The python in the dressing room: Siouxsie Sioux and a wild show in Los Angeles
When we think of punk music, we think of rebellion. Images of the Sex Pistols come to mind, and Johnny Rotten’s poetic lyrics about a broken country continue to ring true. Politics and outrage were certainly the birthplace of punk. As many people across the UK found themselves depraved and hopeless, they turned to the unrelenting anger of punk and saw it as a much-needed release.
“Early seventies Britain was a very depressing place. It was completely run-down, there was trash on the streets, total unemployment – just about everybody was on strike,” said John Lydon when discussing his inspiration for the Sex Pistols, “Everybody was brought up with an education system that told you point blank that if you came from the wrong side of the tracks… then you had no hope in hell and no career prospects at all. Out of all that came pretentious moi, and the Sex Pistols and then a whole bunch of copycat wankers after us.”
Lydon is right that Sex Pistols were one of the pioneering bands that helped define the punk movement across the UK and the world. In their wake came a vast array of other musical talent, some of which has slipped through the cracks of history, while others have gone on to make careers that outlast the punk pioneers by decades. One of the latter is Siouxie Sioux.
In one of her early gigs with The Banshees, Siouxsie and her band supported Sex Pistols for their show at London’s The 100 Club. The gig was a whaling barrage of distortion, denim and dirty dancefloors, something that the genre became particularly synonymous with.
Because punk’s origins lie in the rage of the working class, many people saw punk shows as a period where they could vent a tremendous amount of anger and pent-up frustration. There were often fights, plenty of drinks, aggressive dancing, and lots of property damage. These actions gave many people a negative outlook on punk, as they saw the anger of the genre on the surface and refused to look any deeper than that.
One of the worst punk bands when it came to causing carnage at their gigs was Macc Lads. Bookers banned them from venues up and down the country because they saw their shows as too violent. One of the most notable was in 1989 when the band performed at the Hummingbird in Birmingham, causing thousands of pounds worth of damage.
Of course, chaos didn’t only ensue during punk shows, either; it continued backstage. Siouxsie had a lot of experience with this, as she was often the person contributing to the chaos. One particular gig that she mentions is after performing in LA, when they had a surprising reptilian visitor.
“Yep, I remember how hot that was,” she said when asked about a show at the California Hall in 1980, “That was our first time to play in the States, and we’d just played the Whisky in LA. We had a very special guest who came to see us at the Whisky, and that was Bryan Gregory, the guitarist from the Cramps.”
Gregory was always a character, so the fact that he was in the dressing room along with Siouxsie and the rest of the banshees meant that it wouldn’t be long before chaos ensued. That chaos eventually came in the form of Siouxsie picking up Gregory’s pet snake and tormenting everyone in the dressing room with it.
“I remember I got to meet his pet snake,” she recalled, “I seem to recall chasing someone around the dressing room, holding that snake. It was a big python.”
Wherever punk bands went, carnage was never far behind. While there were likely very few dull moments on tour with Siouxsie, it was better to be chased around a dressing room with a python over causing thousands worth of damage and getting banned from various venues. It seems there are different strands to punk.
