A MATCH, A FLAME, A BANSHEE HOWLS

This must be the sort of effect Cleopatra had on a room full of admirers; whatever one says is probably not enough. Siouxsie Sioux, the regal leader and prime mover of Siouxsie & The Banshees, is a woman of extremes, who plays upon her strengths to stop traffic. Onstage, she moves with a fierce grace, pinwheeling from end to end and front to back. In song, she soars and whispers the arcane rites of Banshees lyrics in a demanding, seductive growl, a night princess claiming her due from the assembled multitude.

I’ve seen it happen: men who’ve waltzed more than once around the track come to a dead stop when faced with Sioux. Never mind the ego, how might they possibly get a date with this alluring dark creature? Forget it, Siouxsie’s above-it-all manner seems to speak before a word is uttered. And they fade away, eternally disappointed, left to wonder about what they’ve missed forever.

This year celebrating the first decade of Siouxsie & The Banshees, Sioux knows all too well that an image, however false, can lead its owner down a path she had no intention of following. She can pop off the things people say about her without raising an ornately sculpted eyebrow.

“That I was aggressive for no reason. That I was a hard bitch, which I can be if required. And if I smile they say, ‘My God, she’s she’s gone soft, she smiled.’ It’s all laughable, whether it’s flattering or insulting.’’ A wise, sly smile appears and animates her immaculately made-up face. The girl who started out rendering an off-key 20-minute version of “The Lord’s Prayer” at a punk nightspot as the formal debut of her band knows better than to believe what strangers or the resentful envious say. She knows that most people find the deceptiveness of an image a lot easier to grab onto than whatever reality exists under the surface.

The reality, in fact, is a stunning woman now in her late 20s, who could have been a model but lost interest in that passing fancy once she turned 15 or so. Siouxsie’s strong features— black hair, white skin, red lips—are compounded in their appeal by a long, trim figure slim enough to wear a clingy black knit dress and not hint at one unseemly bulge. Her striking appearance serves as cue of what to expect from the three male Banshees whom she calls family: ethereally pale Steve Severin, Sioux’s partner in composition since the punk days; blond, exuberant, athletic Budgie, drummer and collaborator with Sioux on several exotic rhythmic duets, not to mention the steamy shower photos which advertised them; and guitarist John Carruthers, newcomer in a role held previously by, among others, the Cure’s Robert Smith. Dressed in lowkey but expertly cut finery, they are a distinctive and riveting bunch.

Beneath the makeup and moddish clothes, Siouxsie Sioux is a determined, hard worker, unsparing of herself and others. “She’s hard on us,” jokes Budgie. Sioux responds in a deadpan, off-with-his-head tone, “I’ll see you in the dressing room, buddy; you shall be reprimanded severely for that outburst. Lock ’im in the closet with the coat hangers!” Then she laughs, fully and robustly, because no one is more driven than Sioux herself.

Though Tinderbox was completed almost a year ago, the Banshees had to postpone their American tour until this summer because Sioux dislocated her kneecap performing “Christine” onstage in London last fall, was carried off howling in agony, and warned to stay off the injury if she ever wanted to walk properly again. Instead, she continued the tour with her leg set in plaster, thereby aggravating an already nasty situation and causing the leg to atrophy. But, threatened with a corrective operation, Sioux “worked like a sadistic maniac” on a course of physical therapy, which she is still continuing and had almost completely restored her muscle tone by the time their U.S. tour commenced in May. She smiles in triumph. That is the sort of obstacle at which she excels, a test of herself.

It’s not easy winning Siouxsie’s favor. At bottom, she’s a selfcontained woman who enjoys her own company and opts for a private life over a pop star’s existence. She can be forbidding, shrieking in anger at a foul-up or fixing a chilling stare of disdain on a hapless victim. But among the people she comes to trust, Sioux relaxes and gossips, teases and confides, discusses literature, movies and mythology. She takes a long time getting to know, but with added knowledge comes increasing admiration. Ten years on, Siouxsie is one of the few originals left.

