Siouxsie Sioux / Huxley’s, Berlin
Siouxsie Berlin show so bad punter attempts to stab half the audience.
Words Mark Fernyhough / Image(s) Heike Schneider-Matzigkeit
Perhaps she had us fooled all along. Looking back at Siouxsie Sioux’s 1976 debut TV appearance alongside the Sex Pistols on Bill Grundy’s Today Show, it’s clear music history should be revised. Rather than appearing the radical political revolutionaries they’ve been re-cast as, they come across as simply pretty vacant. Today the dirty rotters would no doubt be collecting ASBOs, happy slapping minority groups and getting kicked off TV talent shows. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, while punk’s death knell resonates once more, tonight is a failure.
As it’s Halloween, Siouxsie Sioux, the punk that goth forgot, should be in her mascara drowned element. Instead she’s too busy complaining how “she can’t get the staff”, and explaining to the audience that her late stage appearance can be put down to the fun she was having backstage with friends. There’s nothing worse than overlooking your pale-faced followers for a quick shot of Monica and Chandler. In another act of megalomania, old Sue has banished photographers from the photo pit and ordered them to shoot from over the heads of the audience. Since when exactly did she become Prince? Meanwhile, a psycho loony stabs a number of audience members with a pair of scissors before eluding the Berlin cops and vanishing into the night, Jack the Ripper-style. What does Siouxsie care, though? She’s too busy running through a set of new songs and berating the crowd for wanting to hear something they actually know.
At the age of 50, she nonetheless appears in remarkably fine form, while the dark cabaret of new tracks ‘Sea of Tranquility’ and ‘Here Comes That Day’ are alluring enough to stand up on their own merits. It’s Siouxsie’s bad attitude that truly destroys this evening, her achievements overshadowed by an apparent air of bitterness.
It’s hard to imagine how many of tonight’s audience will be back to see her on the next out-of-retirement tour, but judging from their muted response it will be even less people than went out and bought her new record.
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