Featured Artist

Siouxsie Sioux

The selection of Siouxsie Sioux as the subject of Fader magazine’s recent Icon Issue was entirely fitting, because the punk era produced no more iconic a figure than the woman born Susan Janet Ballion. Siouxsie’s influence was, and continues to be, enormously wide-ranging, from her fiercely individual approach to singing to her provocative sense of style, which continues to be emulated in punk and goth fashion. And during its adventurous 20-year run, Siouxsie and the Banshees created a groundbreaking body of work whose influence can be heard in the music of such artists as Massive Attack, Tricky, Jeff Buckley, LCD Soundsystem and TV on the Radio, whose Dave Sitek made a number of illuminating points in the Fader profile.

“I’ve always tried to make a song that begins like ‘Kiss Them for Me,’” Sitek stated. “I think songs like ‘I Was a Lover’ or ‘Wash The Day Away’ came from that element-of-surprise mode, where all of a sudden this giant drum comes in and you’re like, what the fuck?! That record was the first one where I was like, okay, even my friends who don’t know who The Cure or Sonic Youth are, they’re going to fall for this. I feel like that transition into that record was a relief for me. Really beautiful music was always considered too weird by the normal kids, and that was the first example where I thought, we’ve got them, they’re hooked! I watched people dance to that song, people who had never heard of any of the music that I listened to, they heard that music in a club and went crazy.”

Siouxsie emerged as both a wholly original rock star and fierce cultural revolutionary with her very first performance, unleashing a caterwauling version of “The Lords Prayer” at the Malcolm McLaren-organized 100 Club Punk Festival in 1976, with her soon-to-be Banshees cohort Steve Severin on bass and Sid Vicious on drums. Though she didn’t know it at the time, Sioxsie had just created the prototype for the band she would lead for the next two decades.

The group appeared fully blown a few months later, challenging audiences with a sound that was widely viewed as revolutionary even during that barrier-smashing era, drawing on influences as disparate as the Velvet Underground, Can, Low-era Bowie and Crash author J.G. Ballard.
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