1978, punk was well and truly flourishing across England, offering a counter-movement to the disco movement drifting in from the Atlantic. Despite the Sex Pistols performing their last ever live show (until a 1996 reunion) at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in January, punk was in rude health. While the Sex Pistols may have burned like a supernova, bands like The Clash, The Jam, and The Damned had made forceful debuts the year before and showed no signs of disappearing. Yet, in November 78, Siouxsie and the Banshees released an album so spellbindingly inventive that it gave coinage to a new genre, post-punk, a genre that gets thrown at bands nowadays like confetti.
Ironically, Siouxsie Sioux and her friend Steven Severin had spent large portions of 1976 following the Sex Pistols, very much ensconced in the emerging punk scene. September 20th and 21st, 1976, represented a watershed moment in British punk with the 100 Club Punk Festival in London. It featured a string of bands who would go on to be luminaries in British punk; The Clash, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, and the Sex Pistols. Yet it was Siouxsie Sioux and her friend Steven Severin who provided the festival’s weirdest performance, a twenty-minute improvised set, with Siouxsie intermittently reciting the Lord’s Prayer. An act of performance art, the two neither knew nor could play any songs.
Yet, they moved on at pace, and by February 1977, Siouxsie and the Banshees were touring England, having recruited drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist Peter Fenton. Fenton was quickly replaced by John McKay, a completely self-taught musician who lacked Fenton’s rock sensibilities. The band performed on Tony Wilson’s So it Goes later in the year and made the first of many appearances for John Peel on BBC Radio. Despite the media breakthrough, the band remained unsigned, with one fan even starting a graffiti campaign in London, imploring labels to sign the band. Eventually, they were signed to Polydor in June 1978.
The band released their first single shortly after, the fantastic ‘Hong Kong Garden’, a homage to a Chinese takeaway in Bromley, while sadly referencing the racist activities of skinheads visiting there. The single reached number 7 on the UK Singles Chart, featuring a simple oriental style riff, the tinkling rhythm of the xylophone, and a catchy chorus; the song was more new wave than punk. It provided an early hint of the band’s talent, especially McKay’s unorthodox guitar skills, while the drumming had music journalists scratching their heads.
Recording for The Scream took place while ‘Hong Kong Garden’ entered the charts, taking just a week to record and three weeks to mix. The album was co-produced by Steve Lilywhite, who was chosen because of his innovative style of drum recording, asking Kenny Morris to play the bass and snare drum first, recording the cymbals and tom-toms later, thus creating an iconic drumming sound. The result was a twisting, restless masterpiece, an album of precise, controlled aggression, spacious in sound yet brimming with intent. It subverted traditional song structures with its angular guitars, distorted echoes, and bass-led rhythms. Instruments dovetail with each other in an ordered chaos, while the lyrics provided a haunting quality, largely influenced by the dystopic novels of J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs.
The opening track ‘Pure’ almost feels like it has been recorded in a cave, the guitars echoing ominously, Morris’s drums lurking in the background, Siouxsie’s voice drifting in from far off. ‘Jigsaw Feeling’ is similarly haunting, the pounding bass driving the song forwards, the guitars screeching in and out, never overwhelming the songs pounding rhythm. Siouxsie’s voice is the sharpest weapon, slicing through the noise. It’s a song of urgent, fragmented anguish, Siouxsie’s lyrics bordering on poetic ambiguity (“The impulse is quite meaningless/In a cerebral movement”). Fragmentation gives way to limbo in ‘Overground’, the overground representing banal normality where you “mingle in the modern families”, the track punctuated by these choppy, emphatic riffs.
‘Carcass’ is one of the band’s earlier songs, written when Fenton was still the guitarist. It’s an unconventional song about a Butcher falling in love with his meat. The track has the punkiest flavour of the album, filled with dark imagery and twisted humour (“Someone’s in cold storage seeking Heinz main courses”). The band then engages in a cover of the Beatles ‘Helter Skelter’, bending it beyond recognition. It’s superbly arranged, with its slow, cavernous build-up and screeching, reverbing guitars, Siouxsie’s voice rising with the gradual pounding of the drums and bringing some real venom. ‘Mirage’ is a song of manipulation, a losing grapple with reality, the song rattling along with a relentless urgency.
‘Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)’ was inspired by anti-nazi German artist John Heartfield’s photocollage Hurrah, die Butter ist Alle! (“Hurray, the Butter is finished!”), a satirical piece based on Hermann Göring’s quote, “Iron always made a strong nation; butter and lard only make people fat”. The song’s rhythm is built around Morris’s miltary-esque stacatto drumming, while Siouxsie’s vocals are at their most powerful, conveying a sense of contempt in just a yelp of her voice. Siouxsie matches Heartfield’s satire, singing on the chorus, “Metal is tough, metal will sheen/Metal will rule in my master scheme”, another takedown of Göring. ‘Nicotine Stain’ sees Siouxsie powerfully capture the feelings of nicotine withdrawal, her voice juddering and breaking while the guitars drift in and out, creating a sense of overwhelming mania.
‘Suburban Relapse’ sees the band capture the suburban dystopia of J.G. Ballard, as Siouxsie sings about being crushed and twisted into mania by suburban life, debating whether to “throw things at the neighbours/Expose myself to strangers”. Siouxsie’s voice perfectly captures the song’s mania, creating a poetic emphasis in how she mirrors the sound of the words, like how her voice snaps when singing “But my string snapped”. The track’s frenzied, jagged guitars enhance the madness, while the rhythm is all over the place, mirroring the disorder of the lyrics. The closing track, ‘Switch’, begins in an almost melodic fashion, yet it turns into arguably the album’s most twisted moment. The track is arranged into three separate parts, as Siouxsie tells three dark tales about a GP, a Scientist, and a Vicar swapping jobs, each resulting in disaster. It’s a fitting end to an album that flirts with the unhinged throughout.
The Scream was an album that altered the musical landscape, channelling the raw energy of punk and putting it through an atmospheric blender, twisting and warping it into something entirely new. A form of dystopic innovation, that has influenced countless bands, such as the Cure, Sonic Youth, and the Smiths. An iconic record.