Browse by Artist: SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES

Artist:	SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
Title:	Downside Up: B Sides And Rarities
Label:	POLYDOR (GERMANY)
Format:	4CD BOX
Price:	$65.00
Catalog #:	POLY 21823CD

55 tracks on 4 CD's, 34 of them for the first time, including the Thorn EP. Includes a 76-page booklet with an introduction by Siouxsie and full track annotation by all 3 band members. Full lyrics for all B-sides printed for the first time with sleevenotes by Mark Paytress. "Siouxsie Sioux first came to our attention in 1976 as a Sex Pistols acolyte who was standing behind the band during the notorious interview with Bill Grundy on the Today programme. Yet with hindsight, her work doesn't seem to belong to punk at all. Her debut album didn't appear until 1978, by which time untutored three chord thrashing was beginning to appear passé. Instead, with the Banshees she helped invent a form of post-punk discord full of daring rhythmic and sonic experimentation that was as influential as it is underrated. Downside Up features 55 tracks spread across four discs, some of which have not previously appeared on CD. The result is a collection that constitutes an alternative history far more revealing than a greatest hits package, for here is a group that never filled B-sides with inferior throwaway tracks. Rather they saw them as an outlet for some their most radical and challenging work. Standouts include the spiky 'Drop Dead/Celebration', the sinister 'Eve White/Eve Black' and the chopped up industrial funk of 'Tattoo', tracks that prove that the Banshees stand proudly alongside PIL, Gang Of Four and The Fall as the most audacious and uncompromising musical adventurers of the post-punk era." --Nigel Williamson.

Artist:	SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
Title:	Spellbound
Label:	SLOW TO SPEAK
Format:	12"
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MM 9435EP

"Pushing on with their continuing series of high-quality classic reissues, Slow to Speak presents their latest 12" featuring the exceptional post-punk of one Siouxsie & The Banshees. Clear contemporaries of fellow reissued monoliths of British rock, The Police & The Cure, Siouxsie & the Banshees, though having formed in 1975 by core members Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin, the group didn't really come into their own until the late-1970s crisis of rock music, when punk's initial fury began to dissipate under the cooling gaze of mainstream fixation, arguably neutralizing such counter-cultural monoliths as Iggy Pop & David Bowie. Sioux & Severin, excessively grand in their aspirations & determined not to succumb to the same fate, found themselves drawn to the emerging post-punk philosophies of anti-pop image formulation and projection, combining an essentially anti-celebrity presentation with starkly realist social commentaries intertwined confidently into their peculiarly unique and sinisterly haunting dark-rock aesthetic, one of the major contributors along with The Cure in the creation of the still-debatable goth-rock genre. Irrelevant of their cultural allegiances, Siouxsie and the Banshees were able to accomplish complete artistic autonomy while retaining their patently anti-authoritarian stance through the medium of their aural poetics, taking up verbal arms against legacies of British imperialism, medicine & power, post-industrial technological melancholia & religious-politico-psychosis of rabid Zionism; all this was performed under the advantageously offsetting facade of self-imposed outcasting, presenting themselves in dooming attire & make-up, exactly as they saw their world: a desolate land drifting towards an existential void of endless consequence, inhabited increasingly by a zombie-like rabble -- uncertain of what they live for, and more importantly, what is worth living for."

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