Siouxsie Sioux returns after 10-year hiatus with Latitude headline announcement
Siouxsie Sioux, formerly the frontwoman of Siouxsie and the Banshees, has today been announced as a headliner for Latitude festival, putting a welcomed end to her ten-year hiatus.
Latitude festival, scheduled to take place on the grounds of Henham Park, Suffolk, on July 20th-23rd, 2023, welcomes the goddess of British punk to the bill to join fellow headline acts Pulp, Paolo Nutini and George Ezra. Siouxsie will headline the BBC Sounds Stage on Sunday night to close out the weekend.
Latitude Festival Director Melvin Benn commented: “What a privilege it is to welcome the iconic Siouxsie to the Latitude Festival. Siouxsie has been an enduring trailblazer, and her impact across musical culture is colossal. Uncompromisingly defiant, Siouxsie’s powerful body of work is incomparable. There has never been a live performer like her, and there probably never will be!”
The first time Siouxsie graced the stage as a performer at the 100 Club Punk Festival back in 1976, she sang a chaotic punk-inspired rendition of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. That evening triggered a unique career with Siouxsie and the Banshees that would take raw punk towards its refined offspring, post-punk.
While Siouxsie’s groundbreaking output of the late 1970s and ’80s inspired countless musicians up to the present day, few of her admirers became quite as popular as Robert Smith of The Cure.
In 1979, The Cure supported Siouxsie and the Banshees on tour and Smith was invited to fill in on guitar for some of the headline shows. “It was so different to what we were doing with The Cure,” Smith later recalled in conversation with NME. “Before that, I’d wanted us to be like the Buzzcocks or Elvis Costello, the punk Beatles. Being a Banshee really changed my attitude to what I was doing.”
In 2007, Siouxsie released her debut solo album, Mantaray, and the following year, she appeared at the World Soundtrack awards with the recently passed Angelo Badalamenti to perform ‘Careless Love’ from John Maybury’s film The Edge of Love.
Most recently, Siouxsie took to the stage at London’s Royal Festival Hall as part of Yoko Ono’s ‘Meltdown’ in 2013, to perform an unprecedented two sold-out shows as a guest of the famed curator. Siouxsie surprised the 5000 attendees with an unannounced complete and full rendition of Siouxsie and the Banshees 1980’s Kaleidoscope alongside a myriad of hits from Face to Face to Here Comes That Day.
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