From the cradle bars comes a beckoning voice

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts.

28/06/81 : JuJu - Siouxsie & The Banshees

The women are staging a mini-revival after a fallow period with this being the fifth album in the last nine with significant female input. And this is our first ever visit with Siouxsie & Friends - they've been mentioned a few times in year-end write-ups as having produced decent albums that we've never met, so it's nice to finally get a chance to write about them. I don't think I've ever listened to one of their albums but I like their general sound and believe this is supposed to be good, so I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, I like this - although I appreciate it won't be for everyone. It's got, to no-one's surprise, a goth/indie sound but it's got much better playing and production than you might expect - and Siouxsie as an added bonus on top. It also gives strong "I bet they were great live" vibes - I can imagine plenty of moments of awe-struck silence followed by everyone going utterly mad. I struggle to imagine I'll revisit it now, but if I'd bought it live at the time (which wasn't going to happen because I was terrified of Siouxsie at the age of 13) then I can imagine I'd have listened to it loads - probably in the dark, because it's a very sensory experience (and yes, I realise that all albums are in fact sensory experiences). It's a cool album cover as well!

We're at #9 in the charts this week on their second week of a decent 17 week run with it having peaked at #7 in its debut week. The top five this week were the most peculiar combination of Disco Days & Disco Nites, Stars on 45, Motorhead, Cliff Richard (a new entry) and Toyah with the next highest new entry being The Polecats (#28) who I don't remember in the slightest but Google tells me were a rockabilly band - I remember the mini-rockabilly revival around this time and I also remember thinking "what on earth is going on here?!?".

Wikipedia tells us this is their fourth album and is apparently a return to a guitar-based sound after a detour into "a slightly electronic bent" for their previous album. There's an interesting section on John McGeoch's guitar playing (which received a lot of praise) telling us he used a device called the Gizmotron (or Gizmo) which was developed by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme in the late 60s/early 70s. Apparently this device "used small, motor driven plastic/rubber wheels to make the strings vibrate, yielding resonant, synthesizer-like sounds from each string" (which I'm struggling to envisage). Musicians loved the idea of it, but unfortunately it rarely worked, which is never an ideal scenario - but the good news is that someone invented a Gizmotron 2.0 in '16, so you can try that if you want to!

Critically, it was very well regarded at the time (Sounds and NME both went way over the top) and retrospectively, with it being seen as "a landmark album of post-punk" - it's weird how we still use post-punk as a genre, although I'm not sure anyone quite knows what it means any more. It's also often been referenced by a lot of bands as a favourite and you might even have heard of some of them - The Smiths, The Cure, Radiohead, Jesus & Mary Chain and Suede amongst others. And so, commercially, all it managed away from these shores in #29 in New Zealand.

It's obviously in demand though because discogs.com tells us you're going to have to spend a crisp tenner to pick up a copy of it but if you want to go mad then you can pick up the limited edition remastered gold vinyl '18 re-release you can spend £180.45 on it. I won't be doing that but this is a very decent album and I enjoyed it a lot - it could have been released any time in the last fifty years and it would still have felt nicely out of its time.

05/07/81 - Decent enough