Discussion:U.S. Retrace

message: [https://web.archive.org/web/20130326140816/http://www.allmusic.com/artist/siouxsie-and-the-banshees-mn0000748222 ALLMUSIC ANCIENNE BIO].[[Utilisateur:Carlier2|Carlier2]] ([[Discussion utilisateur:Carlier2|discuter]]) 15 octobre 2016 à 01:32 (CEST)
{{Wikiprojet
|Rock|moyenne
|avancement=C
}}
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130326140816/http://www.allmusic.com/artist/siouxsie-and-the-banshees-mn0000748222 ALLMUSIC ANCIENNE BIO].[[Utilisateur:Carlier2|Carlier2]] ([[Discussion utilisateur:Carlier2|discuter]]) 15 octobre 2016 à 01:32 (CEST)
mick mercer music historian stated that they were not g.
http://thequietus.com/articles/01436-the-thirty-best-goth-records-of-all-time
removed some of the description of the Bromley contingent as it did not relate to article subject and has its own article if interested

message: RECORD MIRROR THE MAGIC OF TRANCE Mark Cooper 07/03/81
The fetish speaks - part one.  MARK COOPER goes ghost walking in the enchanted, perverted world of Siouxsie and the Banshees.
1.  A fetish is any natural object believed to possess magical or spiritual power.  "Following the footsteps of a rag doll dance we are entranced" (‘Spellbound’ Siouxsie and the Banshees).
SIOUXSIE moves across the stage at the Manchester Apollo like a siren possessed.  The lights follow her as she moves back and forth, her hands stretching out and then returning to her sides.
She’s dressed in black except for a glittering sash that surrounds her waist and she’s lit up like Cleopatra, an Egyptian priestess commanding her slaves, her subjects.  She puts one foot upon a monitor and gazes into the front few rows... the only ones she can see.
"I stand to one side so that I can see into the audience.  Usually all you can see is the 20 at the front.  When we put the lights on the audience, there’s suddenly 2000 more people out there.  It makes you feel very good to know that there’s all those people out there, but it always comes as a bit of a shock.
"I try to move around a bit to let them know that I’m there," John McGeoch, the Banshees’ guitarist.
"We don’t want to be manufactured and I don’t think we are.  At the same time, we take a lot of care with what we do.  When we play now, it’s a show and not a gig.  The lights now are brilliant; the guy who does it has been with the band a long time and when we change the order of the songs he gets a little nervous because the whole order of the lighting arrangement has to change."  Budgie, the Banshees’ drummer.
"A beautiful mask in plaster cast" (from ‘Headcut’ on ‘Juju’).
Siouxsie in the lights is perfectly framed.  Her face commands the audience who stare up, transfixed.  This is live, magic, and yet a ritual.  The crowd shakes to the music which rises and drones like an Indian raga and the faces are enchanted, sucked into the music and the show, the live world of Siouxsie and the Banshees.
This is a spectacle and a sense of awe descends on the crowds like a mist.  Siouxsie commands and she almost terrifies, the music sucks you in and yet there’s unease in the songs, a sense of disturbance, of a rising panic drowned in the notes but rising as the music marches forward.
2.  A fetish is any object or person that comes to be regarded with total belief, with a kind of devotion.
"To be quite honest, I don’t really have any specific idea as to why we do anything... there’s a load of groups who can sum themselves up and package themselves with some kind of slogan.  It’s real neat.
"We’ve never been able to do that and it’s a problem sometimes in interviews.  But that’s what’s special about this group."  Siouxsie, singer.
"I think there’s an interest in our work that goes right back to ‘Join Hands’ and it’s an interest in devotion.  There’s a song we have called ‘Icon’ that was inspired by Dervishes getting themselves into such a state that they could put needles through their heads.  Our interest in that state is a theme that runs through our work.
"And that’s because playing on stage can sometimes bring me into that state and we’re trying to share that because it’s really good.
"A song like ‘Jigsaw’ when we play it well can put me into a trance and that’s something we’re trying to project into an audience.  ‘Juju’ explores that a bit more coherently.  But our interest in religious magic comes naturally, it’s nothing as crass as Talking Heads getting books out of the library and swotting it up, giving you a bibliography of African music and religion."  Steve Severin, bass guitar.
AFTER the show, the band come out into the foyer and sit behind a desk for half an hour and sign autographs.  A good 50 fans are waiting to meet them, clutching programmes to be signed, many of them punks, many of them dressed in Banshees’ style.
