Artist: Siouxsie and the Banshees
Album: Peepshow
Year: 1988
Grade: A
In Brief: Gothic becomes eclectic on this late 80s alt-rock masterpiece, proving that a band with a well-established sound and a devoted cult following could still challenge itself and reach a whole new audience in the process, which was no easy feat a staggering nine albums into their discography. Over 30 years later and never having heard the band at all before, this record blew me away, and I honestly can’t think of a better entry point if you’re also new to Siouxsie – or a better time to give her band a try than with Halloween right around the corner!
We’re in the home stretch of my series of monthly throwback 80s reviews now, where I cover albums that were largely new to me as I binged my way through that decade last year, but that I know are going to be longtime nostalgic favorites for some of my readers, and possibly stones still left unturned for others who, like me, took a long time to get around to going back that far. The late 80s were an especially exciting time to explore, as it seemed like a plethora of artists hailing from the indie and alternative rock worlds were getting ready to stage a calculated overthrow of the mainstream right around the corner in the early 90s. R.E.M. had just signed a major label deal and put out Green, whose success was harbinger of things to come for them in the 90s, and they were certainly a strong candidate for my review spotlight this month, as were the decidedly-less-mainstream Cocteau Twins with another career high point on Blue Bell Knoll. ’88 was also a pretty amazing year in several genres of music beyond just the “alternative” stuff. Despite being raised on Christian music, I’ve never been a huge Amy Grant fan, but Lead Me On was easily a career high for her, combining the best of her pop, Gospel, and confessional singer/songwriter sensibilities. Meanwhile Sam Phillips, who was fresh off of a name change and who had just busted out of the contemporary Christian industry, also delivered a strong collection of idiosyncratic pop songs (that I kinda guess you could call “alternative”?) on The Indescribable Wow. The Pet Shop Boys indulged their love of lengthy 12″ club mixes on Introspective, The Bangles grew significantly beyond their gimmicks on Everything, and even the normally too-low-key-for-my-tastes Sarah McLachlan stunned me with her often-overlooked debut Touch. But the one band that really floored me with their ’88 release was Siouxsie and the Banshees – a British alt-rock group whom I hadn’t even thought to check out when I started this whole project, but the hearty recommendation of Peepshow that I got from a friend was such a great call that it prompted me to quickly go through and binge the rest of their 80s work as well.
Now it’s probably for the better that I didn’t try to listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees back when the band was still active (they broke up in the mid-90s), because although though I claimed to think it was cool to hear women leading the charge dark and aggressive rock music, I found a lot of the warbling, idiosyncratic female vocals in the genre to be a bit off-putting, if I was truly being honest with myself. It took until well into adulthood for me to finally get over this and start getting into groups like Florence + The Machine, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and heck, even Björk (who, by the way, gets an honorable mention for The Sugarcubes‘ delightfully strange debut Life’s Too Good while I’m on the topic of great ’88 releases). The Sundays, whose debut was just around the corner in 1990, now strike me as a softer and more whimsical take on this sort of sound. And there are even moments where I can hear a little bit of Siouxsie’s influence on Gwen Stefani, of all people, despite the massive difference in tone between those two artists most of the time. And there are probably a lot more women in rock – and rock bands in general – scattered from the 80s and 90s through to today who could cite Siouxsie and the Banshees as an influence. I’m in a place now where I’m much more likely to appreciate the dark, sometimes drony, and often slightly macabre vibe of their music – there’s even something strangely romantic about it as this record draws to a close, as if the songwriters (Siouxsie herself along with bassist/keyboardist Steven Severin) were convinced that death was imminent, but that it was really important to communicate their undying love to someone with their final breaths. But it’s really a bit of a potpourri – there are playful songs that turn out to have fangs, there are brooding songs with danger seeming to lurk around every corner, and pretty much everyone involved seemed to be having a blast stretching the definition of what sort of music this band could make.
