that starts off being about a girl of 16 who gets pregnant and has a baby like her own mother, but as the song progresses, it’s about the repetitions of life and poverty and discipline reflected in the musical repetitions and with references in the middle to the various lines of the London Underground, “Any line you can think of but for the Yellow” (which I’m pretty sure would be the Circle line.

Side two opens with the first of the album’s two singles, Melt!, which had always seemed to be about sex, but the song is also run through with references to death and funerals. But the intertwining of the two is not a new thing.

Painted Bird is another wildly festive song in arrangement, but seems to be about birds who attack their own when they perceive it to be somehow alien. It’s not an obvious point in the song, but the metaphor of society attacking those seen to be different or accused of difference is not hard to miss.

Cocoon is a weird piece of chamber jazz in which the subject wrapped in blankets on a cot imagines herself transforming but isn’t. The arrangement circles around a stand-up bass line and doesn’t (like most of this album) resemble anything they’d previously done. But the evolution it indicates will turn up on Tinderbox and Through The Looking Glass a couple of years later.

And the album concludes with the second single, Slowdive, which should have been a bigger hit given how obviously it is about sex. The slinky violin and viola arrangement draws the listener down into the music.

Sadly, John McGeoch’s excesses where just that much more excessive than those of the rest of the band that he was booted upon the album’s release. Robert Smith joined the band for the following tour and the next Banshees album, Hyaena.

That said, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse is absolutely a five-star album and one I’ve reveled in having on repeat the last couple of weeks.

Next: The Creatures’ Feast.

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Categories 80s, Music, rock and roll

The Creatures – 01 – Wild Things

May 5, 2020 //
2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Things_(EP)
Recorded 25-27 May 1981
Released: 25 September 1981
Lineup: Siouxsie Sioux, Budgie
Producer: Mike Hedges
Track list:
  1. Mad Eyed Screamer
  2. So Unreal
  3. But Not Them
  4. Wild Thing
  5. Thumb
Recorded just before Juju was released, and released later the same year, Wild Things comprised five songs across two 7” singles, at least one of which (But Not Them) was worked up during the Juju sessions. The idea behind The Creatures was that the ideas worked well as just percussion and voice.
Mad Eyed Screamer seems an appropriate soundtrack fo these times. It seems to describe sideshow preacher or world-bedraggled, drug addled street person. The title phrase also aptly describes this years demonstrators.
So Unreal points at the same dynamics, but from the perspective of having known the titular screamer before? I wish I could feel the way that you feel? No it’s not that, it’s that the person being addressed has gone the way of normalcy. All the traits you had have all gone away / Get up and wash at the right time of day. It might be a guise, but it it’s a desirable one. Get out of the scene and get into the so-called real world?
But Not Them is a classic Siouxsie lyric pointing to a murder (or more) that has occurred. Dead lumps of meat / Melt in this heat.
The cover of the Chip Taylor classic Wild Thing, which gives the EP its title (suggested by Steve Severin as the kind of thing the creatures in Where The Wild Things Are would have danced to), is twisted to one side. A classic declaration of love? No. Wild Thing, I think I hate you / But I want to know for sure / Come and hit me hard / I hate you.
Finally, there’s Thumb, which uses recordings of traffic at the opening and closing for a backing, and describes life mostly from the point of view of a hitchhiker:
One for the road, jump inside little girl take a ride by my side / No end to the ride with this stranger tonight.
The drum/voice nature of the Creatures’ work offers a starkness to Siouxsie’s lyrical approach to the world that is often subsumed in the Banshees’ work. These songs were remastered and included in the 1997 compilation A Bestiary of the Creatures.
Next up: A Kiss in the Dreamhouse

 

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Categories 80s, Music, Rock, rock and roll

Siouxsie and the Banshees 04 – Juju

April 27, 2020 //
2

Released: June, 1981
Lineup: Sioux, Steve Severin (bass), John McGeoch (guitar), Budgie (drums)

Tracklist:
Side 1:
Spellbound
Into the Light
Arabian Knights
Halloween
Monitor

Side 2:
Night Shift
Sin In My Heart
Head Cut
Voodoo Dolly

Released just 10 months after Kaleidoscope, Nigel Gray is still at the helm.
Juju was preceded by the Spellbound single in May. Arabian Knights was released as a single in July.

