Siouxsie And The Banshees

On 20 September 1976, on the stage of London's 100 Club, four kids with almost no experience, no songs of their own and barely a handful of minutes of rehearsal delivered one of the most improbable performances in the history of British punk — and, with hindsight, one of the most decisive. It was the first appearance of Siouxsie and the Banshees, still in a wholly provisional and embryonic form.
Siouxsie Sioux, born Susan Janet Ballion, had until then been known chiefly as a firebrand fixture of the Bromley Contingent, the gang of hardcore young fans who orbited the Sex Pistols and followed them practically everywhere. A "groupie", according to a label that would soon prove wildly reductive. With her provocative clothes, heavy make-up and an already strongly individual image, Siouxsie was a regular presence in the small scene taking shape around the Pistols and Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's boutique Sex.

A stand-in band

The opportunity arose almost by chance. On 20 and 21 September 1976, Malcolm McLaren had organised the "100 Club Punk Special" on Oxford Street, two nights meant to bring together much of the fledgling London punk scene, featuring the Sex Pistols, Clash, Buzzcocks, Damned, Vibrators and Subway Sect.
Just days before the event, though, one of the scheduled bands pulled out. When McLaren complained about the no-show, nineteen-year-old Siouxsie immediately seized the chance: "We'll do it." Bassist Steven Severin, her partner in crime in the Bromley Contingent, agreed. The problem was fairly obvious: they had no band, no repertoire, and barely knew how to play.
In a matter of hours they threw together a line-up. Severin got hold of a bass, an instrument he had only started handling the day before; on guitar came Marco Pirroni, who would later become one of the key collaborators of Adam & The Ants; on drums, Sid Vicious volunteered, not yet a member of the Sex Pistols at the time. Siouxsie and Severin had also tried to rope in another Bromley Contingent regular, Bill Broad, the future Billy Idol, who turned them down.

The soundcheck was perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the whole enterprise. The night before, the four of them showed up at the Clash's rehearsal space in Camden Lock. After about ten minutes, Sid Vicious decided that was enough. A few songs were floated as material to twist into their own shape, from the "Goldfinger" theme to a Bay City Rollers number, but in the end a far more radical idea won out: Siouxsie would recite fragments of the Lord's Prayer while the others simply made noise.

Twenty minutes of "The Lord's Prayer"

So, on 20 September 1976, Siouxsie and the Banshees took to a stage for the first time. Severin on bass, Pirroni on guitar, Vicious on drums and Siouxsie on vocals. None of them, apart from Pirroni, had any real musical training. What emerged was roughly twenty minutes of improvisation built around "The Lord's Prayer", twisted into a kind of blasphemous, apocalyptic mantra. Into that long performance spilled fragments and quotes of "Twist And Shout", "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" and even "Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles". More than a concert in any traditional sense, it was a full-on sonic assault: Vicious's pounding rhythm, Severin's basic, hypnotic bass, the feedback of Pirroni's guitar and, over it all, Siouxsie's dark, brooding voice. Pirroni, the only musician with any real technical grounding, at one point shouted to Severin that they were playing in E. Faced with the bassist's baffled look, he had to simplify the instruction even further: play the fat string.

Call it do-it-yourself if you like. But it was precisely out of that sheer unpreparedness that something emerged which already went beyond the boundaries of punk. Siouxsie's voice was gloomy, booming, hypnotic and sensual; the guitar worked through feedback rather than traditional riffs, while bass and drums produced an obsessive pulse that, heard today, seems to anticipate certain traits of the post-punk that would explode in the years immediately following. Below is a precious audio fragment from that show.

The audience reaction

The audience was understandably thrown. 100 Club promoter Ron Watts dismissed what he'd witnessed as “performance art,” and the phrase wasn't meant as a compliment. Johnny Rotten, on the other hand, was among the most enthralled: while Sid Vicious's friends pelted him with insults from the crowd, the Sex Pistols singer began dancing frantically.
On stage, behind the provocative attitude, Siouxsie was terrified. Years later she would recall that during those twenty minutes there was nothing in her head but “pure fear.” When Sid stopped playing, the others followed suit. Siouxsie grabbed her beer, stepped off the stage and walked through the crowd. For a moment there was silence, then the applause broke out.
None of the four thought the experiment would have a follow-up. Siouxsie was convinced it would be the first and last performance. Instead came a request for another gig, then another. Out of that unlikely improvisation, born to fill a gap in the bill, a band had come into being — one that would go on to become among the most influential of the entire post-punk era. Below, a historic interview in which Siouxsie and her bandmates look back on that night.

From punk to “The Scream”

The 100 Club line-up didn't last: Sid Vicious would soon join the Sex Pistols, and Marco Pirroni would go his own way. Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin, however, turned the Banshees into a proper band, eventually settling into the line-up with John McKay on guitar and Kenny Morris on drums that recorded the debut album. When “The Scream” came out in 1978, it was immediately clear the Banshees weren't just another punk band. The music favoured archaic lyrics and shadowy atmospheres, dark sonorities, echo, reverb and nerve-shredding distortion: a mood halfway between horror and occult mysticism that would be developed further on 1979's “Join Hands” and, above all, on “Juju” in 1981. Siouxsie also updated the stark, sepulchral atmospheres of Nico, pushing them into something even darker and more melodramatic.

The Banshees' importance, though, went well beyond aesthetics. Their sound, especially on the early albums, opened up a path quite different from punk orthodoxy: jagged, dissonant guitars, empty spaces, hypnotic rhythms and a sense of unease that would leave deep traces on post-punk and the goth scene that followed. John Robb has pointed out that even the early Joy Division showed elements already present in the Banshees' music: with them, punk's narrative took new directions and began to sketch out what would later be called gothic rock.
Siouxsie would go on to become one of the most influential female figures in British rock, carrying on the Creatures project with Budgie in parallel and, after the Banshees split, launching a solo career as well. Meanwhile, her influence would ripple across generations and genres, from post-punk to goth, from alternative rock to electronic music.

So can a punk infiltrator — indeed, even a Sex Pistols groupie — really have helped give rise to goth as we know it? According to Robb, probably yes, even though Siouxsie “hates the term goth,” as does her bassist Steven Severin and plenty of other artists linked to the movement. And yet, with her witchy look and Cleopatra-style kohl-rimmed eyes, she will forever remain a goth icon, one who spread a model of femininity that was at once romantic and aggressive, sensual and untameable, thoroughly unwilling to bend to the macho conventions of the music business.
A dark legend that endures to this day, even with a few more years on the clock and a few less notes in the voice. But it can all be traced back to that London night half a century ago. Fifty years on, what was meant to be nothing more than a spur-of-the-moment provocation now looks like one of the moments when punk, barely born, was already starting to hint at what would come next.

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21/09/2026