‘Swimming Horses’: Siouxsie and the Banshees’ eeriest masterpiece
The dreaded G-word is often lazily tacked onto Siouxsie and the Banshees. While traces of gothic—in the best, arcane sense of the word—can often be felt across their lengthy body of work, the Banshees have conjured an infinitely more alluring and colourful plume of post-punk alchemy that such trite pigeonholing dared recognise.
Following the 1980s effort Kaleidoscope’s shimmering mosaic of eclectic flavours and styles, the band would dominate the edges of the underground and mainstream with a unique sound that was all things exotic and psychedelic, steeped in a new wave netherworld rippling with allure right up until their The Rapture finale in 1995.
They were a fantastic pop band too. Like The Cure, they too had a knack for presenting the charts slices of confoundingly strange and subversive hits fuelled with inventive hooks—coupled with singer Siouxsie Sioux’s striking aesthetic. It made the Banshees a gift for Top of the Pops and MTV eager for arresting promo videos. The Cure’s Robert Smith was certainly paying attention, falling in love with their aforementioned third LP and crediting its disparate sonic character with influencing their acclaimed 1985 record, The Head on the Door.
Paths had crossed before Smith’s brief tenure as an official Banshee in 1984. Sioux provided backing vocals for The Cure’s ‘I’m Cold’ B-side, while Smith filled in for original guitarist John McKay after his departure from the Banshees’ 1979 tour. Then, a few years later, Smith and bassist Steven Severin formed the one-album side project, The Glove.
By the time of the Banshees’ sixth album Hyæna, Smith was already a seasoned collaborator. With the band already flexing their intrepid expanse of sounds and Smith cutting The Top‘s equally splintered surreality, the joint forces intriguingly stirred the pot of a potently alien and romantic musical brew.
Leading Hyæna was the fantastically eerie yet majestic ‘Swimming Horses’. A subaqueous swirl of cascading piano drops and bubbling guitar chimes, ‘the track documents the Banshees firing on every cylinder, irresistible art-pop bristling with evocative traversal illustrating the darting titular sea creatures as if they’re scoring some artful nature documentary. For all the weightless fancy and shimmering imagery of ‘Swimming Horses’, Sioux’s lyrical explorations are anchored in a much darker reality.
“This is based on a programme I saw about a female version of Amnesty, called Les Sentinelles,” Sioux revealed to Melody Maker in 1992. “They rescue women who are trapped in certain religious climates in the Middle East, religions that view any kind of pre-marital sexual aspersion as punishable by death—either by the hand of the eldest brother in the family or by public stoning. And there was this instance of a woman whose daughter had developed a tumour, and, of course, gossip abounded that she was pregnant.”
She continued, “The doctor who removed the tumour allowed her to take it back to the village to prove that, no, it wasn’t a baby—but they wouldn’t believe her. The woman knew her daughter would have to be stoned to death, so she poisoned her out of kindness to save her from a worse fate. Now this organisation has all these escape routes for women like her, mainly through the elder brother, who pretends to have killed them. But once they’ve been saved, they can never go back. So the song starts, ‘Kinder than with poison…'”
Using the analogy of the male sea horse and its unique ability to give birth, Sioux subtly and poetically reaches into the heart of such violent, patriarchal tribal codes and implores some maternal instinct to assuage the brutally enforced mores that maim and kill young girls due to the perceived shame men might feel.
Social reportage on the ugly corners of humanity rarely takes place behind such a pictorial curtain, and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ ‘Swimming Horses’ pours grief, sorrow, and a seething sense of injustice into an enduring lyrical stained-window, submerged in the deepest depths—a slice of cautionary fantasy as eerie and universal as Little Red Riding Hood or Babes in the Wood.
