The artist who crushed Siouxsie Sioux’s spirit
It’s easy to hail Siouxsie Sioux as a punk icon, simply because she is. But she also deserves far more credit for being able to emerge from the fray than most – because she found herself positioned at what was perhaps one of the most unfair musical crossroads in history.
Bolting out of the blue in the midst of the 1970s, it was the peak time for punk in all its fashionable, political, and sonic glory. The conditions were perfect for a band like Siouxsie and the Banshees to rise through the ranks and make their mark – but just as their train was going at full speed down the line, the movement in which they had made their name ran out of steam, long before they were ever ready to.
As such, as the original spirit of punk died simultaneously with the end of the ‘70s, a new era beckoned. However, its sunshine and roses approach proved all too sickly for a woman like Sioux. It was almost as if, despite everything that the previous decade had stood for, the dawn of the ‘80s signalled a complete pivot in the musical landscape. Suddenly, everything revolved around shiny synth pop and the new wave, and the punks were sent recoiling in disgust.
Sioux’s decision to power through this tsunami of pop commercialism was a bold move on many fronts: by continuing to the beat of her own drum, she could have quickly risked becoming outdated for still embodying a vintage ideal, but equally, her confidence to carry this off elicited a brazenness that not many could muster, thus her ability to keep commanding attentions was unparalleled. To the world, this was the image of a frontwoman who really didn’t care.
Yet behind closed doors, the anxieties of battling to make an impression amid an all-new indelible landscape were impossible to avoid. The gleam of the pop sphere was blinding, not least because it coincided with a whole fresh league of media exposure, making its wrath inescapable. “The accountants of this world are now making the music as well as programming it on the radio, the TV and everywhere else,” Sioux bemoaned. “It’s like, why does Phil Collins need to do every show available? That’s what’s stifling the spirit of any youth movement.”
In many ways, it was simply an unfortunate luck of the draw that the ‘80s came with its unwelcome friends of MTV and an invigorated, but incessant, media scene, because it killed precisely the spirit that Sioux and her cronies of the ‘70s had worked so hard to harness. No longer was there any sense of underground or uprising – instead, everything was out in the open and geared towards the mainstream goal. This obviously reaped its benefits for Collins and Co, but it’s fair to say it left the outsiders, like Sioux, a little disheartened.
Of course, even amid her rut of anger and disappointment at the state of the sonic world, Sioux would be damned if she was ever going to let that stop her. Instead, the mark of the woman was to carry on fighting the fight, and with her level of tenacity and grit, she knew it wouldn’t be too long until the masses turned back around. After all, punk never died – it just moved with the times.