"The gap between the entertainer and the audience is something we try to narrow onstage without going out and singing ’No More Heroes’ or anything as obvious as that.  At the same time, some of our music requires a certain distance - a song like ‘Nightshift’ has to be massive.
"That’s why we’re doing these autograph sessions but sometimes they upset Siouxsie because people just freeze up."  Steve gives a nod over at Siouxsie, sitting at a bed in a hotel room in Manchester, a few hours after the show.  Siouxsie is disturbed by the autograph session.
First we’ve talked about repetition, about the difficulty of a long tour, of shows that follow, one after the other.  "You can go self-conscious.  You remember that you walked over to this side of the stage the night before.  Sometimes when I feel this is happening too much I just go to pieces at night and I do things like turn the bed upside down.  It’s probably healthy that I do react.
"I suppose these feeling come when we do a gig and it feels like a ’show’ with all the worst connotations of that word.
"I don’t think for one moment that what we’re doing now is like the Pink Floyd or something really boring.  We don’t need the lights because there’s no movement or anything else happening onstage.  But the people who put this together have been with us a long time and we’ve worked toward this together.  It’s a very natural meeting of music and lighting.
"Music has to be real and not just a show.  ("But there has to be theatre in it," Steve adds.)  There’s a thin, intangible line between good and bad, and if it works, if it’s good, you don’t sit down and wonder - was it acting?  I know it’s good when I’m transfixed in what I’m doing but not looking at what I’m doing.  Very involved and very intense, but not noticing myself."
THE autographs force Siouxsie to notice as the fans notice her, watch her and wait for her.  Close up, much closer than on the stage. Close enough to frighten with the nature and the form of their interest.
"I do want to have contact with the people who come to see us and an autograph session is an excuse for that but I’d rather they were interested in saying something or asking about a song or something rather than having a flimsy excuse like a piece of paper to sign or hoping maybe that you’ll look up at them."
A flimsy kind of contact.  "There’s nobody’s autograph I’d value.  Oh, there’s a few people it’d be nice to happen to bump into and find something in common with but I’d never force myself into that situation. 
"When they do treasure a signature or a piece of paper it upsets me."
And the look-alikes, the women who dress like Siouxsie, the punks in uniform, Crass badges complete?
"It’s the opposite of how I think.  I’ve never once wanted to get someone else’s autograph or try to look like them.  It’s not that you feel superior, you start to wonder why wasn’t I like that?"
3.  Psychologists explain a fetish as any object or part of the body that is fixed upon, separated from the rest, regarded as an exclusive source of attraction, of pleasure.
And the image that they see?
"They see you right but they only see part of you, they take that part for the whole in a possessive kind of way."
Wait a minute, back to that autograph session.  And Siouxsie talking: "It’s the only opportunity in which the right people can take the initiative and actually come up and talk to us but the fans make it into a session situation.  Sometimes.  And people at the front of the stage try to touch you."
Siouxsie shrinks back on the bed.
"Standing in the light I never wanted to be right.  Now I’m attracted by the light and blinded by the sight."  (from ’Into The Light’.)
"This is all happening more on this tour, more because this is the first tour they’ve really come to see us and us alone."
While Steve continues: "The fact that we’ve placed ourselves in a popular market means that all this has got more exaggerated.  Now it’s our audience and nobody else comes; they’re virtually all fans of ours before they come to the gigs.  Before John joined they were all different factions and so playing was more of a fight."
Siouxsie agrees: "This is the first time we’re not fighting something in the audience and it’s an odd twist that we should end up fighting the adulation.  Elements of what we’ve just said, when they do creep in (and it’s not every night by any means), scare me.
"I know that people strive to get to the kind of position we’re just beginning to reach.  But when it’s the kind of situation we’re describing, I don’t like it."
"Sit back and enjoy the real McCoy, our new air of authority, our sentinel of misery." (from ’Monitor’.)
SIOUXSIE and the Banshees now play shows before large audiences.  They have hit singles and albums and Siouxsie stares out of a lot of photographs composed, made up, her hair a shock, her face graven in a permanent punk pallor.
Is this a long way from 1976?  Steve says no.  "We always wanted to be accessible.  After that first gig at the 100 Club we didn’t perform again for six months.  We used to sit around every day and discuss what we wanted the band to be.  We’ve always known what was valid to achieve those aims and what wasn’t."
And so to the show, to Siouxsie the witch and Voodoo Dolly.  And Siouxsie the cat?  For Siouxsie a way of being herself and, sometimes, autograph sessions and elsewhere, a way of succumbing, of fear, a way of becoming the audience’s creature.  A star.  An icon.  Their fetish.
