SIOUXSIE & THE BANSHEES - JUJU @ 40

June 6th marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Siouxsie & The Banshees’ Juju LP, issued on this day in 1981. It was their fourth studio album, overall, and their second of a trilogy of albums they’d release while constituted in their “MK II” configuration of Siouxsie Sioux, Steven Severin, Budgie & John McGeoch. It is perhaps the best of this trio of brilliant albums.

While the prior album, Kaleidoscope, deliberately worked towards differentiating each song from the others with no consideration for how they’d be performed live, and the subsequent album, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, delved into psychedelic, orchestrated arrangements, Juju was conceived primarily through live performance. A result of this process was that the record organically manifested as a sort of concept album, delving into themes of darkness and subversion that created a common thread through each of its nine compositions.

Musically, Juju represents guitarist John McGeoch at his most inspired and experimental. After his somewhat tentative participation in Kaleidoscope, due to his still being a member of Magazine, Juju found him now fully ensconced in The Banshees where his presence infused and informed the album. As a post punk manifesto, his guitar work rivals that of Keith Levene in PiL in terms of innovation while offering up a much more melodically driven wall of sound. It’s no surprise that John Lydon would eventually recruit him to fill Keith’s shoes after his ouster. Vocally, Siouxsie achieved a warmth and depth to her voice that were a step above anything she’d accomplished before and her tone was duly enriched by the lyrical intensity she brought to each song. The album jars and stuns with striking imagery in song after song. “Ripped out sheep’s eyes. No forks or knives” or “Don’t forget when your elders forget to say their prayers, take them by the legs and throw them down the stairs” are just a couple of examples of verses that reach out of the density of the music and wrench the listener into the darkness of the album’s concepts. This is real “shock and awe” song craft.

But don’t undervalue the contributions of the powerhouse rhythm section provided by Budgie and Severin. They deliver a churning tribal shudder that provides a whirling yet unshakable foundation upon which McGeoch can embellish with his guitars and Sioux can swoop and dive through with her voice. Indeed, the interplay of the quartet is entirely seamless through every song and I’m certain this is largely the result of the compositional process and their being worked out in live settings before being brought into the studio for their commitment to recording tape. The resulting tapestries of sounds are so tightly woven that there’s really no separating them out into discrete components.

This era of Siouxsie & The Banshees was arguably the peak of the band’s prowess while this lineup persisted. Sadly, McGeoch’s struggles with alcoholism would result in him being fired from the band after touring for Dreamhouse and the group was never quite as influential again. The music they made during their first two incarnations (1978-1979, 1980-1982) would offer up sounds and styles that would influence generations to come in terms of post-punk, Goth and a variety of other branches of the alternative music tree. Personally, Juju and the other two albums made by this lineup represent the definitive set of essential recordings by a band that came out of the original London Punk scene and then were one of the first to go beyond its simplistic nihilism and shine a light through the darkness into places where new sounds could be found.