walking upstream…
Siouxsie and the Banshees
photo: original uploader was mantaray100 at en.wikipedia · public domain ↗Siouxsie and the Banshees
sourcesRecord Collector — Suburban Relapse · Louder Than War — Steve Severin's Top 10 Albums, #5 Diamond Dogs (Bowie testimony) · Louder Than War — Steve Severin's Top 10 Albums, #7 Ege Bamyasi (Can testimony) · This Is Not Retro — Siouxsie Sioux Interview (rejection of the punk label) · Wikipedia — Through the Looking Glass (confirms the Roxy Music "Sea Breezes" cover and covers-album context)
In September 1976, a mutual friend's tip put unknown teenagers Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin on a stage together for the first time: a scavenged, one-off band, with Sid Vicious on drums, filling a spare slot at London's 100 Club punk festival. It became rock's most retold origin story. But neither founder ever called it a sound: Siouxsie later said the band "always distanced" itself from the punk label, and Severin was blunter still, describing how they instead took on "the baton of glamorous art rock — Bowie and Roxy Music — while incorporating a love for Can, Kraftwerk and Neu." What followed was two decades of icy, theatrical art-rock, chanted vocals over tribal drums and dissonant guitar, that helped invent goth without ever claiming the word.
the sound in question
1981
SpellboundSiouxsie and the Banshees
walk the tributaries ↓
David Bowie1970s · Art rock / Glam rock
In 1972, a bedridden teenage Siouxsie watched David Bowie perform "Starman" on Top of the Pops from a hospital TV room. "It was like I was being woken up, like being let out of a chrysalis," she told Mojo decades later. "I don't know where I'd be if it wasn't for David Bowie... I don't think punk would have happened without him." Fifteen years on, Bowie asked the Banshees to open for him in Anaheim on his Glass Spider tour — proof the debt had turned into a working relationship, not just a fan's memory.
listen: upstream & heresource: Mojo — David Bowie Remembered (Siouxsie Sioux's Bowie tribute) ↗
1974
Diamond DogsDavid Bowie
1980
IsraelSiouxsie and the Banshees
listen forSeverin singled out Diamond Dogs, Bowie's dystopian 1974 concept album, as his favorite Bowie record. Cue its title track: a stalking, half-spoken vocal riding a theatrical, brass-streaked groove built for a stage set rather than a chart hit. Then play "Israel" — the same cinematic, doom-glam pulse, Siouxsie gliding over a widescreen arrangement instead of a verse-chorus hook, as if she'd absorbed the whole persona along with the sound.
Roxy Music1970s–80s · Art rock / Glam rock / Sophisti-pop
Siouxsie and Severin's creative partnership dates to one night: Roxy Music's show at Wembley Arena in October 1975. Siouxsie hired a costume specially for it — "a cross between a mermaid and a chorus girl — purple sequins with a fish-tail train" — and rode the train into London wearing it rather than change at the station. It was proof theatrical excess and pop could share a stage, a lesson she carried straight into the Banshees' own stagecraft. Twelve years later, the band paid the debt outright, covering Roxy's "Sea Breezes" on an all-covers album.
listen: upstream & heresource: The Guardian — Her dark materials (Bowie/Roxy Music/Can testimony, Wembley costume anecdote) ↗
1972
Sea BreezesRoxy Music
1987
Sea BreezesSiouxsie and the Banshees
listen forPlay Roxy Music's "Sea Breezes" first: a hushed, mournful verse that erupts, two minutes in, into a crashing, sax-streaked instrumental swell before receding again. The Banshees' 1987 version keeps that exact swoon-to-crash architecture but sings it colder — Siouxsie's voice sits further back in the mix, the romantic ache of Roxy singer Bryan Ferry's original replaced by her detached, ceremonial delivery.
Can1970s · Krautrock / Experimental rock / Psychedelic rock
Severin traces one specific night: Can's first UK show, at Brunel University in 1973. "They came on and just played nonstop for two hours, each piece merging straight into the next," he remembered. "It had the most mesmerising effect on the audience. That's what I wanted to achieve with the Banshees." It's the plainest cause-and-effect claim in the band's whole history — and the hardest one to point to on record, since the Banshees never covered a Can song. The debt is in the ambition, not a riff.
listen: upstream & here
1971
HalleluhwahCan
1981
Voodoo DollySiouxsie and the Banshees
listen forCan's "Halleluhwah," from the krautrock landmark Tago Mago, rides one hypnotic bass-and-drum pattern for over eighteen minutes, mutating by tiny increments instead of building to a chorus — precisely the quality Severin singled out from that 1973 show. The Banshees' "Voodoo Dolly," the incantatory closer of 1981's Juju, does the same trick in miniature: a tribal drum figure loops underneath while Siouxsie's vocal circles and distorts, the song less a story than a trance you're pulled into and only slowly let out of.