Staff Picks

Siouxsie and the Banshees took a long time making their way onto my list of favorite bands. I’ve been aware of them since before I can remember, but during the self-education on 70s UK punk I gave myself in my 20s, they never really registered. I knew songs like “Hong Kong Garden” and “Love in a Void” and I thought they were alright, but they didn’t knock me out the way “What Do I Get” or “One Chord Wonders” or “Neat Neat Neat” did. I basically thought of Siouxsie and the Banshees as ’77 also-rans who had a fluke pop hit way after the fact (1988’s “Peekabo,” which I remember being all over MTV).

Then, sometime in my late 20s, I picked up 1981’s Once Upon a Time: The Singles and fell head over heels. The punky “Honk Kong Garden” and “Love In a Void” where there, but what blew me away were the batch of singles that came after that: “Happy House,” “Christine,” “Spellbound,” etc. It’s those singles from 1980 and 1981 that made me a fan and made me curious to explore the Banshees’ discography further. After picking up the first four albums, the shape of that discography and the band’s story became a little clearer. Siouxsie and bassist Steve Severin were the creative core, and they played with many musicians before a lineup with drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist John McKay solidified around the time they signed with Polydor. That lineup did the first two albums and a handful of singles, but imploded in September 1979 when Morris and McKay quit the band mid-tour. Budgie, recently off playing drums on the Slits’ phenomenal Cut, joined on drums and became the group’s third creative pillar. The trio then worked with a succession of guitarists (most of them incredible) for the rest of the band’s run, their music continuing to change and evolve until the very end.

So, it’s spring 2025. I’m chilling, living my life as a Siouxsie & the Banshees fan, and YouTube serves me a video called Siouxsie and the Banshees: Ranking the Albums from “The Scream” through “The Rapture.” I feel like I know my Siouxsie records pretty well, but the three guys in this video totally outclassed me with their knowledge, and I was learning so much that I ended up watching the whole 90-minute video. The guys in the video rate some of the Banshees’ later albums more highly than I do, which made me want to spend more time with those records, but the video’s big revelation for me was learning about a record they kept bringing up called The Thorn.

The Thorn came out in 1984, and it is the sole EP Siouxsie and the Banshees ever released. Which is kinda weird, right? The Banshees were students of the craft of making both singles and albums, so why did they neglect the humble EP? I love EPs. I like that you get a little more than a single with an EP, but it’s not as weighty as an album. Perhaps for that reason, I think a lot of bands’ best work is on their EPs, which have a way of catching artists at transitional stages. Napalm Death’s Mentally Murdered, the Fall’s Slates, and the Clash’s Black Market Clash all come to mind as great EPs in that transitional vein.

And Siouxsie and the Banshees were, indeed, in a period of transition when they recorded The Thorn. Guitarist John McGeotch (formerly of Magazine, and later of Public Image Limited) quit the band in 1982, and Robert Smith from the Cure (who had also filled in for a spell in 1980) joined the Banshees as his replacement. However, the Cure was hitting their own creative stride during this period, and eventually Smith left the Banshees to focus on his own band. The Banshees then recruited journeyman musician John Valentine Carruthers (whose most recent gig was in Clock DVA) as Smith’s replacement. The Thorn is the first thing Curruthers recorded with the group, and it served as an introduction to the Banshees’ new lineup.

How do the Banshees choose to kick off the Carruthers years? Curiously, by revisiting some old tunes. Not the greatest hits, mind you, but a motley collection of album tracks and b-sides from several lineups before (including three from the Morris / McKay lineup that had disbanded four years prior… the lineup that recorded the not-as-great earlier stuff). They chose four tracks: “Overground” originally appeared on the first Banshees LP, The Scream, while “Placebo Effect” was on the second album, Join Hands. “Voices” was the b-side to 1978’s “Hong Kong Garden” single, while “Red Over White” backed up 1980’s “Israel” single. If someone forced you to make a list of the worst 10 songs the Banshees had recorded up to that point, these would almost certainly be on it. They all sound unfinished, but some of them sound barely started. I guess bands do this all the time—revisit old material that didn’t quite work the first time around—but most bands are better at relegating those early attempts to the cutting-room floor. I think it’s rare for a band to reclaim and revise their earlier material like that, and particularly rare for them to do it successfully.

