WAS's Awesome New Wave Song(s) Of The Week #13: Siouxie & The Banshees - Cities In Dust, The Passenger, and Fear Of The Unknown

This week’s Awesome New Wave Song is not just one song… it’s an Awesome Trifecta !   

There are artists who are considered punk, or post-punk, or new wave, or goth, or alternative, or dance, or trance  … but how many can do them all?   And even rarer … do them all well?   These week we celebrate a band that was there at the birth of all of those genres…  and influenced many others.

Siouxsie Sioux started her career as a Sex Pistols fan (and was part of their famous expletive-laden BBC interview video in 1976).  She was doing goth before it even had a name, wearing dark eye makeup and bondage attire to London clubs.   By 1977 she had her own band, Siouxsie & The Banshees (SATB) and started a 20 year run with them that constantly generated innovative singles, albums and videos.  Like any artist that constantly tries different things, some of their music was not terrific... but when they nailed something it was beyond fantastic.  A song off their fifth album was so good that shoegazer band Slowdive named themselves after it!

My favorite SATB songs start at their seventh release Tinderbox in 1986.  That’s where “Cities in Dust” is found, a darkly vivid and atmospheric song about Pompeii.  Odd tribal rhythms, mysterious chiming and gruesome imagery make the song unique especially for the time…. very few releases have ever painted a dense and spooky ambience with sinister sonic discord so well.

In 1987 they released “Through the Looking Glass”, a covers album where they out-Iggied Iggy Pop.  While his original version of “The Passenger” is a sparse and classic reading, SATB kicks it up several notches, even adding terrific backing horns… it could have gone horribly wrong but instead works perfectly and I prefer her version.  And even better is the video … while the original SATB video has much better sound (and has the audio synced to the video) -  the version below is my favorite as it was filmed at Portmeirion, Wales … which is of course where the best TV series of all time, “The Prisoner” was filmed in the late 1960s.  Good old Number Six and Rover even have a cameo in the video!

Then in 1991 SATB released Superstition which had a hit single “Kiss Them For Me” … but the real star of this album was “Fear (of the Unknown)” … a song produced by Stephen Hague (he’s everywhere!) that not only outdid your typical attempts at the style by artists native to it, it also was an homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo.  The song’s dense vibe and trance feel charted on both the Modern Rock AND the Hot Dance Club Play charts.  And if all that wasn't enough, in the video, a lithe and sexy 34-year old Siouxsie climbs a building in heels, sans goth makeup, and proves once again that she is one of the most gorgeous creatures ever.  I mean, just look at that butt!   I could watch that snippet of her running in place all day… run, Siouxsie, run!

-WAS