That last bit is why I think Peepshow is an especially good entry point for people looking to give Siousxie and the Banshees a listen – even better than the slightly more successful Superstition that scored them a bona fide mainstream hit in 1991. Follow them back through the 80s and you’ll find a fairly consistent vibe – they definitely tried different things from one record to the next, but for the most part, it’s easy to figure out why they got pigeonholed as “goth” early on and why they were all buddy-buddy with The Cure (to the point where Robert Smith was even a bona fide member of The Banshees at one point). Listening to this record, there are moments that might be better classified as baroque pop, or folk/rock, or maybe even electropop. And that doesn’t even begin to describe its biggest and most startling single, which is a pastiche of backwards samples and other bizarre production choices that is almost difficult to take seriously at first. (We’ll go more in depth on that one in just a minute.) Peepshow lives up to its name in the sense that it’s kind of freaky and you never quite know what unusual things you’ll notice out of the corner of your eye, but I’d also say it never succumbs to the desire to be sophomoric with its more sensual and macabre subject matter. Somehow even in its sexiest moments and its creepiest ones, this record comes across as impeccably classy, knowing what it wants to say and saying it with confidence, and not doing any of it for cheap laughs or pure shock value. That’s a hard line to walk, because if you stumble too far to one side or the other, you could get written off as a novelty act.
All of this is to say – if you feel a bit of skepticism going into Peepshow, stick with it. It might seem a little too offbeat to easily digest at first, and it’ll most likely take a few tries before you can understand how anyone would regard it as life-changing, but when it starts to pay off, it’ll feel like you’ve dug up a secret book of magical spells that was written just for you.
INDIVIDUAL TRACKS:
1. Peek-a-Boo
This bizarre single, now regarded as a Siouxsie and the Banshees classic and a watershed moment for late 80s alt-rock, is one that I would pay good money to go back in time and witness people’s initial reactions to upon hearing it for the first time. I can definitely say that my reaction, being dropped in Peepshow with very little prior knowledge about the band and absolutely no context for this bizarre outlier, would have been priceless for someone else to watch, because I thought for sure I was being punk’d. Whoever recommended this to me must have just wanted a laugh at my expense, right? The stuttering samples at the beginning sounded like a bad attempt to approximate then-popular sounds in hip-hop, the backwards percussion samples probably seemed cutting edge at the time but now sounded to my ears like the kind of thing that would relegated to a wacky hidden track in the 90s, the overlapping yelps from Siouxsie were disorienting as hell, the accordions and guitars sounded squashed and horribly off-key, and just about every new musical element that came in at different points in the song made it sound more and more dissonant, like the entire thing had been recorded in the Land of Misfit Toys. And the lyrics even had the audacity to interpolate the song “Golly Jeepers, where’d you get those creepers”! This was a novelty hit, right? No way anyone ever took this seriously… RIGHT??!?! Okay, so the first thing I needed to understand about this song is that, once you get over the initial shock of how strange it is, it’s actually quite an earworm. The second thing I needed to understand was that, despite the playful and almost mocking tone, it wasn’t a joke. Not by a LONG shot. To quote Siouxsie herself, it was about “the way women are portrayed in our fascist media”, and WOW, she wasn’t pulling any punches! Listen carefully to the lyrics (which, admittedly, are kind of a difficult thing to focus on amid all of the hullabaloo) and you’ll realize it’s a rather grotesque portrait of a woman contorting herself into various poses as she tries on eccentric outfits and essentially acts as a slave for the pleasure of a man’s prying eyes. Suddenly it all makes sense: The song came out sounding like a demented circus because it’s an apt description of how women in that situation probably feel. In essence, it’s a feminist protest song, just done in a subversive manner. But it sure as hell gets your attention, and while it took me a while to get to the point where I truly enjoyed it, it didn’t require any effort to respect the intent behind it.
