"From that day on," said Steve Jones, "it was different. Before then it was just the music - the next day it was the media."
Outrage, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Wild women attract publicity but are rarely offered any sensible business proposition because men still fear voodoo hoodoo and hex. They are scared to make eye contact, pray that the provocateur won't sit too close, hope that if they ignore her she night find her own way back to the ward. Weird witches are still seen as casting curses. Blame the crop failure in Courtney Love.
Jayne County will be remembered for the very wonderful If You Don't Want To Fuck Me Baby (Fuck Off) released in 1977, but she was, in the end, a bloke. Poly Styrene skipped out to play for a while and was banned by the BBC, but it is no coincidence that the Slits and Siouxsie, both aggressive, both early originators, took nearly two years to land a record deal. The Banshees were acclaimed as a great live band with enough songs to earn them consideration, but a contract eluded them. Someone with a paint can sprayed "Sign Siouxsie Now" on several record company buildings. It didn't help. Nor did Siouxsie's habit of insulting A & R men from behind her mike. They were turned down by Anchor, EMI, RCA, Chrysalis, CBS and Decca until June 1978 when Polydor, who signed The Jam, came forward. They gave them a three album deal with full creative control - a contractual obligation that underpinned their subsequent longevity and aided survival when all around exploded like mines in a field. Hong Kong Garden, released in August, went to number 3; the album The Scream to number 12.
In February 1979 Sid Vicious died of an overdose. A note to his mum said that he wanted to be buried in his leather jacket and next to his girlfriend Nancy Spungen who had bled to death in the Chelsea Hotel after he stabbed her in the stomach. As his exit came to symbolise the end of pop's psychotic episode, Siouxsie and the Banshees prepared for a British tour.
The relationship between Severin and Siouxsie was cemented when the guitarist and drummer, as Severin succinctly puts it, "ran away".
John McKay and Kenny Morris left their tour passes on their pillows and hopped on a train from Aberdeen. The show opened with The Scars followed by The Cure. The Cure continued to play and the Banshees failed to materialise. Then Siouxsie appeared on stage. "Two art college students have fucked off out of it...If you ever see them you have my blessing to beat the shit out of them."
Robert Smith (of The Cure) temporarily helped out as guitarist; Budgie (formerly of the Slits) was employed to play drums. Budgie is a strange little person, not least because of his equanimity around disorderly sisters; a man who can survive the Slits can presumably survive anything. Like the parakeet after which he is named, he is small and colourful and appears easy to please. "I got the nickname when I was sharing a flat with Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford in Liverpool. Some guy was tormenting a budgie in a cafe and I went to its defense. Other guys had racing pigeons but I used to breed budgerigars - I had a great one called Bobby - as a kid I was called the Bird Man of Morley Street."
He had intended to study fine art and took a course at Liverpool Polytechnic. His father, a joiner, sometimes asked him if he was ever going to get a proper job. Budgie loves the band - sees it as show-business rather than pop music. He still enjoys walking into an empty theatre before a soundcheck. He likes rootlessness and the unexpected; touring makes him remember when the fair used to roll into town - strange and different and slightly dangerous.
Two years ago he and Siouxsie were married, although she says that, to some extent, she is also married to Severin. Budgie kind of stole her from Severin, but they all got over it. They live in France near Toulouse. They have a garden, and cats, and books. They might have children, now that she has recovered, a little, from her own past.
The early Banshees albums, eerie, echoey, urban and accessible, appealed to a thanatoid sub-sect of punk that looked like Morticia Addams in a frightwig. Unhappy Darling? Perfectly. These, the pallid and purple, liked the Sisters of Mercy, Aleister Crowley and frightening films about the undead. In 1981 they collected in the Batcave in Soho where Siouxsie songs - Mirage, Love In A Void, Christine - wove in with those by Bauhaus and The Specimen. Thus Siouxsie was reincarnated into Goth Goddess and so her career survived.
Billy Chainsaw, her personal assistant, affirmed this cross-pollination by frequenting the Batcave and, at one point, throwing a wedding ceremony in which his bride wore black, the cake was popularly believed to have been cut with a chainsaw, and Billy, also in black, was unable to wear a hat because "my hair was too big".
Chainsaw, who left shift work in a factory in Birmingham to work for Siouxsie in 1979, now also edits a magazine, Purr. Created by and appealing to the people that ebb and flow in his world, it is a confident mixture of illustration and underground writing and a reminder that this sub-culture has sprouted long roots. Purr's second issue featured an exclusive story by Hubert Selby Jr; its third the last story written by Robin Cook. A booklet illustrated by Edward Gorey is to come.
Siouxsie had gone off punk anyway when they gave it a name. She knew that once it had been recognised it would be limited in how it was perceived; the point would be missed because its strength lay in the broadness of sweep that was an attitude and a spirit. You are qualified, she still thinks, because you are good at something, not because you possess something that tells somebody else that you are good at something. She has long distrusted the judgement of others and the diktats of definition.
