Siouxsie Sioux is 37 now. She does not think of herself as an icon partly because she is not that conceited and partly because it would imply petrification. An icon is the moustache and beret of a meaningless revolutionary. An icon tends to be dead. And she has an album out this month. Her 14th to be exact. She is proud of it, and rightly, for The Rapture is a good work with sophisticated songs, a melancholy atmosphere and unpretentious orchestration. It was produced by John Cale who produced Patti Smith's Horses and had toured with Nico during her final narcolepsy. No, says Siouxsie, she doesn't feel old. Well, sometimes. But then, when she was 18, she sometimes felt as though she was 150.
Mr. Dallion was a drunk. He drank Newcastle Brown Ale out of bottles, then whisky chasers, and a lot of them. They are very unhelpful, drunks. Not at all what you would describe should anyone have ever asked you what you wanted in a father. They perpetuate fear, and leave scars, and cultivate an anger that never really goes away. They usually die, but this is of little help to those they leave behind. Indeed, those around them sometimes wished he would die. She hated him. Once she tried to poison him by putting salt and pepper in his drink, and as he drank it, his Adam's apple bobbing like a fairground attraction, she thought all the time, Oh my God I've done it, I've done it.
He was verbally aggressive rather than violent, although her sister, 10 years older, told horror stories of knives and pokers, smashed plate-glass windows. Blood. Her sister still hates him. But Susan knew that when he was sober he was lucid, funny and intelligent, that he liked books; Kipling for her, Sartre for himself. But she also remembers the trivial things that take on burdensome importance - the dolls' push-chair that was smashed when he fell over it sticks in her mind. She still pushed it but it never really worked, the wheels were buckled.
When school friends asked, "What does your father do?" she couldn't really say that he sat at home drinking, so she used to make things up. She never asked them home for fear of finding him in a stupor, or ranting, or in the middle of a gaggle of reeking public-bar cronies. He was a Pisces and now she always associates drinking with Pisces; his eyes would turn into fish eyes.
A violent streak ran in the family; neither her father nor her mother, Elizabeth Betty, possessed any front teeth because her father's brother, Johnny, had gone berserk one night and smashed them both in the face. The Dallions had met in the Belgian Congo, she speaking French, he milking serum from poisonous snakes as part of his work as a laboratory technician. Her husband's drinking, or "disease" as it is sometimes also called, meant Betty had to work full-time as a bilingual secretary. She never talked about "it" and he was an "it" as far as the family were concerned.
Younger than the others, Susan was left to keep her own counsel, and look after herself as best as she was able. The garden at their home north of Petts Wood grew into a jungle - high hedges, a crisis of roses - until the neighbours ganged up and complained. The Dallions must prune their hedges, they insisted.
Order was required but order, in fact, hardly existed, for demons and "pervery" were all around. The sight of a man exposing himself was common up and down those Chislehurst streets; it was rare _not_ to see a flasher at Bickley station. There was one, in particular, Rolf Harris they called him, who rode his bicycle with his penis resting on the crossbar. Events took a more offensive turn, however when, at the age of nine, Susan was sexually assaulted by a man at the sweet shop. "I was too young to realize that I had been attacked - but my friend's father called the police." It wasn't until much later that she found out how common it was. In 1986 she wrote a song about it, Candyman. Yes, she says now, they were knee deep in wankers.
At school she didn't like boys so much. In games of Kiss and Chase other girls would allow themselves to be caught and kissed; if any unfortunate caught up with Susan she rammed grass in his mouth. Later, in clubs, if men goosed her she swivelled around and punched them.
Alcohol finally delivered Mr. Dallion to his Maker and when it did Susan, at 14, felt guilty because her wish had come true. They laid the body out and her mother finally cut the hedge.
What did she inherit from him? A love of books and a hatred of the medical profession. A bunch of quacks he called them. She agrees. But Mr. Dallion put her off marriage and the idea of a family; and, of course, excessive drinking, in herself and in others, always unnerved her. Later, on the road and in the pop business, she thought that heroin addicts were the same as drunks - slumped, hopeless and boring.
Her sister was at art college and sometimes took her to the end-of-term shows - her sister knew arty men - men whose flamboyance and homosexuality attracted Susan because there was no threat. She was conscious of this. Conscious of being comfortable around men for the first time. "I thought, this is so brilliant. Nobody is hitting on me and you don't see men fighting and drinking too much and it all going wrong."
She took to dyeing her hair, inspired by the glam, but more extreme. Crazy colour. Black. Blonde. Eyes painted like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. She liked Nico and Patti Smith and Catwoman. All her heroes were heroines. And so, somewhere between doing the Strand and hearing Patti Smith's Horses album for the first time, Susan became Siouxsie.