Grade: A-
2. The Killing Jar
Now imagine if you liked “Peek-a-Boo” from the get-go, and it was the only Siouxsie and the Banshees song you knew, and you were coming into this album hoping for more deliriously strange cut-and-pasted experiments like that one. You’d probably be disappointed to find that more conventional, real-time instrumentation takes a front seat from here on out. With that said, this follow-up single takes a few stylistic twists and turns before it finally reveals itself as a driving rocker. First of all, the drum riff that kicks it off sounds more like the sort of reggae-rock pastiche you’d get from The Police – I still find myself caught off guard by that even after getting to know the song fairly well, and the way that the drum cadences change the character of the song a few times midway through is a testament to drummer Budgie‘s ability to keep things fresh. (Also, as someone whose wife is the proud owner of a budgie, I adore the stage name.) Then there’s Martin McCarrick‘s cello part, which for a good portion of the song seems to be the more prominent stringed instrument in the mix, with Jon Klein‘s electric guitar relegated to a series of weird scratches and squeaks until his driving riffs finally come into the foreground near the end. This is all a very intoxicating mixture of sounds, and a great fit for Siouxsie’s tale of an ugly man who apparently collects fireflies and butterflies and other such insects as a personal hobby, using a jar to deprive them of oxygen so that he can take them home and stick pins through them and proudly display them to fellow enthusiasts. There seems to be a strong correlation between this man’s relationship to the beautiful bugs, whose lives he snuffs out in an attempt to preserve their beauty, and the hollow shells women are made to feel like in order to please men in “Peek-a-Boo”. I don’t know if it’s intentional that these two songs seem to have that in common and if they were placed back-to-back to make the parallel more obvious, or if these were just the two most viable singles and it was a happy accident. Either way, the band has now established itself in my mind as one that earns their slightly creepy aesthetic by telling stories that may be hard to hear, but that are definitely worth pondering, because they say something significant about us as a society.
Grade: A
3. Scarecrow
With the two biggest singles right upfront, I bet it’s tempting to think there’s no way the deep cuts on this record could ever live up to the standard set by them. But you would be wrong – this is one of those albums where I can easily imagine every single cut being a fiercely defended favorite by a sizable portion of the band’s fanbase. And this track is the hill that I, personally, would choose to die on if asked to defend a favorite Siouxsie track. Of course it’s all the percussive elements that had me transfixed right away – the darkly chiming harmonic notes from the guitar that open it up, the droning main riff that will rattle around in your skull hours or even days later while you’re trying to sleep, the drums that lay down a quieter groove at first but go full gallop on the chorus… it all seems like it’s painting a picture of a headless horseman hurtling through the forest on the darkest of nights, and I’m totally into it for some strange reason. The central character of this song doesn’t appear to actually be an undead being, nor is it a literal scarecrow, but instead it seems to be some sort of a fortune teller or a magician, or maybe more broadly an artist of some sort, someone whose talents have been usurped by other people for their own personal gain for so long that he’s become a depleted, lifeless husk of a man. This time around Siouxsie sings from the point of view of one of the many people drawing on his power – a few of her lines suggest that she might even be playing the role of a witch. The line “We can turn his rags to riches” certainly suggests a callous lack of sympathy for his plight. Once again, I’m sensing a theme here – the devaulation of someone’s life because it’s seen as a resource to be exploited by others. I know a lot of folks probably have “Peek-a-Boo” on their personal Halloween playlists, but if I had to make such a playlist? I’d go with “Scarecrow”, hands down. It may not be as campy, but when you think about the implications of it, it’s a downright unnerving song, and I love how well it communicates its sick lust for wealth and power.
Grade: A+
4. Carousel
While it’s not nearly as noticeable as it was on “Peek-a-Boo”, this song is also an interesting pastiche of strange sounds – it’s just got more of them faded into the background. I’ve used the “demented circus” comparison already, but this song seems to take it quite literally, with the faint sound of carnival music being heard in the background, at complete odds with what will eventually be the rhythm of the song as it slowly congeals around Severin’s keyboards and Siouxsie’s tense and very “un-poppy” vocal melody. The lyrics are comprised of a surreal poem that isn’t just haunting in nature, but that seems to be about the very process of being haunted, like someone had sought out dragons and dwarves and all manner of physical monsters, only to get what they bargained for when they couldn’t get off the thrill ride, and now they’re forever scarred by the experience. This one’s memorable for what it lacks at first – the absence of percussion makes it feel conspicuously empty until the drums some in for the outro. And just when the nightmare seems to have finally settled down, there’s a brief moment – probably only a fraction of a second – where that carnival music from the background suddenly gets very loud, only to cut off abruptly, as if jolting the listener out of a bad dream. BRRRRRRRRR!!! (That’s the sound of me getting an acute case of the chills.)