All four tracks on The Thorn are completely reworked, reimagined really, as Banshees circa 1984. The minimalist sketches that sat on b-sides are now ambitious, orchestral, dramatic as all fuck… they shine. Earlier this week I was driving around listening to Twice Upon a Time, the sequel to Once Upon a Time that covers the rest of the Banshees’ career, noting how many covers appear on that compilation. I thought to myself that perhaps where the Banshees were really in a class of their own was as arrangers. They constructed these massive, layered soundscapes that sounded like nothing else (well, at least until Robin Guthrie ripped it off and turned it into a whole subgenre). Though the bones of the songs on The Thorn are not great, they are still captivating in these versions. However, when the Banshees took their power as arrangers and welded it to truly great _songs_—whether covers of classics like “The Passenger” and “Dear Prudence” or their own compositions like “Cities and Dust” and “Swimming Horses”—they achieved highs very few other artists ever matched.

So yeah, The Thorn kicks ass, but sadly it ain’t easy to get. It came out on vinyl only in 1984, wasn’t released in the US at all, and has never been reissued. Aside from Overground appearing on Twice Upon a Time, the only place you can get these tracks digitally would be as part of 2004’s Downside Up CD box set (Discogs median price check: $133.50… also, I hate to be a bummer, but the rest of the box is kind of a slog). Since I learned about _The Thorn_’s existence a few weeks before I went to Europe last summer, I made a mental note to keep my eye out for it. I actually found it at the very last shop I visited on the trip. It wasn’t expensive… there are a ton of copies on Discogs for $15 (or less, if you’re willing to skimp on condition), but you’re gonna have to pay that international shipping.

And speaking of Twice Upon a Time and un-reissued Banshees records, get that back in print! Twice Upon a Time came out in 1992, and they only pressed vinyl in continental Europe (not even the UK!). I do not want to pay several hundred dollars for that record, but give me a halfway decent reissue and you can have my $50.

Alright, I guess it’s time to shake off the cobwebs and write my first staff pick in a couple of months. Do I still know how to do this? We’ll see, I suppose.

A couple of weeks ago we flipped the calendar over to 2026. In early January in years past, Jeff has always quoted Embrace’s song “End of a Year:” “It’s the end of a fucked up year… and there’s another one coming.” I’ve never stopped to think too much about that lyric until this year. While I had some great times in 2025, the latter half of the year was one of the most grueling times I’ve ever lived through. It truly was a fucked up year. And, as Ian said, there’s another one coming. No respite, no turning the clock back, just keep plowing ahead into the shit.

I was thinking the other day about how I haven’t heard the term “new year’s resolution” once this year. Admittedly, I’ve been doing my best to spend as little time as I can with both mass and social media, but I don’t think I’m that disconnected. My theory is that the world has grown so fucked up that no one has the energy to do anything but console ourselves about all the trauma we’ve endured. For the past few years, social media around the new year is a unified chorus of people exclaiming what a shit year it was, and virtually no one expressing hope the next year will be better, much less determination to make it so. I know that, in the past, I’ve dismissed most of the negativity I see about the state of the world as catastrophizing, or at the very least (foolishly) buying into the tendency in mainstream political discourse to treat every moment, every controversy, as THE MOST IMPORTANT CRISIS WE HAVE EVER FACED. But lately when I watch the news I see so much cruelty… so much evil. Our government in the United States is run by a coalition of gangsters, sadists, and people who are happy enough with whatever tiny piece of the pie they’re getting to remain complicit. I’ve always thought this was more or less true of national politics in the U.S., but there’s been a concerted effort in recent years to remove all good-hearted people from positions of power and replace them with the aforementioned gangsters, sadists, and stooges, right down to the humblest, smallest arms of local government. My mom works for the school system in the tiny town in Virginia where I grew up, and she’s told me about how a small group of right-wing activists have taken over the school board and enacted a regime that is basically the local equivalent of Stephen Miller’s wet dream. The world is getting worse, just about everywhere, for everyone but a tiny subset of people whose greed will never be satisfied.

I almost always stick to music in my pieces for the SSR newsletter, but I’ve been thinking about politics a lot lately… not Republican versus Democrat bs, but politics broadly defined, as in how we live together as humans and try to get along. Maybe I’m worried about losing my political compass without Red in my life. They were so passionate and so relentlessly empathetic, and I feel like they served as a bulwark against my natural tendency toward defeatism and apathy. But I also owe a lot of my thoughts about politics to being immersed in the world of Poison Girls for the past few weeks. Which leads me to my double staff pick for this week:

Poison Girls: Where’s the Pleasure 12” (Xntrix, 1982)

Rich Cross with Alec Dunn & Erin Yanke. This Is a Message to Persons Unknown: The Story of the Poison Girls book (PM Press, 2025)

