Siouxsie sioux biography book

Biographies of musicians always have to walk a tightrope between covering the personal lives of the musicians on one hand, and their careers as artists on the other. The ideal way, in my estimation, would be showing how each of the two influence the other. If I have to prefer one of the two rather than the middle ground, I have to take the path focusing on the music so I'm surprised how much I enjoyed this one, which takes the middle ground but with a definite focus on the personal lives of not just Siouxsie Sioux but also her bandmates.

This book is structured around a series of interviews arranged in chronological orer. It starts out with rather disturbing accounts on Siouxsie's exceptionally traumatic childhood when everyone called her Susan Janet Ballion - which in part formed her outlook on life and also her philosophy as a songwriter. What I suppose will make or break this for most people will be her infamously trollish sense of humour, from dressing in Fascist and Soviet regalia on alternating days of the week over intentionally acting creepily towards strangers in order to scare off potential rapists to her eagerness to share embarrassing anecdotes about the private lives of musicians she had toured with and fellow scenesters in generally. While Siouxsie comes across as a somewhat difficult person to be around especially to people who aren't longtime acquaintances, as readily attested by the Banshees' high turnover rate of guitarists and the testimony of other bands she toured with, I find her interviews as entertaining as her musical output.

The book also contains plenty of interesting sociological information about S&TB and the context surrounding their place in music history. For example the amount of influence the Banshees took not just from 1960's psychedelia in general and the German "Kosmische Musik" scene, even before they moved away from their early noisy punky sound to a poppier and more overtly psychedelic style. Their inspiration from horror/science-fiction film soundtracks is also described in great detail, with a significant part of the group's musical outside-the-box-thinking coming from an attempt to adapt the avant-garde compositional techniques found there into the context of rock instrumentation. Then we have the accounts of Siouxsie feuding on a personal level with almost every foundational Oi! band in particular the Cockney Rejects whom she had to share a practice space with at some point, when I was surprised to know they even had been on each others' "cultural radars". The aforementioned shift in style on "A Kiss in the Dreamhouse" also turns out to have been motivated in a large part by the band's dislike of most musicians actively citing them as inspiration. Indeed, one gets the impression that Siouxsie and the Banshees always kind of felt like outsiders to the music scenes they were ostensibly categorised under. Quite a bit of time is also spent on the sideproject The Creatures, which I need to listen to more.

I've been informed elsewhere that Siouxsie has a reputation for exaggerating, embellishing or otherwise having a rather creative approach to the band's past in interviews - something that does not surprise me considering her aforementioned trollish (bansheeish?) sense of humour. As necessary as it might have been to keep a proverbial intellectual saltshaker handy, this book has nonetheless made a satisfying companion piece to my appreciation of yet another interesting music group.