|
|
 |
| |
| |
Siouxsie Sioux |
Still Sioux good to be on road
INTERVIEW - SIOUXSIE SIOUX
“DON’T box Siouxsie or she’ll box you back!” This was the stern warning the iconic hellraiser gave when I dared ask where she fell in the punk/goth debate.
Siouxsie Sioux may not like labels, but she’s earned a lot of them. And for good reason – in her long career, she’s waded into a fair few scrapes and confrontations.
She spent a night in Holloway prison after squaring up to some “heavy” cops and she was once told “never to darken the door” of Camden’s Dingwalls after sacking her guitarist.
Right now Siouxie is promoting her DVD Siouxsie Finale: The Last Mantaray and More Show, which is out on May 18, and documents the final show of her Mantaray tour at Camden’s Koko last September.
Siouxsie and Koko, aka The Music Machine, aka Camden Palace, go way back.
She says: “I knew the tour was coming to an end. We were going to go to South America and were thinking of filming up the Amazon, which would have been fantastic, and then the Mexican leg fell through, which meant the whole tour fell through. I realised we hadn’t documented everything. Siouxsie up the Amazon had a nice ring about it. We were going to play the Amazonia, which is this famous theatre on the Amazon where Carmen Miranda performed.”
She says she was “gutted” when it didn’t happen, but instead decided to add a final London date, to be filmed at Koko.
Siouxsie says: “I thought, ‘We’ve got to have a document because the tour has been going really great’. I hadn’t played Koko and it had a great sense of history for me, going full circle. I played the Music Machine before we were signed. It’s not up the Amazon, but it’s up Camden.
“In the 1970s it was quite popular. They had pool halls right in the gods, the stage was really high and the audience could go under it. It was a really weird set-up backstage, pretty crappy. It hadn’t really been looked after for a long time. Koko is the place renovated to its original glory as an old music hall theatre. It was 1977, we had our audience and we were blazing our trail.”
In the same year, Siouxsie recalls a “disastrous” set at Dingwalls with the original Banshees. She says: “I had a fight with the guitarist and sacked him onstage.”
The dispute was over “his guitar playing and having an orange lead,” she explains. “I was trying to pull the guitar off him, shouting, giving him daggers and pushing him and backstage it was all pandemonium. We left and he never played with us again.”
In the same year, she says: “I was arrested outside the Rainbow in Finsbury Park after a show with the Heartbreakers. We were just waiting for our car to pick us up and the police and the meatwagon pulled up.
“They started picking on the drummer from 999. They started getting really heavy so I just steamed in. I spent the night in Holloway jail – that was fun. I had a gig the next day and I appeared in court and was found guilty of obstructing the highway.”
The Banshees played their first ever gig at the 100 Club in Oxford Street.
Siouxsie adds: “I was thinking it would last as long as the show would last. I didn’t realise I would be doing it over 30 years later.” |
 |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
