We are having a heatwave here, time to reach for some goth in the hope that the icy feel of the grave will help me sleep like ‘that sleep everlasting‘ tonight.
Urr, what kind of music is this?
Earth’s two greatest cultural commentators, 1988.
It’s music for people who like, umm, don’t have any friends.
Siousxie & The Banshees Peepshow. Wow, just wow.
This is an astonishing album, I know Juju and The Scream are the ones that get all the serious Siouxsie lover’s love but ever since my son introduced me to Peepshow*, this is the main one for me. Nine years and nine LPs into their career the band reached their mountain top big top.
Just dial up the opener ‘Peek-a-Boo’; go on, it took them a year to make. It is a pounding electro oddity, fuelled by a reversed John Cale sample, accordion, a martial beat and the ghost of Bertolt Brecht dancing the fandango with Tom Waits in drag. The way Siouxsie milks every sinister swooping syllable is remarkable, a different mic being used for every single line of the song robs everything, save the beat, of any comforting anchor point. And what a beat! I would happily march to the gates of Hell to this tune.
That the tune is about the media’s depiction of women, equating ‘playing the game‘ explicitly to sex work** just ratchets everything up a notch. That the video, featuring Siouxsie in full manic Sally Bowles mode and the band as plague doctors, is so great, just cranks it into overdrive.
Every single track on Peepshow is just great. ‘The Killing Jar’ is perhaps the best known song here, it is certainly the cut that harks back to classic Banshees the most, the most conventional and muscular guitar-based tune, to me it has always sounded like anger at the inevitable loss of someone to very bad drugs indeed.
Tunes like ‘Scarecrow’ and ‘Carousel’ pull off the neat trick of being all about a disquieting atmosphere one minute and then picking up a lurching momentum the next, obeying their own internal logic entirely. Steven Severin is such a good bass player. I do find the child’s-eye viewpoint of the latter freaky.
Then its all aboard for ‘Burn Up’, which is a real barnstormer. It sounds like a hoedown in Hades … on a Wild West themed ghost train, via the Weimar Republic, obviously. The way new-ish member Martin McCarrick rustles up the melody and the rhythm section provide the locomotion is an absolute treat.
The stately, Kate-Bush-fronting-Roxy-Music-does-trip-hop-whilst-inventing-Goldfrapp, ‘Ornaments Of Gold’ is quite amazing. Siouxsie adding her own Eastern martial snap to proceedings to keep everything from becoming too nice. There are times when this is all I need.
Editing out ‘Raw Head And Bloody Bones’, always a bit of a non-event in my ears, the three song run to the end of Peepshow is a belter for the ages. First up ‘Turn To Stone’ is just damnably sexy, poetic and dreamlike. It’s a perfectly paced ditty, driven by Budgie’s steady beat, a whisper of Spanish guitar and all manner of purring, yet stately vocals. Is it me or is it hot in here?
Heaven sent some dark marvel
Fool's gold as cold as marble
High above the sickle moon
Your hidden dreams chill and swoon
Improbable single ‘The Last Beat Of My Heart’ is a very straight, if tense, ballad about the end of a relationship, ‘When time wreathed a rose, a garland of shame / Its thorn my only delight’. Its very gothic, in the best possible way. The music is more suggestion than substance, underlining that majestic voice which she uses in such a sweetly conventional manner it wrong foots me every time I hear it.
Finally, fittingly we are left with/in a ‘Rhapsody’. Another track at least 18 years ahead of its time, the music subtly builds and swells impressively and oh so beautifully, painfully, slowly before we get a blessed bloody release. Siouxsie goes fully operatic on us at the end, crystalline and ecstatic, her tone giving us more than her words can manage. Its a hell of a thing, idiosyncratic and hugely original. Then before we are ready, it fades and is gone.
Peepshow is a wow.
It is, I think, the poppiest most leftfield LP in Siouxsie & The Banshees discography^. The addition of multi-instrumentalist Martin McCarrick really did seem to tip the balance of the band’s music and set it spinning off in numerous interesting ways, often during the same song. Guitarist Jon Klein has a really individual style, quite sparse, subtle. The rhythm section of Budgie and Severin are never less than excellent, aiding and abetting all these flights of fantasy and fancy, whilst being utterly compelling in their own right.
As always Siouxsie Sioux^^ is the dark sun that everything revolves around in total obeisance. Her charisma burns coldly throughout every second here. She has always been a uniquely influential presence in British music post-punk but what I was not ready for though when I first heard Peepshow is how many different ways she uses her voice, she really does stretch herself in all manner of arresting ways. Plus she is clearly having a ball on the likes of ‘Burn Up’ and ‘Peek-a-Boo’, which is pleasant to hear and it is illuminating to see a crack in the ice-maiden dominatrix persona she usually gets painted as. What a talent.
If I could change anything about Peepshow I would wish for better artwork, it deserves art that makes more of a statement. Plus it is criminal to print the inner sleeve with a picture/text combo that means you can’t actually decipher the lyrics, which are well worth the read.
Visit the Peepshow. Who wants friends?
1324 Down.
PS: because you deserve it:
PPS: ‘Hey Beavis, have you ever played peek-a-boo with your weiner?’
*kids, they cost a lot, they worry you a lot, quite frankly they’re a vast pain in the arse a lot of the time but very very occasionally they are worth all the hassle – I have got into some great music via my progeny.
**Reeking like a pigsty
Peeling back and gagging free
Flaccid ego in your hand
Chokes on dry tears, can you understand?
She's jeering at the shadows
Sneering behind a smile
Lunge and thrust to pout and pucker
Into the face of the beguiled
(which makes the Beavis and Butthead clip above (at 1:33) funnier and cleverer than I initially thought it was, even).
^feel free to correct me gently on this point if you know better than I on this point, I struggle with the jagged nature of a couple of their LPs.
^^Susan Janet Ballion by any other name smells as sweet.
