Siouxsie Sioux Walked On Stage Without a Band
On 20 September 1976, Siouxsie Sioux played her first concert with a band that had existed for a few hours, no songs written, no rehearsal, in front of a room that did not know what to do with her. By the end of it the outline of a new kind of music was on the table. She has spent the half-century since refusing to be thanked for it.
Twenty minutes at the 100 Club
The 100 Club Punk Festival in London had a hole in the bill when a scheduled act dropped out. Siouxsie, then a fixture of the scene that hung around Vivienne Westwood's King's Road shop, offered to fill it. She assembled a group on the spot. Steven Severin on bass, a young Sid Vicious on drums, Marco Pirroni on guitar. None of them had played together. They had nothing prepared.
What they did was improvise for around twenty minutes over a single thudding drumbeat, built around Siouxsie reciting the Lord's Prayer and threading in scraps of "Twist and Shout" and a German anthem. Johnny Rotten pogoed in the crowd. The set ended at the exact moment Sid Vicious decided to stop drumming, and so did the rest of the band. It split the room, and it is now cited as one of the places post-punk actually begins.
The Bromley Contingent and the broadcast that backfired
Siouxsie came up through the Bromley Contingent, a cluster of suburban kids who followed the Sex Pistols and dressed to unsettle the high street. She was in the room for the moment that put punk on every front page in Britain. In December 1976 the Pistols went on Bill Grundy's early-evening television show, and after Grundy made a leering remark to Siouxsie on air, Steve Jones called him a dirty old man. The swearing that followed became a national scandal and a free advertisement. The press meant to bury the scene and instead announced it.
The genre she refused
Siouxsie and the Banshees went on to make some of the most influential records of the next two decades, and her look and voice became the template a whole genre copied. She is routinely called the godmother of goth, and she has spent years rejecting the title, pointing out that she was making something of her own and never asked to be the founder of anybody else's subculture. The label stuck anyway, which is its own kind of proof.
Why she ends up on a shirt
Siouxsie did not wait for permission, a record deal or a finished song. She took an empty slot and built something out of nerve, and when the result turned into a movement she declined to manage the franchise. Goth walked in the door behind her, and she never once held it open.
The Siouxsie tee renders her the way the records do, the kohl-black eyes, white on black, no name printed underneath. It is for the people who already owned the albums, and who understand that the ones who start something are usually too busy to take the credit for it.
Take the nerve home. Siouxsie post-punk tee.
Related: Cherry Bomb, another band of teenagers who had to argue for the stage. The Pistols turn up sideways on the UX Pistols tee.
She appears again in 15 Women Who Were Right Too Early.