But the Banshees have no doubt that what they do is best realised here with these lights, with this music.
They beam out: "The total opposite of our show is PIL playing behind a video in New York.  When I was younger and I went to a show I loved it when I was presented with a total experience."
This is Steve explaining and Siouxsie continues.  Both of them seem often to return to their childhoods, to growing up, to explain why they do as they do.
"I think it’s to do with something really basic like rubbing your scent all over the place.  You want to say: ’This is me and you’re going to have to spend a lot of time washing the place down after we’ve left’.
"It’s a away of making that place your own so there’s no way anyone will be thinking of any other band or any other memory from the past."
Siouxsie and the Banshees insist upon their style and their show.  Enter the Apollo and you’ve entered totally into the Banshees’ world, so totally that you can lose yourself in it, lose yourself so that you can be amazed or terrified, swamped or released.
And Siouxsie is your leader, a siren to be feared, perhaps.  And perhaps even a suitable object of surrender.  The music invites, invited.  Let’s go, churches and dance.
LAST WEEK Siouxsie and the Banshees discussed how to reach a trance state in their music and then convey that state to their audience.
And we saw how Siouxsie - as star and image - is always in danger of being turned into a fetish by her fans and into a commodity by the business in which she works.
Fans create stars and stars create fans.
"Idols are the works of man’s own hands - they are things and man bows down and worships things, worships that which he has created himself.  In doing so, he transforms himself into a thing."  (Eric Fromm).
‘Juju’ is a celebration, but it is also a warning.
Siouxsie explains the old show: "On the ’Join Hands’ tour we had stained glass windows and black drapes.  It was like taking your own miniature church with you.  And that’s carried on.  We take our own set and show into a theatre and make it our own."
Steve continues: "The idea we had for taking the stainless windows with us was almost like our little joke that those people have come to worship us."
Now hold on.  Isn’t this a bit total?  Siouxsie and the Banshees play fearful devotional music and compose their show and suck you in.  Who’s controlling who here?  And who’s the fetish?  And is there room to breathe?
I plead occasional claustrophobia in the world of the Banshees, its colours so black, its dance so unrelenting, so constantly, droningly black.
"We have got a very definite style and that’s something we’re criticised for but it’s not something we conjure up, it’s what comes out.  The whole base of rock and roll is people with very definite styles, people who manufacture those styles into myths, hideous people like Bruce Springsteen."
Ah yes, the million dollar question.  Don’t the Banshees manufacture a myth, from the perfect lighting to Siouxsie’s staring face, to the rushing black tones of McGeoch’s choppy guitar?  A total complete, made-up world, perhaps even a fetish?
"No," says Steve.  "Maybe," says Siouxsie.
"We want to put on a show and we do but we don’t want to be manufactured," says Budgie.
But Siouxsie explains: "You see we’re not really conscious in that way onstage.  The consciousness is of what you can do when you’re not playing, things like the lights, but the gig itself isn’t choreographed, it’s real, live."
"Some people think it’s hammed up, that ’Juju’ is an exploitation of magic, of ideas that are used to impress, to sound impressive, heavy maaaan.  We knew people would react to the album by saying: ’Boogie, boogie, it’s the boogie man’," Siouxsie puts on her most sarcastic voice.
Steve explains: "We tried to play the artwork down, not to be crass and obvious.  We tried to play down the black magic side of things and make it as relevant to what we are actually saying as possible.  I can just visualise how Toyah or Jimmy Pursey would have done it.
"We avoided all the sword and sorcery stuff, the Roger Dean side of it."
THEY succeeded.  ’Juju’ is a dark world, a complete atmosphere and the whole record works as a style, a form of hypnosis.  And as an examination of control, of the power of performance when the band transfixes the audience and themselves and works a dance-dark magic.  A magic in which the audience becomes the band’s puppet and sometimes the band belongs to the audience, becomes their puppet.  A great metaphor for the band’s hypnotism.
And for the more sinister side of things when the mixture overbalances and instead of devotion and religious union, the entertained turn the entertainer into a puppet on a string, spellbound.
"When you think your toys have gone berserk, it’s an illusion you cannot shirk.  You hear laughter cracking through the walls, it sends you spinning, you have no choice."  (from ‘Spellbound’).
Siouxsie and the Banshees explore this dark world with a devotion and relentlessness that makes some find them narrow, claustrophobic, one-sided.  But the truth is that this is their commitment and the source of their dark strength.