When she was small she could never understand why, because she was a girl, certain duties were assigned to her; now she faces "the misconception that being a female commodity stops at the age of 25". This she must dismiss, just as she knows she must wear what she likes. What is mutton dressed as lamb anyway and who cares? "I haven't reached the stage when I think, ooh, I better tone it down. I like people who can handle their age, take it and throw it back, like fuck you."
She has little time for people who think they know her because of what they have read and little affection for a music industry where "success" has become tawdry and ephemeral and sales are so rarely related to quality or content. She is caught up in a conundrum - she knows that creativity is often enhanced by limitation but resents the fact that Polydor will not spend more money on promotion - money that could be spent, among other things, on making touring more enjoyable. "It is to do with what people are told," she says. "We have never hired a shit-hot marketing team. I don't want to be a product."
But a product, in some ways, she is - a trademark even. The Banshees are seen to sell a predictable number of albums much as an author tends to sell the same number of novels, and, depending on who else is touring that year, they say they can be pretty sure to fill a 6,000 capacity hall in London, 3,000 in Europe and up to 15,000 in America. Thus, certain financial forecasts can be made by a record company unwilling to take risks. No, thank you very much, the Banshees will not be on a punk compilation with Sham 69 or any other band with whom they have never been associated. Nor do they wish to send out the same songs in a different package. "I want to be out there in the marketplace but I'm not doing it that way; that cheapens it," she says. "So I am seen as a prima donna bitch."
Lasting isn't important. She shrugs. They formed for a night. If this party finishes she will find another one somewhere else. But it's not over yet. "In hindsight we have been very lucky we weren't huge for a short amount of time." She would also like to be rich. "A million would do." A million would mean that she could make the albums but not be forced to release them. She likes making the albums.
The German installation artist Rebecca Horn seems to have been responsible for the interior of the Pump House in Rotherhithe; indeed, there is a possibility that, when particularly depressed, she made the whole of Rotherhithe. This vast dilapidated building houses a dark landscape where a discarded wheelchair and barbed wire fuse into subterannean passages and where, crumbling walls and old graffiti open out into a space where, for no apparent reason, there is light and warmth and people are selling army surplus. Around the outside there are lines of rusting Beetles and no visible entrance or exit. The Pump House is known in the film industry as a place where low-budget films are made. "Very poor catering," says one experienced regular. Very poor catering is right. Chips from a van and a piece of fruit cake. A lurex curtain reveals a podium full of Banshees: Budgie and Severin are wearing silver shirts and feathers; Siouxsie's wearing a gold-sequinned trouser suit. The podium is revolving, round and round, and a disco ball spits out those shimmying globs of light that cause convulsions. "Can we have quiet, please, this is a set not a party."
A bald Australian man named John Hillcoat studies a monitor. Hillcoat has been employed to make the video for Stargazer, the second single to be released from The Rapture. He is an interesting choice. In 1909 he released the extraordinary Ghosts Of The Civil Dead, a film about high security prisons in Australia. Since then there have been videos for Nick Cave and the German avant garde noise band Einsturzende Neubauten. The Banshees saw his film, Blume, for the latter, a finely focused use of simple but surreal images made by a film maker who knows that narrative must never be lost to the palette of the editing suite. The chaos of hi-tech quick-flash graphics and digital effects does not appear in the work of Hillcoat - he allows an idea to breathe. His videos are short films and they are different.
His promo for the Banshees' O Baby involved a baby beauty pageant in Flagstaff, Arizona. Hillcoat, who is fascinated by the macabre, both covert and overt, knew that the imagery would be of frills, curls and uncanny posturing as children from 10 months upwards competed for titles such as Tot Personality and Miniature Miss Talent. Research had also revealed a subtext, a dangerous undercurrent where fanatic mothers had lost control and beaten their daughters up for losing.
Siouxsie flew in and Hillcoat noticed that she was keen to record the scene backstage to tell the truth of this glitzy scenario. It was, in the end, a pop video, not a documentary, but she knew that silence was the Candyman's currency.
She had attended her mother's funeral the day before. So, on the set in Flagstaff, the Siouxsie mask was useful, a defence and a device that aided work. "She was very strong," says Hillcoat. "The consummate professional."
Behind lurked a bereavement that had been appalling. There had been cancer and, in Siouxsie's view, a series of medical mistakes. Then, suddenly, the telephone call to France that warned of finality. "I booked the flight but I was too late," she says "That was the worst thing, not saying goodbye."
John Maybury once persuaded her to remove the Siouxsie face for his Court of Miracles film series - he recognised that she was "a lovely looking woman," but that it was not her habit to take advantage of this. In Rotherhithe, the mask is the pancake face of traditional Chinese theatre for a narrative set in Hong Kong. Red flashes across her profile; thick black streaks slash over a crimson mouth: Siouxsie is definitely here. She is wearing the sparkly slacks, being photographed, thinking that this work with Hillcoat marks a new start for them, that the album will be a turning point. But there has been a moment, in the dressing room, between coats of paint as it were, when the bare face of Susan Ballion was revealed. A strong jaw, dark eyes, high cheekbones - it is still and sad and beautiful and you wouldn't know it was her.
