I’ve mentioned it here a couple of times, but I’ve been continuing to enjoy listening to “Curious Creatures,” the podcast hosted by former Slits/Banshees/Creatures drummer Budgie and Lol Tolhurst, ex of The Cure. Not only are their insights and recollections of “Life After Punk” compelling and often hilarious (“You May Think You Know The Territory … But We Drew The Map!”), but they’ve had a slew of really great guests like Miki Berenyi of Lush, Kevin Haskins of Bauhaus/Love & Rockets, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem (who never shuts up), Juliane Regan of All About Eve, Rachel Goswell of Slowdive, Martin Atkins of Pil/Killing Joke/Ministry/Pigface and loads more. Find out more about it here. It’s well worth your time, if you’re a fan of this sorta stuff.
In any case, it regularly puts Siouxsie & The Banshees back into my brain, despite said band having largely called it quiet eons ago (although I did go see them on the bare-bones Seven Year Itch reunion tour, some centuries back, and then a solo show at the BB King Blues Bar on Times Square on the Mantaray tour in 2004, of which I honeslty remember absolutely nothing … although you can see pics of that gig here). Now divorced, Sioxsie and Budgie now live separate lives (he’s in Berlin, now, and started a family). Sioux is about to embark on her first tour (only over in Europe and the UK, so far) in decades, although she is slated to appear Stateside in May at the Goodbye Cruel World festival in California, alongside a host of her former peers like the Bunnymen, Love & Rockets, Billy Idol and several others. I am curious as to how that’ll go.
But in terms of their legacy, the music of Siouxsie & the Banshees still completely holds up, and I’ve been revisiting their catalog in depth, of late, notably singles like “Song from The Edge of the World” (which oddly never made it onto any of their LPs), their strange covers album Through the Looking Glass (which contained great treks through Sparks’ “This Town Ain’t Big Enough..” and Iggy’s “The Passenger,” but also an ill-considered rendition of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”) and other favorites. I’m also a big supporter of their album that came after that, Peepshow, which featured a host of great songs beyond the “big single” that was “Peek-a-Boo.”
” In any case, in the course of all this, I stumbled upon this old shot of Sioux and bass player/co-conspirator Steve Severin, and it immediately struck a familiar chord with me. While an otherwise perfectly banal photo of these two British Punk veterans, some eagle-eyed downtown New Yorkers might recognize the mural they’re standing in front of.
The pair are pictured in front of the south-facing façade of what used to be a Sloan’s supermarket on West 3rd Street between Mercer Street and Broadway in Manhattan, which featured a whimsical depiction of fake window filled with fresh produce and delectable comestibles. In later years, it looked like this
Today, that Sloan’s is long gone, and the space it occupied has been dormant and shuttered for years. After being repeatedly tagged up with graffiti, the mural was also painted over. Today, it looks like this.
Recent Comments