SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES - A KISS IN THE DREAMHOUSE @ 40

 

Turning 40 years old today is the fifth studio LP from Siouxsie and The Banshees, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, which was released on November 5th, 1982. It was their most experimental and ambitious production to date and garnered universal praise from both fans and the music press.

After the success of their previous album, Juju, the group took some time to reassess their work and felt that, for the next release, they wanted to up the production values, particularly by introducing the use of real strings rather than synthesizers. Working on the non-album single, Fireworks, set the template for where they wanted to go. While John McGeoch was okay with the use of synths, Siouxsie and Steve Severin were adamant about going acoustic, with the former stating, “They give a real, earthy, rich sound. You could hear the strings spitting and breathing and wheezing.” Beyond that, producer Mike Hedges strongly encouraged the group to experiment with radical effects setups, tape loops, vocal layering and different instruments like recorder, tubular bells and chimes. The end result was a post-punk neo-psychedelic hybrid born of extensive drug use while working on the album. That tactic, while perhaps inspirational at the time, would sadly lead to a darkness which would prove fatal to more than one person in the long run.

The title of the album was conceived by Severin after watching a documentary about Hollywood prostitution. the “Dreamhouse” was an actual brothel in Hollywood which featured a number of prostitutes who had undergone cosmetic surgical alterations in order to make them appear more similar to the famous stars of the times. A good lookalike would be able to command a significantly higher price than the other girls.

A Kiss in the Dreamhouse was the final release in a triptych of albums, begun with Kaleidoscope and followed by Juju, which featured John McGeoch as a member of the band. His alcoholism would result in him leaving after Dreamhouse, replaced by Robert Smith of The Cure for a time. It’s a period for the band which saw them transform into sophisticated, adventurous trendsetters, moving well ahead of the pack when it came to pushing the boundaries after the initial wave of punk had subsided. With this album, they made it clear to everybody that they were a creative force to be reckoned with.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - THE BOLLOCK BROTHERS, NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS 1983

The scene surrounding the Sex Pistols was a complex patchwork of different crews and a lot of them ended up spawning their own bands, whether it was Siouxsie and the Banshees form the "Bromley Contingent" or The Slits or any of the dozen bands that popped up from Manchester. Closest to home, the scene behind Johnny Rotten was primarily John's close friends and his brothers and their mates. First to emerge from this crew was 4" Be 2", fronted by Jimmy Lydon and featuring occasional contributions from Martin "Youth" Glover and alleged production assistance from Rotten himself. The other main character involved in this was Jock McDonald, a somewhat disreputable scallywag of a character who would go on to form The Bollock Brothers as a side project, which eventually became his main outlet.

I'd previously come across some singles by both 4" Be 2" and The Bollock Brothers based on this supposed production involvement of John Lydon. As it turned out, slapping his name on the records as producer was little more than a sales ploy. Some of it was pretty good, however, but in 1983, McDonald concocted his best "swindle" of all, his 1983 complete reinterpretation of the entire Sex Pistols debut LP, Never Mind the Bollocks. Titled, Never Mind the Bollocks 1983, this was one of the first times I'd ever encountered a complete cover of an entire album, so my curiosity was immediately piqued as soon as I spotted it in the new releases bin at my local import records shop.

What Jock had done with the Pistols music was tantamount to sacrilege by using very early digital sampling technology to electronically recreate the album in a kind of robot-punk style with snappy, machine-like drum machines and digitally deconstructed guitars. He even took the liberty of reworking some of the lyrics as another level of disrespect. The thing was, this utter and complete disregard for the sanctity of the source material turned out to be the best way to approach it as the album still screamed with a legitimate "punk" attitude because of this stance. In truth, punk should never be treated with too much reverence as so much of it was about blasting away those edifices of rock hero worship.

When I put on the record for the first time, I was immediately displaced by the cheap sounding fake digital stomping signalling the intro to Holidays in the sun. It was like a shoddy computer version, a pathetic imitation. As it went on, however, the consistency of the production and it's singularity and commitment to its vision drove home its secret power. It was the ultimate subversion of the subversive, making a comment on the commodification of the movement while recasting it as rebel robot music.

McDonald and the Bollock Brothers never managed to hit this height again on subsequent albums of his own original material, but the fact that this desecration of punk's sacred cow exists at all is good enough to remind us not to be too precious about what we put on pedestals.