THE FIRST DECADE

“It’s nothing I’m interested in, saying ‘yeah, we’re 10 years old, woowoo-woo.’ I mean, the difference between last year and this year isn’t all that big, so there you go, it’s a decade. We were supposed to last 20 minutes but they were way off mark.”

TINDERBOX

“It’s different, and I suppose it’s got a lot to do with us trying to consolidate as a four-piece, just a solid base of four people. It should have been out last August or September, but for the fact that we were sacking people left, right, and center, including the producer. It seems like we’ve been working on the album years ...”

CANDY MAN

“It’s not anti-drug, it’s anti-incest.

We actually issued a press release statement thinking, if they’re going to think that, we might as well say what the song is really about. We’re also trying to be very careful not to sensationalize or trivialize it, because it’s something that’s frustrating to talk about without doing one of those two things. I suppose that’s always a reason why you write, because of your inability to express it.

“There’s a radio show in London which is purely a news and chat show, and one morning they were dealing with the subject of incest. Something to do with a book someone had released and this one thing almost made me cry: there was a woman that rang up who was about 48, and she said this was the first time she had been able to get this weight off her chest about what happened to her when she was nine years old. That really brought it home, because it’s certainly not a conversation piece, and really, the culprit’s armor is this sense of guilt, sense of shame that it’s the victim’s fault, and the power they can rear over an innocent because that person is trusting. And of course the Candy Man is a lure, not just presents or candy.”

ANTI-DRUG SONGS

“I would never do an anti-drug song, because in that situation there’s a certain amount of choice whether you do or you don’t. And part of the allure of it is people saying, ‘Don’t, it’s bad.’

“We did an anti-heroin concert. A lot of bands had shied away from it, maybe they were scared that they’d lose some sparkle. We found that out when we’d been approached, that, plus it was going to be held in St. James’s Church in Piccadilly. To play in front of that stained glass window...but again, a big reason we did it was how it was perceived by the media. Maybe they don’t want us to be healthy and sensible. You know what I mean, they think they’ll lost some interest.”

92°

“There’s a book by Ray Bradbury called October Country, and there’s one story about these two old men who are traveling somewhere and they’re trying to spread this message of the danger of 92° because they’d been witnesses to an event that happened in some other town where there’d been so many murders and madness and mayhem at this magical figure. Meanwhile, it was coming close and people were losing their tempers—‘don’t tell me about 92°.’ It was a great story and almost the sort of thing that to me is believable because it’s so far-fetched.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 41

“I was telling Stephen about it and he said that he’d seen this great 1950s film called It Came From Outer Space and the part that’s used in the song from the film is where the sheriff is saying ‘at 93 it’s too hot to move, at 91 it’s cool enough to control yourself, but at 92 degrees people get irritable.’ A couple of months ago they reissued It Came From Outer Space on TV, so I looked at the footnotes and noticed that Ray Bradbury had written the screenplay for it.”

CITIES IN DUST

“That was really inspired by a visit to Pompeii. There’s quite a lot of tourism there, but the place itself transcends all that. You can think you’re the only person there. It’s quite immense, and at the end of the day, seeing the petrified bodies, it had a strong effect on me. The song was written, the music was written, when we got back from Italy, I wrote the lyrics. It was dedicated to one of the petrified bodies. It almost looked as if there was someone underneath this kind of plaster cover. I almost expected it to get up and move.”

BANSHEES PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

‘‘We’re basically the same. I think that stems a lot from never wanting to pigeonhole ourselves in ‘punk music,’ ‘rock music,’ jazz or funk or psychobilly or psychedelia because it was our own anyway. It was certainly not within those confines. I think the people who did go along with all the media labelling have lost it. They limited themselves to being too specific and too, I suppose, desperate to be famous in their first five minutes.

“We’re still, what’s going to happen next week?” S