Best (February '90)

HUMAN CREATURES

under her rags of high priestess, known for her deleterious rock'n'roll, siouxsie hides an all simple & rather warm big young girl when she relates to Emmanuelle Debaussart her excitement of creatures'singer. creatures is not the last trendy band from uk but a familiar long standing duet that from time to time offers a solo excursion. a spring return that blends primal impulses & natural grace in a music based on percussions, ruled by a sensual voice, cradled by the warm blow of a brass section. the creatures are nothing less than siouxsie sioux, the ex-batcave priestess & budgie, her ever lasting accomplice & banshees drummer. two bands that evolve in strictly separated spaces.

Siouxsie: 'henceforward come what may, the banshees are a part of ourselves & to get rid of it would be like an amputation. the creatures to one side is something lighter, something less precious. it's a new approach & it helps the banshees to regenerate to avoid falling in routine. going back to square one disregarding your history has got positive sides. sometimes you must think to change of skin.' one lp feast in 83 (recorded in hawai) another boomerang in 89 (recorded with the help of a mobile desk in a spanish XIth century convent), the creatures are not monsters of work. they look human & the planet from which they come, center of their concerns, is well ours. they have feet on the ground & an all directions vindictive interest. more than ever, boomerang shows siouxsie'voice to advantage. but also her ideas & the ones of budgie (who signs here lyrics for the first time). with the banshees, the composition reflect the band soul; with the creatures, on all levels, it's individuals & personal feelings & through a selection of lp'tracks, we discover the worryings, the dreams of the thousand & one faces of a full of sensibility duet.

STANDING THERE

Budgie: 'that's a song that occured in the same way as but not them, the very first creatures composition. by luck. when I was seated behind my drums, & siouxsie was tramping the rehearsal room, all happened by a look, spontaneously. for boomerang which is more pondered, it's an exception but the first lp feast was entirely conceived in that way.'

S: 'the lyrics denounce the group notion. at least, this attitude that makes you feel invicible where you form a quorum. some people would do anything to belong to a group, they sometimes become very ugly. it's really a song for the individual, for the ones who were tried to ridicule because they refused to belong to a group, to be conformable to society. & singing is the only way to reply them 'cse physically I can't do anything against these people.'

MANCHILD

S: 'it's a story that a newspaper inspired me. a news item that occurred in columbia & is linked to the medelin cartel. overthere there are two rival little villages that have been opposed since near twenty years, a battle that is connected with power & drugs. one day one of villages decided to eradicate all the male population of his neighbour & there was one survivor left, a thirteen years old little boy. he's lived til eighteen years with all these horrors in his memory & with the responsability to be the last male representative of his village. but to end when he was going to school, they managed to kill him to his turn. this story when I read it, I had difficulty to believe it 'cse it looked so much like a screenplay. I wrote this song trying to put me in place of this little boy, thinking what he could feel knowing that he was both a child & the last man of his village.'

PLUTO DRIVE

B: 'it's a not very serious look on the way the world is going on. it's someone who'd like to escape but who knows that's impossible. so he dreams he's going to make a trip on another planet.'

S: 'it's also a play on words between pluto ( the god of hell), plutocracy (the power by money), & plutonium, the heart of nuclear power.'

you're rather green?

B: 'yes, against nuclear. it's too dangerous, at least I'm sure that we hadn't been told all the truth.'

S: 'in any case, I don't trust. I've always been paranoiac on that issue.'

B: 'for instance, why don't we have snow in christmas anymore? why has the climate changed so much? why do we all linger this kind of flu which has got flu only by the name. that didn't exist before.'

S: 'all that we heard about tchernobyl, the rats with two heads, the blind cats, the branches that grow up upside down. it looks like ray bradbury.'

is it for that reason that you don't have children? S: 'no, first 'cse I 've never had neither the desire to nor the time. some people has got the maternal fiber, some don't. It might happen one day. but above all, I don't like the idea of < kid of a star >. these kids to the exception of their parents, no one like them for who they are & the so-called parents don't have the time to look after them. money, toys of luxuary run them in the family & then there are always interested people that move around. I don't think that it's the kind of childhood that give very safe grown-ups. if I had a child, I'd like to care him myself, having time for him, & so it means that I should take my retirement.'

FURY EYES:

S: 'to me, it conjures up all the greed & the lust that may be contained in a look.'

B: 'sometimes, when you write lyrics, they finish to escape. you realize at the end that it's nothing to see anymore with what you wanted to express at the beginning. as it was, fury eyes is gone from a precise idea, the state in which you are when you fall in love very young. you feel a lot of contradictory feelings, & you finish by doubting, thinking that everybody looks at you. it's like children that are too confident of them; they have the impression to be so important that all the looks are aimed at them. & that's what it happens to us nowadays. that's not very easy to live when you're on stage; you're constantly watched, scrutinized, each one of your movement is analyzed by the audience.'

