Banshee Severin liberated by composing score to silent movie
Words Sam Lewis
“I’ve wanted to write music for film for almost as long as I’ve wanted to write music.” So says Steven Severin - once full-time member of Siouxsie and the Banshees, now a full time composer, alongside his re-mastering of the Banshees back-catalogue. “But no-one in my band was as rabid a film buff as myself,” he continues. “Even though the Banshees music was often described as cinematic, what few opportunities came our way were largely to do with ‘the cult of Siouxsie’ rather than the atmospheric quality of our music.”
On May 3 in Edinburgh, Severin will perform a live score to the seminal 1928 surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, a movie full of the usual surrealist trimmings - Freudian symbolism, bizarre editing effects and subversive political imagery. Moreover, as Severin points out, “it’s only 35 minutes long, so it’s more like an extended music video than a feature, especially with it’s lack of narrative logic. That appealed to me.”
The process of constructing music to a film piece is, of course, a completely different challenge to that of composing ‘straight-forward’ rock’n’roll, no matter how innovative the Banshees were. “I find it incredibly liberating,” says Severin, “you can play with what I call ‘angles of perception’. After years trying to search for new patterns in rock music, I love the fact that with most film work my former fulcrum - the voice - is missing.”
If creating music for a film is itself at a remove from vocal-based pop music, then making music for a silent film is at another remove again. Particularly because silent films come with a time lapse - the composer has to decide whether the music should try to bridge the generation gap, or remain faithful to the film’s own era. Severin himself has “no interest whatsoever in attempting to do a ‘period piece’ - I’ll leave that to the South Bank squares! I think attempting to shrink that [time] gap is extremely important. Film language has evolved so much in the last century that one needs to make that adjustment to make it resonate once more.”
To that extent, he cites the work of Bernard Hermann, Ennio Morricone and David Lynch as major influences - all artists who’ve pushed the boundaries of film soundtrack to dark, esoteric places. For Severin, the realm of composition is full of possibilities, its sensibility resonating into his work with the Banshees re-masters. “I am very aware of preserving art,” he says. “Restoration and re-presenting is of cultural importance. I don’t think that’s too grand a statement as, thankfully, people are still referencing the Banshees 30 years on. My father was librarian, maybe that’s where I get it from.”
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