The complete accident that gave Siouxsie and the Banshees a career: “We said we had a band when we didn’t”
It wasn’t entirely clear that Siouxsie and the Banshees were destined as one of alternative pop’s most seismic acts to anyone who’d witnessed their live debut.
Catapulted to Top of the Pops fame by new wave’s momentum but always looking further afield toward more psychedelic and colourful pop terrain, Siouxsie and the Banshees sailed through the 1980s as one of the UK’s finest musical exports, the core classic trio of Siouxsie Sioux, Steven Severin, and Budgie seemingly in possession of a bottomless bag of inventive songs as creatively chequered and mosaic as fellow alt-MTV favourites The Cure.
Yet, every band has an awkward teething process. When quizzed on The Bob zine in 1981, around the time of Juju, by interviewer Marchsa Gordon, Sioux gives a strange insight into the band’s burnishing. “When we first went on stage – by accident.” When asked how that happened exactly, Sioux coyly states, “We said we had a band when we didn’t.”
This was no jokey response. While national notoriety would push Sioux to the centre of tabloid fury as part of the Sex Pistols’ sweary entourage on Bill Grundy’s Today show, a hastily assembled Banshees had taken to the stage in September 1976 as part of the 100 Club Punk Special.
Organised by Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and concert promoter Ron Watts, the two-day jamboree in London’s famed Oxford Street club boasted a distinguished line-up of punk’s up-and-coming, Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks hosting both nights, plus The Clash and The Damned, among others, dotted across the bill.
Hearing of a last-minute gap, Sioux sorted a slot to fill the programme, never mind that no actual band members or even any material were had. With bassist Severin already in the fold, the pair recruited future Pistol Sid Vicious for drumming duties, and later Ant highwayman Marco Pirroni on guitar, the spontaneous outfit took to the stage and rolled out just one number, a lengthy version of the ‘Lord’s Prayer’.
“The band was formed just for that one gig; that was it, Sioux recalled years later to Magnet in 2007. “15 or 20 minutes, that was all the future that I saw. But it’s gone on for quite a long time.” When asked if she’d ever sung before a crowd, Sioux shot back, “Never! I was completely self-taught… in public.”
It became a slice of punk lore, and a theme the Banshees would revisit, recording a studio take for 1979’s Join Hands, but the “accident” would grow into a mammoth success, one of the key groups from punk’s first big bang that stayed consistently interesting and vital the longest, eventually bowing out in 1996 after their excellent The Rapture album. Along the way, each record seemed to radiate something exotic and far-flung, a heady and multi-coloured plume of art-punk conjurings infinitely more interesting than the goth tag the Banshees are often slapped with.
How did the audience take to the Banshees’ ramshackle live debut beyond fame and pop stature? Sioux quipped to The Bob, “We spellbound them.”
