‘Rhapsody’: The essential Siouxsie and the Banshees deep cut
It’s easy to forget how consistently colourful, innovative, and exotically pop brilliant Siouxsie and the Banshees remained long after new wave became a stale term.
There was always something in their work that hinted at intrepid creativity and a fierce disregard for the peripheries that much of punk’s derivatives lapsed into. While not touching later records in quality, a nocturnal, European allure radiates all over 1978’s The Scream debut, possessed with a Teutonic and dreamlike fever while anchored to the garage rock urgency of their peers.
With Budgie’s entrance to the Banshees in 1979, the core trio, along with bassist Steven Severin, would truly kick off a run of albums from the following year’s Kaleidoscope that nebulously subsumed a heady brew of flavours. They could be haunting on the spiky ‘Happy House’, marry the dancefloor with antiquity on ‘Cities of Dust’s volcanic disco stomp, or conjure a rousing, grandiose string spectacle on the stirring ‘Dazzle’. They were the day’s ultimate Top of the Pops band, always providing the show with an unforgettable window to a realm sensual and full of surprises—a far cry from the lazy goth label they’d forever be lumped with.
By the decade’s close, Siouxsie and the Banshees finished as strong as they’d started. With the Through the Looking Glass covers album out their system, July 1988 saw the drop of the maddeningly infectious avant-pop collage ‘Peek-a-Boo’, a wriggling mass of samples and backwards drums that burst onto the charts with sugary cool. It was a revealing lead to that year’s Peepshow, illustrating the myriad terrain they’d explore across their last album of the 1980s.
It’s Peepshow’s finale that stood as the perfect bookend of the decade, as well as one of the best pieces they’d dream up together. Rhapsody’s album closer evokes a breathtaking storm of funeral march and evocative thunder, casting a cinematic shroud the moment its dark cello creeps into detail. Across the barren dusk of the opening verses, the drama slowly heightens to an engulfing behemoth of Spaghetti-Western guitars and orchestral howl scoring the intimate epic, crackling with extra electricity from Siouxsie Sioux’s falsetto vocal shrieks.
For whatever reason, the racing emotions triggered when listening to flash images of Cold War nuclear Armageddon amid its gargantuan urgency, “Our loved ones die under the hammer / Of the Soviet sun” plausibly illustrates a missile attack from Kremlin orders. Yet, Severin’s lyrics for ‘Rhapsody’ rather reach into Soviet history to pay homage to one of the old communist state’s premier pianists and composers. “The song is deliberately rich,” Sioux told NME at the time. “It’s about Shostakovitch, a really sad man, who was victimised, ridiculed, and then broken by the Stalin regime. I love his music, really powerful. The song’s about wishing you could be a consolation to him”.
A rising musical figure of the USSR’s early history, Dmitri Shostakovich won plaudits for his emotionally intense work and modernist leanings in craft, initially heralded by the authorities as a beacon of the Soviet arts. Yet, not long after 1934’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk opera, the Stalin era’s oppressive censors began to hound the composer, bludgeoned with denunciations and bad-faith critical excoriation of his works in the state’s official Pravda newspaper.
Accusations of Western influence and deviations from party doctrine would dog Shostakovich until Stalin’s death, his reputation later rehabilitated and awarded the Hero of Socialist Labour, the highest decoration of the Soviet system.
Armed with this context, ‘Rhapsody’ glows with a greater pang of sorrow, pulling the critical engulf away from its seismic towering toward the turmoil of Shostakovich’s private sphere. “Across this crooked land / Runs a crooked man”. Rather than mushroom clouds or massive depictions of doom harbinging, ‘Rhapsody’ captures the quiet, head-in-hands battle of an artist navigating top-down dogmas and fighting for his integrity. Channelling his symphonic works, ‘Rhapsody’ stands as a pertinent and befitting ode to creativity’s need to bloom through political orthodoxy and rigid paranoias.
Flexing a conceptual counter to ‘Peek-a-Boo’s teeming pop cheer, ‘Rhapsody’ swirls everything imaginative and dynamic about Siouxsie and the Banshees when firing at their best, a thrilling post-punk string-laden sweep that transports somewhere emotionally affective and sincere across its six radiant minutes.
