Siouxsie And The Banshees

In 1981, the year "Juju" was released, Susan Janet Dallion, aka Siouxsie Sioux, could already boast an enviable claim to fame. From a simple "groupie" of the Sex Pistols, she had risen to become the founder of one of the most fascinating new genres in rock: dark-punk. It had all begun five years earlier, when a singular lineup took the stage at London's 100 Club punk festival: Siouxsie on vocals, Steven Severin (Havoc) on bass, Marco Pirroni on guitar, and John Simon Ritchie, better known as Sid Vicious, on drums. Siouxsie – who came from the Bromley Contingent, the small band of fans who followed the Sex Pistols' every move – had stunned the crowd with her tortured voice and her unsettling stage presence, half Pierrot, half glam mask.

But that lineup would soon dissolve: Pirroni went on to join Adam And The Ants, Vicious the Sex Pistols. What remained were Siouxsie and Severin, who, together with Kenny Morris and John McKay, recorded the first single under the name Siouxsie & The Banshees, "Hong Kong Garden", immediately followed by the debut album, "The Scream". Siouxsie's scream marks a break from the "no future" of their Pistols cousins: rather than punk's violence, the Banshees favoured archaic lyrics and dark sonorities, lost in a nerve-wracking vortex of echo, reverb and distortion. A mood halfway between horror and Ossianic ritual, finding its natural vehicle in the leader's witchy look (heavy make-up, black leather outfits, studs, fishnets, necrophiliac symbols).

Of course, in this black fog enveloping England, one cannot fail to spot the ghost of Nico, the archetypal high priestess of rock with her sepulchral litanies dating back to "All Tomorrow's Parties" (Velvet Underground) and "Desertshore". But if dark-punk means wild fury plus premonitions of death, then Siouxsie must necessarily be considered its originator, as well as its supreme icon. With plenty of thanks owed by "dark" bands such as Joy Division, Bauhaus, Sisters Of Mercy and Cure, as well as by the founders of another movement, dream-pop: the imprint of this riot girl from suburban London is unmistakable in the early work of Cocteau Twins.

"Juju" is the masterpiece of Siouxsie & The Banshees, the record that marks the peak of their chemistry and the sublimation of their sonic blend. To the catacomb-like visions, the English romanticism, the typical taste for the occult inherited from artists like Blake and Radcliffe, Siouxsie here adds the witchy tribalism of deepest Africa ("juju" is a form of traditional Yoruba music, an ethnic group settled mainly in Nigeria). The use of ethnic music, combined with electronics, converges into a kind of hallucinated trance, an esoteric ritual with macabre, funereal overtones.

"Spellbound" opens the dance and it's instant delirium: the fury of McGeogh's (acoustic) guitar and the obsessive tribalism of Budgie's percussion throw open the gates of hell, while Siouxsie sings like a possessed witch, in a climax of sonic disfigurement and piercing screams. Of punk, only the imprint remains – the chorus, the speed, the immediacy – but everything is cloaked in a black, cursed shroud. Just enough time to catch a breath with the hypnotic "Into The Light" (an enveloping melody, with a guitar arpeggio and lyrics repeated endlessly in a sort of trance effect), before the band explodes again into another of its horror rituals: "Arabian Knights". The track unleashes one of the most memorable melodies in dark-punk, halfway between archaic atmospheres and Middle Eastern flavours, accompanied by constant rhythm changes that spill into a frenzied gallop. The lyrics seem almost an invective against the westernisation of Arabia, but in a "demonic" context that wouldn't feel out of place in "Rosemary's Baby": "I heard a rumour, what have you done to her/ Veiled behind screens/ Kept as your baby machine/ Whilst you conquer more orifices...". Siouxsie is the undisputed ruler of this sonic ride through the deserts of Arabia, with her wildly booming, sensual vocals, reaching here one of their peaks.

After so much emotion, the "danse macabre" of "Halloween" seems almost to ease the tension, paving the way for the pulsing electronics of "Monitor", a disturbing technological novelty that turns the Banshees' traditional 19th-century Ossianic atmospheres into a post-industrial nightmare. The gothic spectres resurface, however, in "Night Shift", a ballad of satanic majesty: Siouxsie's night unfolds in an ideal, moss-covered graveyard on the moors of Albion, crowded with vampires, zombies and murderers: "The cold marble slab submits at my feet/ With a sweet dissection/ Looking so sweet to me – please come to me/ With your cold flesh – my cold love...".

It's instead the band's punk heritage that resurfaces on the schizophrenic "Sin In My Heart", which raises the tempo thanks to Budgie's frenzied drumming. McGeogh's "noise" guitar takes over on "Head Cut", in a horror scenario worthy of a Bosch painting, amid bleeding lips, death masks, severed heads and the flames of hell. It's the prelude to the grand guignol epilogue of "Voodoo Dolly", in which Siouxsie's fervour overflows into a terrifying necrophiliac orgy. The black magic ritual of the "voodoo doll" is celebrated amid Siouxsie's spectral screams, McGeogh's atmospheric guitar embroidery and the tribal rumba staged by Budgie. The lyrics aren't the most original – "She's such an ugly little dolly/ and she's making you look very silly/ and when you listen in to her ear/ you get paralysed with her fear" – and the music at times slips into kitsch pomposity, but the track can still be counted among the most chilling gothic-rock nightmares of all time.

It's the fitting epitaph of an album that, like few others, pushed the virtues and flaws of gothic-rock to the extreme, spanning, within the space of a few notes, from Edgar Allan Poe to a B-movie American horror flick. A record that, in a sense, sums up the past while closing an era. It's hard to fall asleep after listening to it without the vision of the witch Siouxsie brandishing her little voodoo doll returning to haunt your nights.

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09/11/2006