After the tour for Kaleidoscope, this is the first album by this incarnation of the Banshees as a tested unit. Musically it’s their most cohesive set yet. The songs are individually different while each obviously contributes to a whole vision. Interestingly the album seems built around Budgie’s percussion and McGeoch’s guitar. Severin’s bass tends to be really low in the mix. (This may be a by-product of listening to the Spotify recording on earbuds, as well.)

And as I delve into the lyrics, which never really sunk in, the repeated themes of death and murder and violent sex are more surprising than I expected them to be. I listened to this album repeatedly in my youth, but never took that dive into what Siouxsie was actually singing about.

Musically, it’s anchored by a continuously maintained eastern atmosphere. This is more obvious on side one, especially on Arabian Knights, but each song feeds on that feeling. The chord changes that anchor Into The Light are another example. Arabian Knights features a minor key thing that feels like it’s being played from under water. I can’t identify what (I think) McGeoch is doing there. The finger cymbals also contribute.

Album opener, Spellbound, which was always one of my favourites, is a pop masterpiece on the one hand, but a horror show on the other. It’s similar in theme to previous work that explored the madness inherent in the family structure. Earlier, Siouxsie might have spun it on the axis of the child, but here she uses the line ‘And when your elders forget to say their prayers / take them by the legs, and throw them down the stairs’ as a counterpoint to the chorus’s ‘Following the footsteps of a rag doll dance / we are entranced.’ On the one hand, it’s revenge (possibly), but balanced by the insanity of childhood.

Halloween, which made onto many of my goth era’s mix tapes, wouldn’t have been out of place on any of the first three albums, but again, McGeoch’s guitar work separates it especially from the first lineup of the band. The toms and vibraslap that anchor the chorus are especially infectious.

Side one closes with Monitor, which I’ve always found to be amongst the strangest of the band’s songs. Musically it’s got this driving rhythm that doesn’t really resemble anything else in the post-punk or goth canon. At five and half minutes, it’s still beat in length by Night Shift and Voodoo Dolly on side 2. There’s something sweet in the fact that they took the time to give the songs the room they need to breathe and express what each one needs to.

Into The Light probably has lyrical depths I’m not plumbing but the song balances on repetitions of the rhymes light, white, sight, night, right. The rhythms pull the listener in as if through an aural spinning spiral. This is similar to the repeating motifs in Voodoo Dolly at the end of the album.

Arabian Nights combines images of oil spills, harems, and the repetition of I heard a rumour / what have you done to her. I’m not sure whether the music triumphs over the lyrics or the repetition is the point. Halloween pulls us again into the arena where the adult addresses the child who was:
The carefree days are distant now /I wear my memories like a shroud
I try to speak, but words collapse / Echoing, echoing “Trick or treat”

Monitor plays with the imagery of violence, possibly of a snuff film, pulling us into its horror:
And we shook with excitement / Then the victim stared up
Looked strangely at the screen / As if her pain was our fault.
Closing out side one with this kind of indictment, there was nothing left to do but flip it over and hear what came next.

Night Shift starts with those slow eastern chords and when Siouxsie enters, it’s in the style of a nursery rhyme. That she’s singing of someone visiting a morgue to commit acts of necrophilia (My night shift sisters / with your nightly visitor), well, we’re in the realm of the gothic after all. Musically, it’s crazy noise wrapped around Siouxsie’s disturbingly restrained vocals.

Sin In My Heart opens with finger-picked rhythms punctuated once with the sound of breaking glass. The minimal lyrics, again about sex, are mostly a placeholder for Budgie to wrap his rolling beats around.

Head Cut. Yeah. I want to take this severed head back to my house and keep it to make up and attract flies. And cook? Possibly. And astoundingly danceable all the same.

And the whole circus closes with mini-epic Voodoo Dolly. The singer addresses someone under the thrall of someone or something (She’s such an ugly little dolly / and she’s making you look very silly…you get paralyzed with her fear). The story part of the song evolves into a crazy repetition of the words listen, listen, listen, to your fear. Again, that hypnotic repetition draws you in. It’s an appropriate way to close the album.

While I’ve got great love for the first three albums (and, really, for most of the catalogue), those are 3 or 3 1/2 star albums. I give Juju five stars.

In 2026, the Discord and Rhyme podcast did an excellent episode on this album which you can find here:
https://discordpod.com/listen/178-siouxsie-and-the-banshees-juju-1981

Next up: Wild Things!

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Categories 80s, Music, Rock
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