Siouxsie & The Banshees in Denver, 1986
2026 intro and 1986 article by Duane Davis
Siouxsie Sioux’s voice during her peak in the 1980s was an immediate presence, cold, hard, supple: coil upon coil, a predatory embrace, not so much malign as indifferent–a gun going off in a distant room.
The Siouxsie and the Banshees show at Denver’s old Rainbow Music Hall in June 1986 brought out wolf packs of Mile High Goth kids: there was so much spiked hair the hall looked like a Bosnian minefield, black eyeliner dense enough to have its own event horizon, and a dazzling array of fishnet, safety pins and jewelry of menace.
Siouxsie was touring in support of “Tinderbox,” the band’s 7th album which was released on April 21, 1986, interestingly just five days before the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Soviet-controlled Ukraine when Reactor No.4 went from tinderbox to meltdown.
Also interestingly, the lead single for “Tinderbox,” “Cities in Dust,” released well before the album in October 1985, was a mordant bit of ancient history commemorating the eruption of a different sort of tinderbox when in A.D. 79 Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried a couple thousand Roman citizens under a layer of volcanic ash so hot that, in some cases, the brains inside skulls were turned to glass by the heat of the pyroclastic flow.
Hard to get more Goth than that!
“Tinderbox” itself was a fine album. Beginning in 1981, the band had been on a roll, balancing a fierce, hard-edged dance rock as on “Juju” with the gauzy pop sensibility of “A Kiss In The Dreamhouse.” Siouxsie managed to shift from sounding a little like Heart’s Ann Wilson in Hitler Youth lederhosen to a Manic Panic Kate Bush with reasonable grace and facility.
Though Siouxsie came out of the Bat Cave in 2023 to do some live shows after a decade or so away from the limelight, she doesn’t seem to have any plans for darkening any stages in the immediate future.
Quick aside: In this review I’m not very nice to the opening band for the show, New York’s Raunch Hands. I can’t say that after this lapse of 40 years I remember much about their performance – but apparently I did not like it one bit! So, wondering if maybe four decades later I might have mellowed on them, I dialed up some live Raunch Hands from 1985 on YouTube.
Nope. Still crap.
You can decide for yourself here.
And here’s a decent enough recording from Siouxsie in Chicago on 5/24/1986 at The Riviera Theater a couple of weeks before the Denver show.
Siouxsie Sioux: Distance and Alienation
By Duane Davis
[Originally published in Life On Capital Hill, 7/1986]
The Rainbow looked to be packed or near-packed for the Denver debut of England’s Siouxsie And The Banshees. Down by the stage, a dense swirl of kids milled about as the opening band, The Raunch Hands, launched into a shrill, hi-speed, hi-decible set of smarmy cow-punk. Ricky Skaggs on amphetamines; however, these guys definitely were not.
The songs were monotonously repetitious in structure, content, and execution: built around abbreviated country music phrases that the band had no fondness for, nor understanding of. Each song was at pains (usually the audience’s) to display the group’s witty grasp of seventh grade bathroom humor.
After what seemed like about two weeks, The Raunch Hands finally left the stage, and, one can only hope, Colorado for good.
Siouxsie took her time coming out, which gave the cosmetics addicts in the crowd plenty of time to tease their hair a little higher and a little spikier while making sure the tears and rips in their fishnet stockings were aesthetically arranged for just the right impact: tough but damaged, brittle kewpie dolls whose enormous black-lined eyes opened out vacantly from faces painted with a gloss and color so artificial it came as a shock to see them breathe.
It is a style Siouxsie Sioux had started work on way back in 1976 when she and bassist Steve Severin were part of the Bromley Contingent, a loud, nasty pack of traveling cheerleaders for the then unknown and unheralded Sex Pistols.
Siouxsie, who not long before had actually been little Susan Ballion from suburban London, hankered for some space on stage herself, and, at the infamous 100 Club’s 1976 Punk Festival, with the help of Sid Vicious (not yet a Sex Pistol, but probably still alive) performed an interminable rendition of The Lord’s Prayer.
Siouxsie was a wild young thing back then, much given to shiny black leather, swastikas and bare breasts. Not surprisingly, she garnered quite a bit of attention from the press, most of it unflattering—but then, of what use is positive press to a punk?
What is surprising is that by 1978 she had put together a working band, developed a set of original songs, and wrangled a recording contract. The Scream (Polydor, 1978) featured a blistering guitar attack balanced against Siouxsie’s cold, heavy mannered vocals.
Obsessive and grandiose, the band toyed with a dangerously suspect sexuality and politics, raiding fascism and fetishism for ideas and images that would shock and vitalize a music then nearly brain-dead from a bad case of Saturday Night Fever.
Between 1978 and now, seven more lp’s followed, most recently Tinderbox (Geffen, 1986). The band’s status in England is secure: the albums and attendant singles chart regularly and touring is a matter of convenience rather than necessity. In America, though, there have been problems. Tonight at The Rainbow Music Hall we would get to see why.
After everyone else in the band was in place, Siouxsie drifted out through swirls of fog lit up with lurid shades of red and green.
She wore a short black leather jacket over bright yellow leotards that left a lot of bare midriff and a huge gold belt with an ornate buckle or medallion that looked like something Hulk Hogan would wear if he got a starring role in the next La Cage Aux Folie movie. Most of Siouxsie’s face was hidden behind a glittering black mask with a wild shock of dense black hair above and a wide slash of blood red mouth below.
Opening with their current single, “Cities In Dust,” the band quickly established their strength: clean, uncluttered and bone hard drumming, an inventive and liquid bass line and cold, graceful guitar. Siouxsie’s voice arched over each song, imperious and impenetrable-hard, dark and insolently intent.
She seemed to operate both her body and voice as though from a distance: a grandly decadent marionette being manipulated before an audience whose presence was neither needed nor recognized.
This distancing offends American audiences who expect to be pandered to by the performer and praised and rewarded for their enthusiasm and good taste in supporting whoever is on stage at the moment.
Though we have come to expect a mini-Woodstock every time Bruce picks up a guitar, Siouxsie’s roots are in a music of alienation and repulsion that seeks to deny any collusion or community between audience and artist, the cozying up that is really just another of our culture’s endless replications of paternalistic relationships that enforce conformity and consumerism through the channeling of basic needs and energies.
Siouxsie’s resolute silence between songs, her refusal to banter with the crowd, to plug her newest product (something the Raunch Hands did to the point of nausea), her disdain of either approval or disapproval mark her as that figure which we most despise and fear: the loner, the solitary individual standing outside of either festival or community, aloof, arrogant, self-possessed.
In the end, it is the performance which we are left with. Siouxsie’s twisting, awkward zombie dance, the pure, hard artificiality of the songs, the machined music with its precision-tooled (in)tolerances and hermetic enclosures—minimalist fugues tending towards an ever receding horizon.
It was all there in the first few minutes of the show: Siouxsie took down her mask to reveal another mask—that of flesh against bone, a mobile, living shield lifted against an audience that believes that a paid admission gains access to all interiors.
We paid for what we got: music.
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