Steve explains the commitment: "I’m always intrigued by those things that you really have to delve into... if you got totally into black magic or something you’d have to become a totally different person; you couldn’t live the same way.  You’d just have to cut yourself off and maybe it’s because you have to have such commitment that people consider you evil.
"I’m interested in discovering whether those things actually are evil or whether it’s the fact that you have to isolate yourself from society and the normal way of doing things that people consider it evil."
And get punished as being evil for their difference, for the depth of their commitment?  Who are more committed to their way of seeing than rock musicians living out a style of life that seems like magic, like freedom to those trapped in the everyday of the nine-to-five or the dole?
Siouxsie follows up what Steve has already said: "It’s like going back to the Dark Ages; witches were the ones who kept themselves to themselves apart, nothing to do with anything, being a bit eccentric.  It’s just their character wasn’t as bland and open as everyone else’s and so they were branded as something unsavoury and punished for it.
"And people are punished now for being different - but in subtler ways."
There’s two kinds of difference and both are sinister.  The first is when you lose touch with the world, lose the devotion and become separate, outside the music.
Steve explains his song ’Halloween’ on ’Juju’.  "My source for that is something that happened to me when I was very young, understanding reality for the first time, if that doesn’t sound too... (pause)  I suddenly realised when I was about six that I was a separate person.  Suddenly I knew I was around instead of just being a part of things.  And once that happens you realise that you’ve lost something like an innocence."
The other kind of difference is the difference of trying to be yourself and being stopped.  Siouxsie has always tried and always felt resisted, and she fights back: "Society tries to make people live out a clichéd existence, to conform.  If you’ve got a Hotpoint washing machine then you’re alright because you’re like the others.
"People are pressured to live out lives of conformity and I want to live my life differently and to have the freedom to be able to do it in front of others without being stopped."
Siouxsie has always fought for control, to speak it and live it as she sees it.  Take it back to when she was growing up at home: "A lot of children do hate their parents and that relationship is a very powerful influence.  I used to really hate may mother, both my parents, sometimes I used to really despise them.  Sometimes I used to want to kill them or kill myself just to teach them a lesson.  Now I’ve done a complete turnaround since I’ve left home.  Now I don’t see my parents so much and we get on very well.
"I remember admitting this to a few girls at school and they thought I was a monster or something but I always felt they were holding out in not admitting to having that feeling.
"When you’re an adolescent you always think what a misfit you are and you try to stifle those kind of things.  I always found it very hard to stifle myself.  I’d blurt them out and people would think I was weird."
WE discuss Phil Oakey and his changes of costume, going the whole hog and dressing as Brian Eno and, later, Lou Reed, and later still (now) as himself.  We all admire his commitment; as Steve says, he admires those who take a total change: "It was really different before because you knew if you did it, you were completely on your own whereas these girls who come to see Siouxsie, they know there’ll be at least twenty others like them there."
And Siouxsie leans forward, the Juju priestess who made her followers "so... unaware" and delivers her creed: "I think what’s vital is people with character.  There’s something about certain people, it’s just in there character, they have something that’s theirs.
"Maybe it’s something to do with their humour, but they have something that’s theirs, even when they’re trying to find themselves, they’re trying to find themselves rather than just being a bit lazy and just getting lost."
And there you have it.  It’s four o’clock in the morning and the three of us decide it’s time to go off and sleep.  Siouxsie and the Banshees are a big band now, surrounded by lights and equipment and a host of fans.  As far as they’re concerned their show and their way of acting is the way they need to act.
"I don’t think you can do something and try to cater for other people’s tastes, you just have to do what you want."
No, they’re not breaking up but this is their last major British tour in this style for the near future: "We want to stay in control, we’ve held onto it this far and we want to continue to do so. People always think there’s some huge story in it when you make an announcement like that.
"But this show is a precedent and we’re very proud of it.  We just don’t want to repeat ourselves."
So there’ll be a new single, an EP made by Siouxsie on voice and Budgie on drums and the tour will continue round much of the world.  Meanwhile, listen to ’Juju’.  The record transfixes, enchants, hypnotises, scares.  Leaves you spellbound.
And it’s also the best examination of what happens when that magic goes wrong, turns black out on the sinister night shift and the performer/magician becomes a doll in the grasp of her fans.
I remember Siouxsie after an autograph session, looking so worried at the fans dressed like her, as if she’d been cloned...
"then the victim stared up, looked strangely at the screen as if her pain was our fault, but that’s entertainment, what we crave for inside." (from ’Monitor’)
It’s a devil’s bargain, brothers and sisters, careful how you crave.