Grade: B+
5. Burn-Up
Alright, so that last tune probably had you reaching for a nice, cozy sweater to keep out the cold. It’s time to heat things up. Who’s ready for a hoedown? Uh… I can’t hear you guys. I said, WHO’S READY FOR A HOEDOWN?! (Wow, why does that question never get the desired response?) OK, so yeah, the notion of Siouxsie and the gang doing a “swamp goth” track might seem a bit weird, even based on the offbeat persona they’ve already established thus far into the record… but hear me out, this one’s actually a lot fun. It definitely wears its folksy influences loud and proud, from the blurting harmonica to the absolute blast of a time Budgie seems to be having rattling and rolling his way through what I’m assuming was his approximation of a zydeco beat. And the lyrics are, I kind you not, about a jack-o-lantern named Jack, who turns out to be a bit of pyromaniac. At first this just seems like a macabre take on another children’s rhyme (and yes, he is goaded into jumping over the candlestick at one point). But as this backwoods hootenanny gradually speeds up and spirals further and further out of control, it becomes evident that Jack is a bit of a hedonist in the worst way, someone who believes the old rockstar myth that “it’s better to burn out than fade away”. Essentially he’s got a self-destructive streak and he’s on a collision course with his own doom. Remember that odd comparison I made between Siouxsie and Gwen Stefani earlier? I’ll remind you of No Doubt‘s Tragic Kingdom, one of my absolute favorite 90s albums, where the title track careened to a complete trainwreck of an ending after the band kept speeding up and up and up, to the point where nobody could keep up with one another any more. This track seems like an earlier variant of that same idea – a whimsically tragic song that gets so carried away with itself that it ultimately crashes and burns in spectacular fashion.
Grade: A-
6. Ornaments of Gold
Is it a stretch to say that I get a bit of an “electropop” feel from this song’s programmed drum loop? I think that was an unmade term at this point in time – there was synthpop, but this clearly isn’t that. It’s hard to describe exactly what’s going on here, other than to say it’s a hypnotic and somewhat romantic mixture of sounds. There’s some sort of plucked stringed instrument giving us an exotic riff in the chorus that I can’t place – it’s not a sitar or a pipa, but it seems to be something from that general area of the world. Budgie gives us some excellent drum fills on this one, really helping it to build momentum toward the end – it’s more of a restrained and beautiful song that honestly doesn’t seem to be trying to haunt us at all this time around, but it’s still easy to get swept up in its constant motion. Looking through the lyrics, they seem to be genuine in their intent to reward someone they love with pure, lavish opulence – if there’s a darker meaning to this escapist fantasy, it isn’t apparent from within the song itself. It’s probably a testament to this band’s ability to consistently creep me out that I’d even go looking for dark clouds beneath the stunning silver lining here. Sometimes you just have to take a song at face value, and this is easily one of the most gorgeous recordings they ever came up with.
Grade: A+
7. Turn to Stone
A-ha! I knew the dream would have to turn back into a nightmare at some point! This is another one of those cases where I’m not 100% sure if two songs were meant to be connected, but since this song appears to be about a dark night during which a poor, trembling soul is turned into either a ghost or a stone statue, and it references “Fool’s gold as cold as marble” in its bridge, it’s easy to imagine that all of the treasure enjoyed in the previous song came at a price. You know how it is in most fantasy and adventure stories – the heroes stumble across some cave or sunken ship or whatever full of obscene amounts of gold and jewels and whatnot, they try to take some of it home, and either the whole place falls apart on them or they end up cursed or something. That’s the general idea that I feel like this song is going for – you took the forbidden fruit, and now you won’t make it out alive. What I didn’t really notice until I paid closer attention is that this is really more of an acoustic track, embellished by a strong drum loop and an organ (or a keyboard approximating one) – there are some really lovely moments of finger-picking that sound more like a Spanish guitar. I can imagine the Yeah Yeah Yeahs listening to Siouxsie’s refrain as she wails, “Ferry me down, turn to stone!”, and thinking, “Ooh, that gives me an idea for a song about the River Styx”, and thus their epic single “Burning” was born. (That probably isn’t how it really happened, but there are moments like this where Siouxsie reminds me so much of Karen O that it’s uncanny.)