S: 'sometimes, it's even too much. I almost feel it like an aggression. all these inquisitive glances make me horribly uncomfortable.'

UNTIEDUNDONE

S: 'it's a song on the fact that reaching a certain stage of your life, a stage that gives you the strength to make barriers falling down, all that made you hold rigid disappear. it's a little as if you're restrained your bones. you become so lithe that you could even thread your way under a door. you lose little by little all inhibition. & you arrive to have a more philosophical approach about life. to be more relax but not in the L.A. meaning of the expression!'

& losing this inhibition has also changed your concerns?

S: 'I think when you're young, you're particularly interested in everything that concerns you closely. hopefully, when you get older, you're able to look elsewhere. it's here that you begin to perceive that the world is polluted, that the truth is hidden you, that the people who rule you not always act in a responsible way. news spread so fast that's impossible to believe the world innocent. & you begin to feel angry realizing that all you can see now has been lasting for so much time & that it's maybe already too late. in a sense, happiness is ignorance but you can't blind you all the time. in any case, you lose this ability with childhood. yet, even if you have regrets you have to grow. everybody generally has to grow & has to take responsabilities regarding the way that we use our own resources. you can't always take. one day, you have to think to give it back. that's what happens to any scale, whatever the work that you devote. it's true for the music, it's true for the rest. you can't always create. all is always question of giving & taking.'

SIMOON

S: 'it's a word that is not very used anymore but that describes a dry & hot wind. these lyrics date back the rushie matter, when they put a price on his head. I thought we had got to that point of war just because someone wrote a book about religion. how a word which to me should yet to be synonymous with peace, caring & understanding, can hide so much inflexibility, cynism & cruelty. it puts me beside myself. this intolerance, this lack of inquisitiveness & this way of treating women almost amounts to racism. where are these qualities extoled in the holy books? a religion should be a way to open doors & not to close it. in uk, moslems want to create a society apart. they didn't really want to take apart; I find it very weird & it's to my point to view, the kind of attitude that generates racism. they create themselves barriers & refuse to communicate. it's very dangerous to let them make, it conduces to make rising up hostility to both sides.'

STROLLING WOLF

S: 'this song may only have been inspired by the place where we were. at the same time, the loneliness of this place allowed us to have a different & very privileged listening of tapes that we brought. in the heap, there was one of howling wolf that we completly rediscovered. we even realized that we could count it amongst our indirect influences. this song is a little like a hat trick.'

in the singing topic, what are your influences?

S: ' I'm a lot more interested in the ethnical roots than let's say country music. I also like the choirs, the purety of sounds. in return, I don't feel any affinity with soul singers. I appreciate japanese singings. more recently, I discovered le mystère des voix bulgares. these voices are so beautiful, almost inhuman like strange angels. & the hawaiian singers with whom we worked during the feast lp. they've got a strange quality, the one of the indian singings. it's filled of spirituality. It's something I won't try to recreate but listening to it surely influenced me. all these kinds of prayers that you hear rising up from worship places. it's something epidermal, I'm carried away elsewhere when I listen to these voices. there's really something strong there within.'

MORRINA

B: ' it's a old spanish term that conjures up the blues, a melancholy especially turned to childhood, to what you've lost. it's a song in which I put all my concerns of the last six years, a miscellany of notes & impressions.'

S: 'it looks a little like the end of a story, it would have been perfect for a book but it fits as well to close a lp.'

what are your fears & hopes for the forthcoming decade?

B: ' the Dalai Lama has not foreseen that it settles down before year 2000. no one really knows about it but at least he seems to know what he talks about!'

S: ' I'm afraid of pollution, I'm scared of seeing a two-headed & blind weirdo coming from Techrnobyl.'

B: ' no, the most disastrous thing would be a reunion tour of emerson lake & palmer. I quiver or worse but here I hardly dare to imagine it, that they consider to make a common tour with yes.'

S: ' as for the hope, it would be that every one rools up his sleeves to clean a little the planet 'cse contrary to a lot, I don't see its end. that it risks to happen, it's going to become a filthy & ugly place, a huge damp. it will probably not affect neither me nor the forthcoming generation but it's henceforth that we have to react.'

B: ' what I hope the most is the musicians, I don't aim anybody, give proof of more gumption & ponder twice to release a record. it's not because you have the necessary money that you have to rush into the studio recording. unfortunatly, I often have the feeling that it's nowadays one of the principal motivations.'

note: the banshees used a song of le mystère des voix bulgares to open each show of their rapture tour.

Translated from Francais and contributed by Franck Drifter.