Spellbound

Is there anything better than a record shop? I know that they're a dying breed, really, but I can still spend hours in them, pouring through the racks, browsing, digging, comparing, gratifying my hunter-gatherer instincts, though with Strawberry Alarm Clock compilations as the reward instead of mushrooms and berries. Even though it's frustrating when you cannot find one thing you came in for - god, it's pathetic when the flagship shop for the biggest and oldest record shop in Britain doesn't seem to carry a new release - it's still such an engaging passtime. So what if I've become the mythical £50 Woman, who goes into HMV every month on payday and drops £50 on buying random... stuff. I love it.

I had a shopping list - Electrik Red's How To Be A Lady Volume One, Brian Eno's Here Come The Warm Jets, Ellen Allien and Apparat's Orchestra Of Bubbles - but couldn't find any of it.

So instead, I bought Allien's Thrills instead, Orbital's Green Album (I'm slowly replacing all my former cassettes with CD), Steve Hillage's Green (another prog classic that is constantly namechecked by ambient electronic artists, so I thought it was worth investigating, considering how much I love Fish Rising) and, on impulse, mainly for DJing purposes, the Greatest Hits of Siouxsie and the Banshees.

I mean, seriously, you can never go wrong playing a bit of Siouxsie for women Of A Certain Age. We *all* had that haircut or did our eye makeup a little bit like that, at some point in the 80s, especially if you've ever been anywhere near an art school.

Now, lots of this stuff, I have not heard in 15, 20 years. I was wondering how it had aged. I mean, I became a bit of a snob when I was growing out of Goth, and I'm sad to admit that Siouxsie was one of those artists who got quite a bit of popularity among the wrong people, and I'm ashamed to admit, I may have thrown around the phrase "sell out" at one point or another.



Cities In Dust is the first single I can actually remember when it came out, remember spinning around on the dance floor on Diaper Night at the local Punque Rocke nightclub, the QE2. Hey, it's what they did with Monday nights, when they couldn't get any adults in - they opened it up to teenagers and let them in the back on handstamps. Some of my earliest and still fondest clubbing memories took place on that floor. And oh god, it still sounds good, still sounds weird and exotic, all those chiming tones and Oriental-sounding pentatonic scales. And Siouxsie's weird, voice floating above it like some kind of exotic bird of prey, that yodeling note-jump so unexpected it's almost atonal, and yet totally perfect.



And then Peek-A-Boo - I was a bit older, and a bit sneery of the new kids that started getting into them with this album. The Cure had definitely dropped off beyond the pale with Kick Me, Kick Me, Kick Me - my teenage snobbery thought the Banshees were next, and wrote this off as music for poseurs. Listening to it now, I'm struck by how *weird* it sounds, all those odd percussive textures - and the main riff of the song is actually backwards. Oh, my teenage self, you were so wrong. How could something so out there, so unexpected, so adventurous, possibly be a sell-out, no matter how popular it proved with the rich kids who sneered at your shoes? It's an odd, rollicking romp of a song, all strung together with this sort of rag-time pop melody strung over the top.

The album spirals into all the classic singles - Happy House, Christine, Israel, Spellbound - was there ever a more perfect string of singles? And Siouxsie, what a glamourous bitch! No matter how often her look was copied by the art school girls, she remained an utterly individual icon - an antidote to the identikit blonde frontgirls of the 80s. And her voice - that unique, expressive wail - as distinctive and iconic and instantly recognisable as Johnny Rotten or Iggy Pop, as much a defining Voice Of A Generation. (This is really why I could never get excited by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs - whatever, I've heard this before, done WAY better - Karen O simply isn't worthy to kiss Siouxsie's bondage boots.)



Ah, Kiss Them For Me. By this time, I was *over* The Banshees. I'd moved on to proper music, like My Bloody Valentine and Spacemen 3 and stuff. What a fucking fool I was. This song is flawless, a marriage of Bollywood strings and faded 1920s glamour. The slight trills in Sioux's voice at the end of every phrase echoed by the quavering sitar flourishes. Was Screamadelica really so much better than this? It bloody well was not.

It's a funny thing, nostalgia. I go back and listen to so many albums from my youth, and I'm shocked at how dated and silly they sound. (Bits of Love and Rockets, who I loved more than life itself at one point, don't always stand up.) And yet, I go back and listen to this, something my teenage indie snobbery had written off, and it sounds as fresh and intriguing and enticing as the day it was written.

Never trust memories, they're false, they lie, they twist and distort, the emotion, the experiences you went through when you first heard the music can totally colour your perception of it. But that changes with distance. This music is truly magnificent.

"Follow in the footsteps of a red dawn, dance, we are entranced... spellbound!"