wears the trousers magazine

Alienation is the stuff of adolescence. Immaterial of whether it inspires the Columbine massacre or ‘Bonjour Tristesse’, the energies of youth are marked out by their sense of dislocation; of not quite belonging. They are also fleeting. It takes a special kind of grit to retain that uncompromising, often grim self-determination of a 17 year old into middle age. Yet somehow Siouxsie Sioux has managed it.

Her own sense of otherness as Susan Ballion, the teenager stuck in ultra-suburban Bromley with a working mother and a French father, was part of what inspired her to create the aloof, otherworldly persona of Siouxsie Sioux. Fast forward 30 years and remarkably little has changed. She’s an older, wiser woman than the teenager Bill Grundy chatted up on-air, inspiring Steve Jones’s infamous outburst of swearing, yet the fuck-you mentality that kept Siouxsie & The Banshees going as their peers disintegrated, self-destructed or sold out is intact. She may be the female face of punk, but she would sooner poke your eye out with a safety pin than put it through her nose. 

Now 50 and releasing her first solo album, Mantaray, Siouxsie cuts a contradictory figure in an industry that delights in artists whose careers and raisons d’êtres can be summarised on the back of a cigarette packet. She hates the record industry yet welcomed the chance to release Mantaray on Universal after a decade slogging away with Banshees side project, The Creatures, on her own label. Yet those contradictions serve her well on record, where her trademark gothic preoccupations are handled with an unexpectedly light musical touch. The album’s lead single, ‘Into A Swan’, is a case in point: being an incongruous collaboration between Siouxsie’s wilfully alternative sensibilities and Scandinavian R&B producer, Kookie.

Siouxsie herself attributes her resurfacing into the mainstream to a combination of chance, happy accident and an abortive attempt to take a backseat role in the industry. In fact, following a lengthy period of ill-health during her acclaimed eponymous 2004 tour, she admits she nearly quit music altogether, retiring to her house in France to “open a flower shop or something”. Events conspired, however, to save British holidaymakers from the horror of popping into the local florist for a bunch of freesias to be faced with a shopkeeper in full goth eye makeup.

This rebirth might well be traced back to Basement Jaxx – British dance music’s successor to Earth, Wind & Fire – inviting Siouxsie to contribute a vocal to what was to become their 2004 album, Kish Kash, led to her singing on the title track. The result was fascinating; steelier and harder edged than anything we had heard from an outfit specialising in dance-pop with more bounce than the Spice Girls on spacehoppers. Basement Jaxx’s recording methods, which lifted Siouxsie’s vocals directly from what she considered a rough demo, were also a revelation to a recording artist used to building songs painstakingly (and expensively) in the studio.

While this experience had revivified her self-belief, she was still determined to save herself the often deadening experience of being a performer. Yet another demo, this time an instrumental track by Kookie, gave Siouxsie an opportunity to reinvent herself as a songwriter for other artists. This collaboration yielded ‘Into A Swan’ and ‘Loveless’, two songs that found a home on Mantaray having been originally intended for a putative ‘Sugababes-style’ girl group.

This may be a surprise to some, but to Siouxsie herself, and anyone with a keen enough ear to hear the hooks in even the noisiest Banshees record, her insistence “I like my pop music,” makes sense. “I like it with an edge,” she adds, “but I also like it as undiluted pop.” In this light both songs make for fascinating listening. Dark and bittersweet like good quality chocolate, with vocals beading a musical fabric woven from string washes and industrial noise, it’s difficult to imagine how a voice other than Siouxsie’s could have made sense of them. They’re pop, yes, but not as we conventionally imagine it: Sugababes-ish, but only if Trent Reznor was in the producer’s chair.

Pop’s loss turned out to be her gain, however, as the record company junked the band and, preferring the demos, offered Siouxsie her first major label contract since Polydor dropped The Banshees in 1996. And after a lifetime of fronting bands and writing exclusively with close personal collaborators, she was now propelled into life as a solo artist. Stepping out into new territory also involved her breaking with past attitudes and ways of working. “I never considered myself as a musician,” she admits. “I was with a bunch of friends and we got lucky. For this album though, I wanted to put myself in an environment with nobody I knew.”

Mantaray, a fittingly abstract title for an album that glides by over the first few listens only to return later with a sting in its tail, belies the usual truism that ‘legends’ make dull and irrelevant albums. Indeed, while she has always prided herself as being out of place, Siouxsie Sioux’s influence – particularly on female artists – has never been more evident. Ana Matronic called her a role model in the terminally safe environment of The Brits, while PJ Harvey has spent a decade and more copying her trademark brand of Hammer horror glamour. Without Siouxsie there would be no Bat For Lashes, and Goldfrapp’s independence, hauteur and physical hostility towards members of the press suggests both are sisters under the skin, if not in hair colour.

Working with new collaborators Steve Evans and Charlie Jones also seems to have encouraged her to take a looser, more organic approach to recording. So if Mantaray occasionally lacks the sonic polish that marked out later Banshees’ recordings, it feels less like the band left the songs a little too long under the hairdryer. As a philosophy, it yields astonishing results – in Mantaray’s closing trio especially. Here Siouxsie loses her habitual froideur almost entirely, delivering ‘Sea Of Tranquility’, ‘They Follow You’ and ‘Heaven & Alchemy’ with the voice of a weary, but never broken torch singer. A paean to the clash between the ideals and realities of staying in love, ‘Heaven & Alchemy’ is all the more surprising given Siouxsie’s natural inclination to disturb with off-kilter imagery rather than move with emotional realities.

For those who have spent the decade since the Banshees’ split, and the years of experimentation with The Creatures (who, while they often impressed, rarely charmed) Mantaray is a delight, if not an unalloyed one. Its existence is a triumph of bloody-minded perseverance, but its execution lifts the curtain on a more complex picture. One where victories are hard won, failure is as familiar as success and where older might mean wiser, but covering that up means more makeup by the day. Thirty years on from her mounting the stage to intone the Lord’s Prayer for 20 minutes, Siouxsie might seem an odd successor to Edith Piaf. But she regrets nothing, and she keeps on singing – about life in black, if not in pink.

Chris McCrudden
previously unpublished

‘Into A Swan’

‘Here Comes That Day’ live at the 2007 Electric Proms