The Banshees
Biography
Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin didn't even know how to play their instruments when they walked onto the stage at the 100 Club Punk Festival in '76. They just had Sid Vicious on drums and a twenty-minute improvisational screech through the Lord’s Prayer to annoy the purists. That’s the Banshees DNA right there—pure provocation backed by an total refusal to do what the industry expected. By the time they got Steve Lillywhite to produce 'The Scream' in '78, they’d traded the amateur hour for a cold, jagged architecture built on Kenny Morris’s floor-tom-heavy drumming and John McKay’s flanged-out guitar scratch. The middle years were a revolving door of guitarists that would’ve killed any other band. You had Robert Smith pulling double duty between the Banshees and The Cure, and John McGeoch bringing that layered, psychedelic shimmer to 'JuJu' before he drank himself out of the lineup. They hit a wall with 'The Rapture' in '95—John Cale produced it, and while it should’ve been a high-art knockout, it felt like a band running out of oxygen. They called it quits before they could become a nostalgia act, which is more than you can say for most of their peers.