In 1986, the UK’s punk motion celebrated its tenth anniversary. Inevitably, some marked the event, not least Manchester’s Manufacturing unit Information who staged a sequence of media-friendly occasions and concert events dubbed “Festival Of The Tenth Summer.” Others had much less curiosity in trying again. Actually, one of many authentic motion’s largest acts, Siouxsie & The Banshees had no truck by any means with such tawdry retrospectives. The band was releasing its seventh studio album, Tinderbox, and continued to look to the longer term. “We find nostalgia repulsive,” vocalist Siouxsie Sioux mentioned, emphasizing the purpose in an interview with UK music journalist Martin Aston within the spring of 1986. “Personally, I don’t like looking back on anything.”
The Banshees weren’t precisely punk, in any case. Although first rising to prominence on account of Siouxsie and bassist Steve Severin’s hyperlinks with Intercourse Pistols, the band’s 1978 debut, The Scream, was a stark, monochromatic affair that pushed approach past the confines of punk. Then, after the media ordained Siouxsie because the Excessive Priestess of Goth in the course of the early 80s, the Banshees responded with Hyaena: a lush, but eclectic providing that includes songs embellished with brass, keyboards, and even the London Symphonic Orchestra on the album’s second single “Dazzle.”
Hearken to Siouxsie & The Banshees’ Tinderbox now.
The band was as soon as once more decided to maneuver ahead with Hyaena’s follow-up, Tinderbox. Their inner dynamic had modified after the departure of guitarist Robert Smith (who wished to commit all his energies to his different band, The Treatment), and his place was taken by John Valentine Carruthers: a Yorkshire-born musician who performed with Sheffield post-punk outfit Clock DVA previous to becoming a member of the Banshees.
Carruthers made his debut on his new band’s The Thorn EP in the course of the fall of 1984, earlier than the Banshees started engaged on their subsequent album in earnest. They decamped to Berlin’s Hansa Ton Studios (the identical advanced that hothoused David Bowie’s “Heroes” and Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life), whereas additionally venturing out to satisfy touring commitments in the course of the summer season and fall of 1985. After in depth rehearsal, the band was well-drilled and the periods went down easily, with the file’s title, Tinderbox, influencing at the very least a few of its content material.
“It’s called Tinderbox because everything seemed to happen either around situations or the effect of weather,” Siouxsie revealed in a March 1986 Melody Maker interview. Extremes in local weather straight impressed a number of of Tinderbox’s greatest tracks, not least the brooding “92°” and the album’s first single “Cities In Dust.” Launched by a pattern from the 1953 sci-fi horror movie It Got here From Out Of House, the previous was influenced by one of many brief tales in novelist Ray Bradbury’s October Nation, whereby two previous males witness murders and insanity allegedly sparked by the temperature hitting 92°.
The atypically dancefloor-friendly “Cities In Dust,” in the meantime, was impressed by the band’s then-recent go to to Pompeii – the Historical Roman metropolis buried beneath volcanic ash following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79. “There’s a lot of tourism in Pompeii, but the place itself transcends all that,” Siouxsie instructed Creem journal in October 1986. “You can think you’re the only person there. It’s quite immense, and seeing the bodies petrified by the volcanic ash had a strong effect on me. I wrote the lyrics when we returned to London from Italy and dedicated it to one of the petrified bodies. It almost looked as if there was someone underneath this kind of plaster cover. I almost expected it to get up and move.”
Elsewhere, the Banshees performed to their strengths on extra usually anthemic, guitar-driven fare corresponding to “Cannons,” “Land’s End” and the album’s dramatic second single “Candyman,” even when the latter tune’s lyric tackled a taboo topic and was usually misrepresented. “It’s really to do with grown ups’ abuse of children’s trust,” Siouxsie defined in a contemporaneous Melody Maker interview. “Whether it’s sexual or not, the innocence and dependency as well. I just find anything to do with that is repulsive.” She added, “Our manager thought it was about drugs, the Candyman being the supplier or whatever. I suppose it can be translated as that, if you’re thinking about people being used that way.”
Brave lyrical issues or not, Tinderbox emerged because the Banshees’ most cohesive – and direct – set of songs to this point. Its darkish, but radio-friendly sound struck a chord at a time when different rising UK alt-rock acts corresponding to Echo & The Bunnymen and Easy Minds have been gaining traction within the mainstream. Launched by Polydor within the UK, the album peaked at No. 13 within the UK, whereas its US launch – by means of Geffen – additionally put up a powerful exhibiting, peaking contained in the High 100 of the Billboard 200. Certainly, with Tinderbox, Siouxsie & The Banshees had once more shaken issues up with a recent, vibrant file which proved they have been completely proper to remain centered on the longer term at a time after they might so simply have succumbed to the lure of the previous.
Hearken to Siouxsie & The Banshees’ Tinderbox now.
