3. Siouxsie And The BansheesJuJu
One of the albums prior to JuJu that made us going ‘fucking hell’ was Join Hands, which made us realise you could be as dark and minimal as possible. At that time I wanted to be a guitarist, but that would have entailed learning to play guitar, which would have been tricky so I shelved that idea quite quickly. Bands would play the Chelmsford Odeon, and the Banshees came on the JuJu tour. It was when they were first making legitimate pop songs, people weren’t throwing their radios out of the window or kicking their televisions. It was quite a sweet time, I was still young, 14 or 15, and my friend Mark Ford and I went to the gig. I was quite a short little lad and looked really young. I couldn’t afford a t-shirt so I just bought a programme. We were waiting out the back of the Odeon for Mark’s mum Cathy to come and pick us up, and she was late so we were just standing there and the door opens and this voice goes ‘alright come in’. We were like, ‘what?’, we didn’t realise that we looked like we were waiting to meet the band, but we went in. There were the Banshees just sitting there, I sheepishly leant over and asked them to sign the programme and had a chat with them [adopts Essex little squirt voice] ‘what made you think of doing JuJu?’. They were really sweet and kind. When I next saw them Nitzer Ebb were doing a festival with them, it was brilliant watching them and we ended up having a very raucous time back at the hotel. We were on the same corridor and they had a very early flight to Poland, you’d hear the tour manager banging a door and going ‘Siouxsie! Siouxsie! They’re going to leave without you!’ He comes back, ‘Siouxsie! They’ve left!’. I told them about the Odeon and Severin said he remembered it but he was probably being nice to me.Â
