A Review of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Kaleidoscope”
Kaleidoscope is Souxsie and the Banshee’s third studio album, released in 1980, and remastered a few years ago. Bands from the Cure to Radiohead claim to have been influenced by them, and the reason is an album like Kaleidoscope. It is a mix-up of a variety of musical styles with several songs unified around mental illness as a topic. It is a departure from their earlier punk sound – better musically and more lyrically varied. It’s an album that’s fun and depressing at the same time. Quite an achievement!
From the start Souxsie and the Banshees were a leading post-punk band, their music typified for instance by Hong Kong Garden, a song fused with traditional Asian inspirations, and their lyrics a travelogue of different states of place and thought. Frankly, however, to today’s ears Hong Kong Garden is completely racist, with lyrics about “slanted eyes” and “a race of bodies small in size,” but 1978 was a different time, I guess. In any case, it’s with Kaleidoscope that the band made a significant turn.
Drummer Kenny Morris and lead guitarist John McKay quit the band at the very start of a 1979 tour – apparently caused by a blow-up during a record store autograph session. The gig that night was with the Cure who were the openers. Because of the loss of half the band the Cure extended their set and the two remaining members, Souxsie and Steven Severin, joined the Cure on stage for a 20-minute version of The Lord’s Prayer. That alone will get you into the punk hall of fame.
Miles Copeland, Manager of the Police and co-founder of I.R.S. Records, home to REM, the Go Go’s, Bangles, Dead Kennedy’s, and a host of other top shelf 1980’s bands, in his new memoir Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: My Life in the Music Business, tells the story of an early tour by the Banshees. Miles calls a roadie to ask that he help tune their instruments before their show. The roadie calls back, complains he can’t help them and says, “Miles, the band can’t fucking play.” But that was the thing – it was the energy and that mattered. In their early days, Souxsie and the Banshees might have played only three chords (all badly according to Copeland), but they could set up quickly, they didn’t have tons of equipment, people responded, and they had some kick-ass songs. For a take on what made it work, and what didn’t work, check out an early version of The Lord’s Prayer.
After the break from McKay and Morris, Souxsie and the Banshees kept on going – and for the better. Guitarist John McGeoch and new drummer Budgie would soon join the band, resulting in a transformation that would lead to three rock-solid albums: Kaleidoscope, Juje and A Kiss in the Dreamhouse. We take on Kaleidoscope.
Kaleidoscope is a fascinating album. The songs are all over the place but the lyrics are in many ways thematically unified. In Kaleidoscope Souxsie and the Banshees kept the music tight and generally up- beat, but the lyrics are dark and deep. Hits Happy House and Christine were straight-on tracks about an insane asylum and multiple personality disorder. Happy House: “We’ve come to scream in the happy house/We’re in a dream in the happy house,” and for the same reason that few jerks think of themselves as jerks an insane person can rant “We’re all quite sane.”
Christine is a musical recounting of the life of schizophrenic Christine Costner-Sizemore (as in All About Eve), two of her personalities, the strawberry girl and the banana split lady referenced explicitly in the lyric, with her many other personalities unfolding in song: “This big eyed girl sees her faces unfurl/Now she’s in purple, now she’s the turtle…disintegrating.”
Tenant tells the story of one’s other voice occupying your head, of clanging radiators, and of crawling on all fours upon cushioned floors. It’s a dystopic beat, very pared down, the hum in your head the only thing realized in a land of alienation and paranoia. Trophy leads with “headhunters” and “headshrinkers,” their game hung as trophies to distant and fading cheers in a grand hall, literally the remains of the sane left to rot (having been “shut away too long”).
These are some pretty intense songs, songs that tell stories not often told. How interesting that the first song on Side A is Happy House. There’s nothing really happy about any of these songs, and that’s the point. McGeoth and Budgie, along with Severin and Souxsie (who would soon learn to play the guitar) put together some very tight rock that doesn’t stray too far from tradition; they give you a bouncing beat’s view of depression.
The problem is never listen to the Velvet Underground as you work through a review of another band or another band’s album. Nothing compares to the Velvet’s Banana album, so it is arguably very unfair to review any Souxsie and the Banshees’ work with the Velvets in the back of your mind. But that’s life. All music is comparable to other music; context and contrast are key, and variety is the spice of life. There is variety in Kaleidoscope, but to today’s ears it sounds tinny, poorly produced with a clipped harshness – very typical of early to mid 80’s, tunes soon to be organized around and for the MTV platform, a perfect vehicle to white-wash some very bad musicianship. Granted that judgment is likely influenced by comparison in time with the Banana album but it is what it is. This is not to say the songs on Kaleidiscope are bad songs or it is a bad album. Quite the contrary is true, but my ears are into the production values of today. Sorry.
In any case, people find themselves in music; they find a narrative that frames their perspective on their world. Ginger believes that the power of music and the arts is the power to shape our world around a non-cynical vision of the future. There is however always the question what does music have to do with empowerment; what do the arts have to do with empowerment? The answer is that having agency in one’s life is a product of knowledge, faith and action. Music and the arts are direct contributors to all three of these elements, and music and the arts give us agency. Our responsibility as a species is to make something of our agency.
It is Souxsie and the Banshees’ work on Kaleidoscope that illustrates the power of music.
What Souxsie and the Banshees did was give voice to a group of people comfortable in the dark, comfortable with the idea that sanity is in some ways a question of one’s comfort level. The punk scene might have challenged the concept of “appropriate behavior.” Souxsie and the Banshee’s challenged the concept of appropriate subject matter. It was not that it was dark; it was that it was different. They pushed it, and that’s cool.
