“The wrong message”: What did Siouxsie and the Banshees learn from the Sex Pistols?
Punk rock changed the landscape of British music and culture forever when it first hit the airwaves during the mid-1970s. Following on from the inspiration of artists like The Stooges, New York Dolls, and Patti Smith in the United States, London fostered a particularly defiant punk scene which combined a subversion of musical norms with a rejection of the establishment and political institutions. At the forefront of that revolution were the Sex Pistols, a manufactured outfit concocted by Malcolm McLaren in 1975.
The existence of the Sex Pistols is a bit of an anomaly within the punk sphere. On one hand, the group were put together by a budding young executive, placing them in opposition to the staunch DIY ethos that the punk movement was built around. However, the Johnny Rotten-fronted group were also instrumental in popularising the sound and attitude of the era, inspiring countless future artists up and down the nation. Like them or not, without the Sex Pistols, there would be no Joy Division, no X-Ray Spex, and no Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Siouxsie Sioux was uniquely positioned within the early days of UK punk. For starters, she was one of the very few prominent women in the London scene and was on the receiving end of a lot of horrendously misogynistic treatment as a result of that fact. At the same time, Sioux was pretty close with the members of the Sex Pistols from their early days, even appearing alongside the band during their infamous appearance on the Bill Grundy Show – during which Grundy made a cringeworthy pass at the songwriter.
The press attention that the television appearance brought both the Pistols and Sioux led the songwriter to distance herself from McLaren’s band, focusing all her attention on her own group, Siouxsie and the Banshees. With that band, Sioux would go on to be instrumental in the early days of goth rock and the post-punk scene, adding new layers of darkness and experimentalism to the grassroots punk sound of the Banshees. Particularly during their early years, however, the band could not seem to escape comparisons to the Sex Pistols.
Usually, these comparisons were made by unimaginative journalists who viewed the Banshees unique and distinctive sound as being one and the same as the abrasive punk sneerings of the Pistols. Back in 1978, around the time of their stunning debut album The Scream, the Banshees were interviewed by Sounds, with a reporter telling the band that much of their spirit came from seeing the Sex Pistols during their early period. “I don’t know…” replied Sioux.
Continuing to discuss the influence – or lack thereof – provided to the band by the Pistols, Banshees guitarist John McKay chimed in, “I was outside it all, watching it, but I was so surprised that it went the way it did. I was very naive to think it would go any other way, I suppose.” Expanding, he said, “It’s just that the Banshees took the right message from the Pistols, but most groups – 99% of them took the wrong message.”
Concurring with that viewpoint, Sioux added, “They saw anarchy as destruction – as a group, as a movement, whereas it’s not, it’s… I don’t know…disrupting yourself, questioning yourself.” Either way, the songwriter was keen to distance the Banshees from the earlier days of punk, establishing her group as a creative and original voice within music rather than just another unimaginative punk outfit. “We hope that now we’ve got a deal and we’re going to make a record, we can show everyone up for what they were,” she shared.
Siouxsie and the Banshees certainly achieved those aims, releasing a plethora of incredibly inventive and influential records between The Scream in 1978 and The Rapture in 1995. Not only were the Banshees able to escape the limitations of their punk roots, but they managed to introduce audiences to an entirely new sound, inspiring scenes like post-punk, new wave, and, of course, goth rock.
