Chart entered : 26 August 1978
Chart peak : 7
Number of hits : 29 ( some members had additional hits in other guises )
There's a lot of firsts here. Besides being the band's debut single , it was the first record any of its members had made. Arguably, it was the first post-punk hit, definitely the first to make the Top 10. It was also the first hit for producer Steve Lillywhite.
Susan Ballion was born in Kent in 1957 to a Belgian father and English mother . She had a difficult childhood marked by alcoholism, sexual abuse, illness and death. In 1975, while working as a waitress, she met Stephen Bailey ( born 1955 ) at a Roxy Music concert and they started following the Sex Pistols as part of a larger group of suburbanites christened by journalist Caroline Coon the "Bromley Contingent", a term Bailey subsequently disowned. Susan's original look, black spiky hair, fishnet stockings, swastika armbands ( for which she was beaten up in Paris ) was highly influential on punk fashion. In September 1976 she and Bailey formed a makeshift band to "play" the 100 Club Punk Festival despite having no songs or musical experience. With the aid of hastily recruited volunteers in the form of guitarist Marco Pirroni and Sid Vicious on drums, they bluffed their way through a 20 minute improvisation around the Lord's Prayer. Susan re-christened herself Siouxsie Sioux while Steve ( on bass ) became Steve Havoc although he later adopted the more arty surname Severin derived from the Velvet Underground's Venus In Furs .
The Pistols welcomed her adherence and invited her along to the Today interview in December 1976 where she was the inadvertent catalyst for Steve Jones's expletives when Bill Grundy tried chatting her up ( though she was handling Grundy fine on her own ) . Perhaps wisely Siouxsie ( as we shall now call her ) and Steve distanced themselves from the Pistols after that and started working on their own music.
They picked up art student Kenny Morris ( born 1957 ) and a guitarist Peter Fenton in January 1977 but the latter proved far too traditional for their tastes and in July he was replaced by another art student John McKay. The band quickly became a top live draw in London and the record companies started sniffing around them. Siouxsie was anxious that any deal should give them full artistic control and held off from signing contracts that fell short of her ideal. An enthusiastic fan misreading the situation took a pot of paint to some of the record companies' offices and daubed "Sign the Banshees ! Do It Now ! " on the outside walls, an event that has been fondly exaggerated over the years. Polydor eventually came up with the right deal and they signed in June.
"Hong Kong Garden" was already a live favourite. The oriental melody first picked out on a xylophone and then searingly repeated on the guitar was John's contribution. Siouxsie's lyrics were inspired by the stoicism of the staff at a Chinese restaurant of that name while under racist fire from skinhead customers. They are not , by today's standards , politically correct ( and this would be a recurring feature of their material ) although I have now noted that the lyric I'd always heard as "a race of bullies small in size" actually says the less offensive "a race of bodies ". She also gets China and Japan a bit mixe up with the line "Place your yens on the counter please". The imperious hauteur of Siouxsie's voice and the controlled abrasiveness of John's guitar along with the nagging pulse of Steve's bassline sounded startlingly fresh and then they up the ante with an instrumental coda of increasing pace and ferocity until a gong brings proceedings to a close.
It was a brilliant debut and completed the grand slam of getting Single of the Week in all four of the music weeklies. More importantly it went straight to daytime play on Radio One, by-passing the usual slow progression from Peel to Bates , where it couldn't fail to make a major impression. And yet , like Wuthering Heights earlier in the year, there's a sense in which it was too good, an impossibly hard act to follow. In commercial terms the band would only surpass it with a Beatles cover five years later and most of their subsequent singles didn't get anywhere near the Top 10. That's perhaps the price you pay for creating something so epochal so soon.
I'm a big fan of their work in perhaps one of their less-commerical periods (with John McGeogh on guitar), but this a great single despite the clunky lyrics.
ReplyDeleteI gather the graffiti-dabbler in question was one Les Mills, who worked as part of the band's crew and would later go on to manage the Psychedelic Furs.
I didn't know that - were the band complicit in the vandalism then ?
ReplyDeleteP.S. Another McGeoch-connected artist crops up next post but one.
I'm not sure the band themselves were in "on it", but I suspect their management may have been aware.
ReplyDeleteYour "first post-punk" comment is interesting, as we've obviously had other elements like Squeeze using a synth and Costello's "Watching the Detectives" taking reggae influences - but this is the first time we've seen a band who were clearly punk, but also moving quickly away from it into something else (The Jam were retreating back into their mod influences around this time).