Why Siouxsie Sioux decided to abandon the iconically goth ‘Siouxsie look’
In 1981, a 24-year-old Siouxsie Sioux was very matter-of-fact in explaining the origin of her stage name to a reporter. She chose the moniker, she said, because “I hated cowboys. I still hate cowboys.”
Case in point, sometimes an artistic choice isn’t so much an endorsement of one idea but a rejection of another one.
While Siouxsie Sioux’s name had an American Indian inspiration, the music she made with her band, the Banshees, and the aesthetic style she developed from the late 1970s into the mid-1980s had very little connection to indigenous Americans, save for the use of some face paint. Instead, Sioux was channelling a lot of influences from her youth, ranging from the glam rock space aliens of the David Bowie playbook and cutting-edge punk fashion trends to some much older touchstones, 1930s German expressionism and 1920s surrealistic art among them.
In combination with some increasingly dark, occult-inspired songwriting, the concept of gothic rock, or just ‘goth’, gradually emerged, although certainly not from the mouths of any artists associated with it.
In retrospect, Siouxsie Sioux was almost inarguably the ‘Queen of Goth’, the pioneer of everything we came to associate with that loaded word. Having already gone through a similar game with the word ‘punk’, though, Siouxsie herself was never interested in representing anything so trendy as to warrant a convenient four-letter, grab-all term.
As former Banshees bassist Steve Severin explained in a 1981 interview with the Associated Press, “The word ‘punk’ is a media-created word in the first place. The thing we really notice about America is that they truly have a horrible way of putting things in little packages.”
When the Banshees started building a bigger following in the 1980s, they soon saw that ‘packaging’ was carrying over to their own work, as fans were being sold a warped version of the band’s style by an opportunist marketplace, the commodification of their unique clothes, hairstyles, and mascara into a sort of pre-packaged kit now available at suburban shopping malls. Siouxsie Sioux’s own mid-1980s aesthetic, in particular, the big hair, all-black and mesh clothing, ghost-white make-up, and angular eye make-up, had somewhat become the paint-by-numbers goth cliché by the end of the decade.
“People were even calling it ‘the Siouxsie look’, which really scared me,” Sioux told Knight-Ridder News in 1992. “When they’re selling it in the shops and the models start to look like you, that’s when it’s time for a change.”
A considerably different Siouxsie Sioux, appearing somewhat nearer to her pre-punk life as Susan Ballion, sang to crowds in the 1990s, often blurring fans who had become used to anticipating the otherworldly version of the musician. But, if you weren’t subverting expectations, what really was the point anyway?
“I think (the changes) are more compulsive than planned,” Sioux said, “but I think that’s probably vital… I like the idea of people wondering what it is I’m up to, wondering if we’re serious this time. It’s important to me that things aren’t just dished up and served like supper. There needs to be some sense of mystery, or danger, even.”
