B-SIDE
Feb/Mar 1989 Vol.3, No.1 pp.26-29,37

Cover: Siouxsie
"Siouxsie & the Banshees"
"Grand Illusions"

Steve: "There have been three points in our career where we were influential on other people, and those points were the first album "Scream", then "Juju" and "A Kiss in the Dream House". Those three albums have made us stop and be aware of what we were doing in the way it was affecting other bands, and it made us more aware of what our moves should be next. So by the time we got to "A Kiss in the Dream House", and released that, there was this resurgence in guitar bands, and people like U2 and Big Country were coming up with hits, and our record company was going 'oh, this is such a great movement that people are getting into, with guitar bands, and they'll latch onto YOU in a big way as you're such a GUITAR band' and we went 'WHAT?' he remembers with a laugh of disbelief. "So we went, right, the next album "Hyena" we'll put keyboards all over it and just fuck everybody up," he laughs."

Apr/May 1990 Vol.4, No.2 pp.26-29,36

Cover: Siouxsie & Budgie
"The Creatures"
"Siouxsie and Budgie Go Camping"

"That is the main difference with the Creatures and the Banshees .. the simplicity in the direction and the music itself being less layered and entangling."

Cover: "Special Sioux Veneer Issue",
(fetchingly glum) pic of Siouxsie
"My Life in Punk Rock"
"Susan X, former barmaid from Chislehurst, tells all .."

big color pic "Siouxsie & the Fishes" at the aquarium

"My earliest memory is pretending to be dead. My mum used to keep stepping over me while I was laying on the kitchen floor. I was five. I once took a bottle of pills to make it more realistic. That was about the same time I started school. I can remember I had really long hair and got chewing gum stuck in it. It was in there for a couple of years until I eventually had my hair cut."

Cover: Siouxsie

"I really like women," says Siouxsie. "I think women are the future. I'm more interested, musically in what women are doing than men. I think the new female singers are much more exciting -- it's like the girl hasn't started yet but the man's dead because, what he's doing, it's all been said before.
"I think Bjork's got a great voice .. Sinead O'Connor .. Michelle Shocked .. I like Kate Bush's new single, I like the understatement of it."

[..]

[the writer] "History's being rewritten daily so that the goodness, the liberating drive of the Sixties and the Seventies can be dismissed as fashion quirks, wishy-washy ideas propogated by weak people who wish to recreate society in their decadent image. This pie-in-the-sky theory obviously suits the current political climate down to the ground because the subtext is that the natural state decrees that the strong prosper and the weak go to the wall, the men conquer and the women submit. The liberal era is now considered an abherrant historical abomination. And Thatcher's a bloke in a dress."

Cover: Siouxsie
"Through the Past, Darkly"
"Siouxsie & the Banshees Ponder a Brighter Tomorrow"

WOODARD: "I'm inclined to ask you if there's an artist whose work embodies your music ? It's not Mondrian. To many angles and primary colors."

SIOUXSIE: "Oh, Klimt. (she stops to ponder) .. Goya or Heironymous Bosch. I just love getting out the magnifying glass and looking at all the little creatures. It's so dark, but so luminous."

"Each record is a pouring out of her soul in an echoing whirlwind of mystical melodies [..] The sound conjures up visions of Arabian Nights, black magic, and the Garden fo Earthly Delights. It strikes a nerve in our collective subconscious mind associated with animal fear and desire."

"The Banshees at 13"

"This enchantress, this cult deity of mythological proportions, now stands at the pinnacle of her power and prestige. Gazing down upon the bowed masses from her lofty peak, it is difficult to imagine the humble origins from which she sprang. Ah, but even goddesses have pasts, and Siouxsie Sioux is no exception."

[..]

"Siousxie would cultivate an image of ominous beauty, like that of some exotic queen of the vampires, to enhance the dark and visionary Banshee sound, hanging like a sparkling veil of night over a sleeping world. She was as influenced by Ziggy Stardust as by England's infamous Hammer horror films of the 1970s featuring such gothic abominations as homoerotic vampirism, necrophilia, human sacrifice, medieval torture chambers, depraved medical experiments, and witch burnings."

Cover: Siouxsie

Q: Part of your strength seemed to stem from the fact that .. you were around a lot at the beginning of the punk thing & soaked it up ..

SIOUXSIE: I dunno.

KENNY: It's down to the individual. I mean John wasn't there in the beginning --

SIOUXSIE: The fact is, we liked what the PISTOLS were doing without any media confirmation.

Q: There seems to be some parallel between you and the Pistols ..

JOHN: It's .. most groups, 99% of them, took the wrong message from the Pistols.

SIOUXSIE: And saw anarchy as destruction -- as a group, as a movement -- where as it's not, it's --

KENNY: Self-rule

SIOUXSIE: Disrupting yourself, questioning yourself ..

"Siouxsie & the Banshees: A complete listing of live performances - Part One

"Those basing their presence here tonight solely on 'Hong Kong Garden' were very confused. The single, with that devastatingly simple hookline, must be one of the surprise successes of the year, but the rest of the set was hugely different; dark, ponderous, black aura music issuing forth."

"Siouxsie & the Banshees: A complete listing of live performances - Part Two"

"Worked as a secretary, a masseuse in a parlour 'riddled with fat, pimply, balding businessmen,' as a barmaid until she was sacked for being rude to the customers and in a lunch-time West-End club where she 'acquired' meals for the Bromleyites before being sacked for her part in the Grundy incident.
Auditioned for several bands who made her sing 'Smoke on the Water'"

Cover: L-L corner "LOVE IN A VOID", pic of Siouxsie

SIOUX: "Yeah Carcass -- it's about a butcher's assistant who can't get girls and so he falls in love with a lump of meat on the slab and so that he can be like the object of his affection -- he cuts off his arms and legs."

Ah hold on! I say (thinking I've deduced a flaw in their logic), How can he cut off ALL his arms and legs -- it would be really difficult for him to cut off his last arm -- wouldn't it ?

"Not at all", comes the reply "he just leans his shoulder on the Bacon Slicer!"

"Afterwards it's back to the hotel, bevy of fans in tow, for drinkies, laffs and four o'clock fun. Sioux retires a little earlier cos she doesn't want to overdo it like on the "Join Hands" tour which ended in a nasty bout of hepatitis. "Discipline!" is her goodnight word, as she lopes out of the bar grinning."

Cover: Siouxsie
"centerfold" pp.24,25 signed
"limblessly in love, Siouxsie X X"
"A Kiss in the Dream House"

KRIS: "What about video ?"

STEVE: "There's a lot of possibilities. All of the videos we've done could be twice as good if they were down to us."

SIOUX: "[T]hey're like chocolate box adverts. I really hate the idea of making a song into a minifilm with a script and all that shit. I just think it should be more abstract and not necessarily anything to do with transcribing the song, but something you can watch and see different things in it if you watch it again and again."

[..]

STEVE: "It's such a young industry and all the people involved are idiots."