'I Was a Teenage Banshee' (Sue Webster, 2019)

Very very vaguely, I think I’d been aware of artists Sue Webster and Tim Noble,  but really only began to pay attention when they’d separated and it became clear that Ms Webster was one of PJ Harvey’s chums. Polly wrote a poem as an introduction to Webster’s The Folly Acres Cookbook in 2015, and, for a fan, Webster’s Instagram feed is worth keeping an eye on as occasionally they do stuff together and PJH even consents to be photographed. But Webster also has other enthusiasms, and I couldn’t help noticing that Siouxsie Sioux pops up on that Instagram feed rather often.

Sue Webster’s current book, I Was a Teenage Banshee, delineates her own relationship with the Queen of Gothdom and how it wove in and out of her bumpy adolescence and partnership with Tim Noble (PJH appears very fleetingly). One Wednesday morning in 1978 the eleven-year-old Sue Webster sat beside the letterbox of her family home in Leicester, waiting for the highlight of her week – the arrival of music magazine NME - and its plop to the floor on this particular morning was to bend the trajectory of her life, like a prism twisting the light. ‘I found myself catapulted across the room by a pair of killer-heeled, thigh-length patent leather boots … The figure I saw rising above me, wearing Cleopatra-style make-up and sporting a Nazi swastika armband, belonged to the surrogate mother I’d long been searching for’. Bowie, Kate Bush, the Slits, the Sisters, and a Leicester band or two, are all present in the book too, but they are barely even support acts; years later, Webster reflects that ‘everything I ever learned in life was from listening to the first four albums of Siouxsie and the Banshees’.

But the narrative doesn’t start there. It starts in the middle, with Webster leaving for university and her father packing three cardboard boxes full of tat which she then carts around with her for the intervening years, never examining them until the day in 2014 when she and Tim Noble part. That’s when she chooses to open them. Box one contained school work and juvenile art work. Box two sheltered diaries, personalia, and ‘letters written to me by friends I had forgotten and who had once cared for me’. Box three was the Banshees box.

It was, Webster says, ‘the obsession that dragged me kicking and screaming throughout my adolescence’: LPs and singles, concert tickets and coach passes, ‘crumpled posters with economical squares of Blu Tack still attached’, her fan club membership card, bootleg tapes and ‘much sought-after concert T-shirts held together for dear life by safety pins, not for the punk aesthetic but in order to retain their very existence’. She uses the memorabilia to prise open the story of her life.

I Was a Teenage Banshee is a big, floppy paperback, pricey and quite difficult to handle both physically and conceptually. Ms Webster presents her tale, a narrative of difficult growing up, love, loss and art, as an excavation of artefacts, elaborating on ‘Crime Scene’, the wall-collage she made out of the bits and pieces from the cardboard boxes and the links between them. Some items come from the boxes and some are the artworks she and Tim Noble make, apart and together: especially together, filtering their own enthusiasms and the works of past artists through their own trashy and deeply committed aesthetic. There are two contextualising essays – ‘A Touch of Insanity’, about Webster’s teenage skirmishes with the mental health system; and the concluding ‘I Was a Teenage Banshee’, laying out how she met and fell for Siouxsie Sioux – and, straying and rambling through memory and rant, they are moving and illuminating, but for the most part we have to draw our own conclusions from those juxtapositions of paper scraps, photos and artwork.

Doing it isn’t that easy, and clearer statements about Webster’s actual interactions with Siouxsie and her music come from other sources than the book, for example a recent account in US magazine Interview. Here, she describes how she listened to The Scream and heard not raucous punk but ‘almost like a soundtrack to a film … it left a lot more to the imagination’. Goth hadn’t really been synthesised at this stage but that’s as good an account of the difference between the two as you might ask for. Her leather jacket with studs and painted Banshee images she made herself: ‘it was my pride and joy, my armour that I put on when I went to the gigs … It’s the thing that defines you, because you aren’t afraid to step out of your front door wearing something that you’ve made’. By the time she went to Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham in 1988, there to meet her future lover and collaborator, Webster had dyed her hair blonde, acquired a baseball cap, and, whether her earlier phase was best described as Goth or Punk, she’d left it behind. No Banshees music later than 1984’s baleful album Juju gets a mention, but Webster doesn’t forget completely: she sees Siouxsie perform again several times in the 2000s, adding to that pile of fading concert tickets. She doesn’t tell us what she thinks about those later encounters with her idol, coming to her again after so many years have passed, more experienced, more secure, much better-off, and with her hair black again albeit not as spiky as in 1984. There’s a lot she doesn’t tell us, in fact.

But really all you need to unlock the mystery is that statement that Siouxsie became Webster’s ‘surrogate mother’. If her natural birth into a working-class Leicester family promised nothing very exciting, her second parturition from that dark musical and sartorial womb created a new potential life, one of exploration and provocation, one of different responsibilities. ‘I came home from school and hacked off my beautiful long shiny black hair with a razor blade. That’s when everything changed and my life became a serious matter.’