While I’ve had Poison Girls records in my collection for many years, the band never truly clicked with me until I picked up a copy of their 1982 album Where’s the Pleasure sometime this fall. I can’t even remember where I got the record. It must have been during one of my trips out of town. Whenever I travel, and particularly when I travel alone, I tend to come home with a giant stack of vinyl, which I then spend the next few months going through. I did not know what I was in for when I dropped the needle on Where’s the Pleasure. First, it’s not what you would think of as an anarcho-punk record. Poison Girls had released several records by the time they recorded Where’s the Pleasure, and they’d long left behind any interest in catering to the middle of punk’s road. Where’s the Pleasurebuilds a world much wider than punk, taking in a range of styles across its thirteen tracks. The ones that first caught my ear—like the title track that begins the record—feature a crack rhythm section that lives deep in the pocket, and the album’s crystalline recording makes you feel like you’re plonked down in the middle of the studio as the band records. While Poison Girls’ connections to punk were fraying by this point, there’s still a punky sense of energy and directness, and I hear a lot of what I love about more “sophisticated” anarcho bands like Crisis and Zounds on Where’s the Pleasure.

The music pulled me in, but it wasn’t long before Vi Subversa’s lyrics captivated me. Subversa was 47 when Where’s the Pleasure came out, and I’m 46 now, so perhaps I’m in the right place in my life to appreciate where Vi was coming from. There are a few songs on Where’s the Pleasure that deal with “topical” issues: “Take the Toys” is, broadly, about war, while “Rio Disco Stink” is an invective against Rio Tinto, a multinational mining corporation with a long list of sins against the earth and humanity. But most of the songs on the album are about “personal” issues: love, romance, sex, aging, family… the stuff of human life rather than political broadsheets. And of course these “personal” and “political” issues intersect, which Vi has clearly thought about plenty. Take, for instance, the declamation in “Take the Toys (Reprise)”: “for all the money they spend on nuclear weapons, there is still not a safe and effective form of contraception.” Vi is an incredible lyricist, cuttingly direct one moment and oblique and evocative the next, and I am certain I’ll be pondering her words for the rest of my life.

Having been so blown away by Where’s the Pleasure, when I got an email announcing a Kickstarter / pre-order for a Poison Girls book on the long-running radical publishing imprint PM Press, I smashed that buy button without a second thought (and added in a “Take the Toys from the Boys” t-shirt for good measure). I just knew Poison Girls’ story was going to be riveting. I knew a few scattered facts that were intriguing—that Vi’s children were punks and had played in Fatal Microbes and Rubella Ballet, and that Poison Girls had frequently shared the stage with Crass—but listening to Where’s the Pleasure assured me whatever time I spent with Poison Girls, their art, and their story would be well-spent.

This Is a Message to Persons Unknown was all I could have wanted and more. As a punk rock book, it is top-notch. I love punk books, and the crisp graphic design and the reproduction of so much of the group’s paper ephemera—zines, flyers, photographs, press clippings, record sleeves and inserts, badges, and plenty more, all of it in vivid detail and full color—would have been enough to leave me a satisfied customer. But that’s only the beginning. The writing and editing are also top-notch… I try not to be an asshole about it, but as a former English teacher, the sloppy writing and copy editing on a lot of underground and small-press books really bug the shit out of me. Rich Cross’s research is exhaustive, but his writing is skillful enough not to lose the forest (the band’s story) in the trees (all those captivating details). The whole thing is executed to a much higher standard than any other book I can think of, even impressive ones like Crass: A Pictoral History.

And then there’s the story, which just blew my mind. I don’t want to summarize too much because this is already way too long, but my intuition that the Poison Girls were interesting characters was 100% accurate. And more than just being interesting, Poison Girls’ story is inspiring. The group’s key members—vocalist Vi Subversa, but also drummer Lance D’Boyle and guitarist Richard Famous—were dyed-in-the-wool radicals, people who looked at all the fucked up shit in the world and refused to take part. They didn’t just critique the world around them; they imagined how it could be better. And then they tried to make what they imagined a reality, despite an entire world working against them. They were human and had flaws and some things they tried worked out better than others, but they fucking tried. They had hope. The members of Crass found them so inspiring that, from January 1979 until early 1981, Crass refused to perform unless Poison Girls was also on the bill. Crass thought it was that important that their audience heard what Poison Girls had to say.

So yeah, Poison Girls has been my little island of hope in the sea of shit that was the latter half of 2025. I was honestly sad when I reached the last page of the book, but thankfully there are a bunch more Poison Girls records I haven’t yet spent enough time with. So at least I have something to look forward to as the world crumbles around us.