Would some of you folks been happier if she chose ... ‘Happy’?
“I do not know Siouxsie, but I ask around to see if she would have any interest in duetting with me. Her manager responds, and I send her four covers to choose from, being Happy (Nancy Sinatra),
Loneliness remembers what happiness forgets (Dionne Warwick), Interlude (Timi Yuro) and Morning starship (Jobriath). I call Siouxsie at her home in Condom in France, and each time she recognizes my voice there comes a small, impatient sigh as if I’d just interrupted her evening prayer. ’Can’t we do something off Ziggy Stardust, like The prettiest star?’ she suggests. 'The prettiest star wasn’t on Ziggy Stardust,’ Mr Know-all returns. Siouxsie stiffens, and we shall never be friends. She is very much as I had expected – a physical blancmange that is six parts Kate O'Mara, two parts Myra Hindley and two parts Fenella Fielding. She had replaced Croydon for the Black Forest, and she appears to hate even the people that she likes. She looks at everyone and everything only with a sense of what is due to her, and she might stare you out as you lay dying on a zebra crossing. She is certain that her historical value outstrips Queen Victoria’s (which, in my meager opinion, it actually does), and she has a duty to no one. Not for a moment will she forget that she is Siouxsie, who might pick fights with people whom her male friends would then beat up. Your mind’s eye can see her in 1972, outside the pubs of Shirley, lines of cruelty already set in stone, full of sexless decorative art, plying very strange cargo – you’re the pride of our street; black magic spun out and on the march – an Eve cigarette held aloft. The overground train to Victoria leaves behind the oak Crescents and Acacia Avenues of Bless This House and Terry and June, where a better edition of Susan could never be constructed. It was never a question of becoming a pop singer, more a matter of entering the field of argument; a Nico iceburg who hates blasé dolls, and who will be very careful about whom she is photographed with. There are no penetrating opinions forthcoming, but Siouxsie the star is embarrassed by women, and possibly angry because she is one. What slips out is cultivated offensiveness and, thankfully, a stabbing trail of quite outstanding
recordings and Siouxsie stomps through with zero emotional involvement and maintains this indifference for twenty very successful years. Siouxsie doesn’t mind if she poisons the world, and here lies the appeal of the one who had said No as the millions of Yes girls smiled their way into the Top of the Pops cameras. The music she makes is a strict ice-bath of nightmare and caution, the hanging
valleys of Bern – a black-eyed shopgirl hidden somewhere in the whistling cathedral towers of Notre Dame, refusing to be dragged back to Boots the Chemist, where both her shift and her insurance stamps remain. Siouxsie chooses Timi Yuro’s Interlude, and she pulls up at Hook End Manor recording studio in a black Mercedes. She is carrying her own microphone and she wants to get on with it minus any familiar
chit-chat. In the event, she is a seasoned professional of exact run-throughs and topnotch precision. there is only one crack in the alabaster as she listens to her final take and softly asks me, 'Are you sure it’s OK?’ it is the solitary moment when the Soviet Statue breathes. One can suddenly imagine real blood in Siouxsie’s veins – and yet, perhaps not.
I am now living at 18 Regent’s Park
Terrace, half-Camden, half-Regent’s Park, and Siouxsie appears to discuss a video treatment for Interlude. We are gathered with a video director and her assistants, whilst Murray Chalmers makes tea. Siouxsie is wearing reflective sunglasses so that her eyes are not visible to anyone, and instantly her demands are barked out with a voice of punished ferocity. Within eight seconds she seems to have alienated everyone in the room, and as Murray fiddles about with cups and saucers his eyes roll ceilingwards each time Godizlla snaps out her stipulations. ’Look,’ she says to no one in particular, ’I haven’t got time for this, I’ve got to be writing some B-sides,’ and we all wonder what on earth she is talking about. The video crew visible sink as Siouxsie outlines her suggestion for the video – a treatment which sees me walking through a park only for Siouxsie to emerge throwing stones at me, to which I evidently accept. The move is a crafty pecking-order trample that would emphasize Siouxsie’s natural superiority to the world, whereas I, quite clearly, would be seen as a spectacle of misfortune. The suggestion is met by a terrified silence, not least of all because it is delivered with a look of advanced misery from Eve white/Eve black.
Aware that she is coming across as a slightly glitzy version of sheer misery, Siouxsie advances to leave – too soon, unresolved, yet getting the drift. On the doorstep she asks me whether right or left would be the best direction to find a taxi, and although her best bet would be left, I suggest she turns right. It is churlish of me, but it is she who has set the pace. I return to the room
where everyone sits in a circle, their jaws agape and their eyes sore at the attack of the beast from fifty thousand fathoms. it is disheartening, but there it is.”