"I wanted to be important," she remembers. "To mean something." She went on the bus in a see-through shirt, demanded a half fare and got one. She walked into Pips wine bar in Bromley leading her friend Berlin on a dog collar. ("We were," he recalled later, "up camp tree.") At one party, in Bromley, where sulphate was snorted off a turntable, she is remembered as sporting a plastic apron, a leather whip, and very little else.
Her mother was slightly worried. "Take a pully," she would say as her daughter, mind on the Velvets, style deranged by Cabaret, left the house in fishnets and stilletos and crystal clear plastic. "Take a pully. It might get cold." Later, her mother was proud of Siouxsie's success and, to Siouxsie's irritation, would invite the fans into the house for tea.
She thought she might be a model but she was too weird. She thought she might be a secretary but she ended up working in clubs. And everything about her said don't fuck with me because she looked tough and she took it further than everyone else. Siouxsie had a score to settle.
Then, on December 9, 1975, having debuted at St. Martin's Art School, the Sex Pistols played at Ravensbourne Art College in Bromley. Simon Barker saw them and told his friend Steve Bailey that they were good, like the Stooges. Word spread, from Steve to Billy Idol to Sue Catwoman to Siouxsie, who were like-minded anyway, united by daring accoutrements and inclination toward gay clubs. They started to go to the gigs, looking fabulous, men in enough makeup to frighten the neighbours, women with blue hair and a demeanour that looked as if the pill was about to wear off. As a fashion phalanx they became known as the Bromley Contingent, and were as important, in their own way, as the Sex Pistols. Certainly they moved the style and attitude forward. Old couldn't believe it; young wanted it.
The following year The Bromley Contingent followed the Pistols to France and Siouxsie was punched by an Arab. She was wearing a topless bra, black vinyl stockings and a black armband with a swastika on it. She liked Salon Kitty and disliked those who banged on about being in the war; the swastika was joke camp not death camp and she did not, then, appreciate the panorama of implications. "The Nazis were not only anti-Semitic but anti-anyone different, anti-anyone like me." The regalia backfired. The National Front started to pay attention and she was horrified.
Film maker John Maybury, who became a friend of Siouxsie's, remembers seeing her wear a swastika at a Pistols concert in London and thinking it was "fantastic". It should be remembered, he thinks, that the original punks were, "naff art students having a laugh. The swastika subsequently melded with the hindsight of political rectitude, but then, "it was fun being obnoxious".
Steve Bailey became Steve Severin (in deference to Masoch's assistant in his book Venus in Furs and the Velvet Underground song of the same name). He and Sioux planned a band with Billy Idol who deserted to join Chelsea and then Generation X. At the suggestion of Malcolm McLaren, Sid Vicious was elected to play drums. Siouxsie and the Banshees played for the first time at the two-day Punk Festival at London's 100 Club on September 20, 1976. A wall of noise illuminated the fact that no one could play. Indeed, Severin had once refused to attend Dulwich College because music lessons were mandatory. Siouxsie said the Lord's Prayer. The melange lasted 20 minutes. They walked off, bored. The Clash followed them on. She did not envisage doing it for a living. "She is nothing if not magnificent," Caroline Coon wrote at one time. "Her short hair, which she sweeps in great waves over her head, is streaked with red like flames. She'll wear black plastic non-existent bras, one mesh and one rubber stocking and suspender belts all covered by a polka dotted transparent plastic mac." Another observer said that the set was "unbearable."
The next night a beer glass was thrown, a girl's face was cut, and Sid Vicious, then 20, was arrested. He found himself in the Ashford Remand Centre where, for distraction, he read a book about Charles Manson that had been given to him by Vivienne Westwood.
In December, Siouxsie accidentally earned an inmutable position in the history of pop culture by appearing on the television show that launched the Sex Pistol's carreer. Like poisonous berries, The Bromley Contingent were peculiar in taste and unusual in hue; they always added colour, so they were asked to accompany the Pistols on the Today show.
Siouxsie, with platinum blonde hair and Droog eyes, presented a more interesting vista than Pistol Glen Matlock. Presenter Bill Grundy asked her out; Steve Jones called him a dirty fucker. It was a live broadcast. The world would never be quite the same again.
"When we went down to the Green Room," Malcolm McLaren told author and pop critic Jon Savage, "there was Steve and Siouxsie getting hold of all the ringing phones and saying, 'This is Thames, get of the fucking phone you stupid old prat.' The EMI chauffeur came whizzing through the revolving doors and said, "Come on boys I've got to get you out of this straight away. There's going to be a storm.'"
The Guardian Weekend, January 14, 1995