Grade: B
8. Rawhead and Bloodybones
You can tell from the song title that this one’s probably gonna be a bit off-putting. While it’s relatively short, running only two and a half minutes, I’ll admit that this is the one song on the album that I truly don’t get. The minimalist arrangement, consisting of little more than two eerie chords that go back and forth while the keyboard/organ/whatever it is blurts out a few notes here and there, all of it sounding rather dissonant and reverb-heavy, is repetitive to the point where it feels more like an interlude setting us up for the next song, than a song in its own right. Siouxsie isn’t exactly whispering the lyrics, but she’s sort of… quietly blurting them out, I guess? It’s definitely a different tone of voice than her usual impassioned wail. It’s almost like she’s trying to give a gentle yet stern warning to a group of young children, using the specter of a hideous monster lurking under the stairs and in every dark corner of their house to scare them out of whatever troublesome things they might be tempted to do.
Grade: C+
9. The Last Beat of My Heart
The final two songs are definitely where I get the whole “fatalistic romance” vibe, but it comes on so strongly that I tend to mentally associate the entire record with that feeling, despite its more creepy and confrontational nature early on. This fan favorite ballad is so pure in its devotion that it plays as an entirely earnest romantic waltz – the kind of song you might play at a wedding, even. The percussion sounds like it’s been reduced to a single hand drum, almost giving it a tribal sort of feel, while the keyboards float in the ether like a dreamy string section, and the accordion, of all things, ends up getting a lovely little solo near the end. These are certainly unusual ingredients, a far cry from the band’s usual “gothic rock” arrangements, but they work perfectly to support this notion of loving someone passionately right up until your dying breath. The real kicker is that this isn’t actually written about someone that anyone in the band was in love with (as far as I know) – it’s actually an elegy to the band Joy Division, who I guess were considered peers when Siouxsie and the Banshees were starting out in the late 70s, but who came to an abrupt end when Ian Curtis took his own life in 1980. I can only imagine that the surviving members who now comprise New Order were flattered by the song’s reverence for their work and the numerous references to their songs contained in these lyrics. But even not knowing any of that, it’s still a stunner, the kind of song that makes you pause for a second and wonder if you’ve just borne witness to something of supernatural origin.
Grade: A
10. Rhapsody
My brain keeps telling me, when I get to the end of this album, that its final song is a long and drawn-out epic ballad, when in fact it’s actually a rather up-tempo and frenetic barn-burner of a finale. It’s the slow, brooding start that always throws me off, setting the stage for a story of a sad but resolved couple living under an oppressive regime. You could interpret the phrase “Our loved ones die under the hammer of the Soviet sun” multiple ways – at face value, it was a commentary on the bleak living conditions in the soon-to-collapse Soviet Union, but the specific image of a “sun” also makes me think of the constant threat of nuclear war that the world was under during the Cold War, and all of the anxiety that brought us. (All of which became scarily relevant again when I was first listening to this after the months into the war in Ukraine). What turns this sad song around and makes it beautiful is when it starts to sprint toward its hectic climax, and then back off, and then lunge forward again in its final minutes, with the song’s protagonists determined that they can still “dream all we want to”, that their love for each other and their vision of freedom cannot be snuffed out even by their impending deaths. The drumming and the rattling of the guitars as this song reaches a fever pitch is downright insane – it’s like a roller coaster that goes hurtling down a steep drop, lurches back up a hill, and then catapults you into the final descent. Siouxsie’s operatic vocals near the end are downright unreal (and I can hear shades of some of Dolores O’Riordan‘s future performances with The Cranberries in there). This album has had me captivated all the way through, but this has got to be one of the most edge-of-your-seat conclusions in rock history.
Grade: A+
WHAT’S IT WORTH TO ME?
Peek-a-Boo $1.50
The Killing Jar $1.75
Scarecrow $2
Carousel $1.25
Burn-Up $1.50
Ornaments of Gold $2
Turn to Stone $1
Rawhead and Bloodybones $.50
The Last Beat of My Heart $1.75
Rhapsody $2
TOTAL: $15.25
BAND MEMBERS:
Susan Ballion (aka Siouxsie Sioux): Lead vocals
Steven Severin: Bass, keyboards
Peter Clarke (aka Budgie): Drums, percussion, harmonica
Martin McCarrick: Cello, keyboards, accordion
Jon Klein: Guitar
LISTEN FOR YOURSELF:
MORE USEFUL LINKS:
https://www.backstreetmerch.com/artist/siouxsie-and-the-banshees/all-items
https://www.facebook.com/siouxsieandthebanshees
murlough23 
You must be logged in to post a comment.