The minuscule gig that gave birth to Siouxsie and the Banshees
Amid UK punk’s cataclysmic bang across the latter 1970s, not even Siouxsie and the Banshees themselves likely expected such an enduring longevity on the pop and alternative worlds for the best part of 20 years.
Most saw their first exposure to Siouxsie Sioux’s striking fashion flair as part of the Sex Pistols’ entourage during the infamous Today swearing controversy. Appearing as a last-minute guest on the regional London news programme hosted by Bill Grundy, Sioux’s blonde, spiked hair, arresting dark eye makeup, and Weimar chic would be plastered on the Daily Mirror’s front page amid the tabloid ‘filth and fury’ outrage.
Sioux had already taken to the stage three months earlier, long before she had even attempted to write a song. Across the 20th and 21st of September 1976, Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and concert promoter Ron Watts organised the two-day 100 Club Punk Special in London’s Oxford Street, a jamboree of mostly unsigned bands orbiting the punk movement. The Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks headlined both nights, with The Clash, The Vibrators, The Damned, Subway Sect, and France’s Stinky Toys scattered across the bill for support.
Sioux was eager to get in on the act. Already acquainted with Banshee bassist Steven Severin, a last-minute addition was made for ‘Suzie and the Banshees’, as the programme spelt them. “It was very impromptu,” Sioux recalled to Magnet in 2007. “The band was formed just for that one gig; that was it. 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 quipped, “Never! I was completely self-taught…in public”.
Enlisting future Ant highwayman Marco Pirroni and Sid Vicious behind the drum kit, a good five months before his entrance to the Pistols’ fold, the embryonic Banshees took to the stage before The Clash on the first day and conjured a 20-minute set centred on a recital of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’.
Why the prayer was selected is unclear, but, coupled with the swastika armband provocatively brandished on the day, such iconoclastic tearing apart of the canonical Christian worship would have revelled in the blasphemous belligerence just as much as Nazi symbols were wielded to rub the wartime generation the wrong way.
The Banshees were only formed as a one-off punk moment verging on performance art, but before long, requested live shows, a TV spot on Manchester’s So It Goes, and a Peel session invite paved the road toward their ‘Hong Kong Garden’ debut single and 1978’s The Scream, heralding the arrival of a dynamic and creative new force as punk teetered on new wave’s precipice.
‘The Lord’s Prayer’ would find a studio version on sophomore follow-up Join Hands the following year, a slightly cumbersome, 15-odd minute slog that saps the album’s balance and energy, but Siouxsie and the Banshees’ punk appropriation of prayer is best left as a piece of musical lore, the electric burnishing of a group who would enjoy a glittering career of inventive pop that towered over much of their contemporaries for sheer creativity til their calling quits in 1996.
