Bookshelf: 33 1/3, ''Peepshow' by Samantha Bennett (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Siouxsie and the Banshees were the grandest of punk and post-punk bands, so grand that ‘Goth’ seemed a bit reductive as a label for them even while they defined it. They swiftly escalated in their career from savage primal noise and punk clatter to controlled, dramatic music that wasn’t extreme because it was hard to listen to but because it used cold intellect to explore the farther outreaches of human emotion and experience. Nothing in their output exemplified this better than the 1988 album Peepshow: in many ways it was the peak of their career. I finally got round to reading Professor Samantha Bennett’s analysis of the record as part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series.

I ought to have remembered from Mark Paytress’s book about the band that the recording took place in striking circumstances: at Berry House, Ardingley, miles away from anywhere in the heart of the Sussex Weald, a couple of weeks after the Great Storm in 1987; Siouxsie and the others drove there through ‘a landscape ripped apart’ with uprooted trees and devastated woods. The band fuelled themselves with a variety of alcoholic concoctions while interrupting the process with trips to a fairground where noises were recorded that found their way onto the track ‘Carousel’, and the Bonfire Night festivities at Lindfield nearby which culminated in the burning of a fifteen-foot high effigy of Guy Fawkes. ‘It was as if we were doing the whole thing on the set of The Wicker Man’, said Sioux.

From that scene-setting, Bennett does something very clever and insightful: picking up on stray references from the band, she decides to analyse the entire record as a set of responses to different genres of film. You can see where this comes from: the album’s initial and most radical track, ‘Peek-a-Boo’, the song which more or less invented Dark Cabaret, whose video has Siouxsie in bobbed hair and her bandmates in top hats, Venetian masks and wing collars, Cabaret melded with Pandora’s Box in a bad dream of Weimar decadence. The publicity for the tour showed the singer as everyone expected, with massive backcombed Goth hair and carrying a skull-topped cane: but when she first stalked onto the stage at Lausanne in September 1988 she was in satin hotpants and stockings and a black bob, Louise Brooks by way of Sally Bowles. So ‘Peek-a-Boo’ is readable as an encapsulation of silent cinema – how could it be anything else? – and Bennett glosses every track on the album that way, finally alluding to over a hundred movies. ‘We might’, she concludes, ‘then consider Peepshow as a soundtrack to all the films Siouxsie and the Banshees ever saw. Or perhaps it was the soundtrack to the greatest film they never made’.

Bennett isn’t just a theorist about music: she produces it, and knows the technology of music-making in intricate detail. She listens to the ten pieces that make up Peepshow intensely, and it seems little short of overwhelming until you listen back too and hear the tiny, delicate shifts in sound she refers to, and which you would never otherwise have noticed. Thus the book brings together both broad emotional impression and focused technical attention, uncovering how those emotions are invoked.

I read (and told you about) one of the other books in the series, Kate Schatz’s novelistic response to PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me: I don’t know what the rest might be like, though I see that there is a treatment of Nick Cave & the Bad Seed’s Murder Ballads so that will be on my list at some point. Over at TheGardenForum someone mentioned that an examination of Is This Desire? would be ideal, if Bloomsbury could be persuaded to accept it: but Bennett’s dazzling examination of Peepshow sets an intimidating bar.