Siouxsie and the Banshees - Metal postcard

This is a clip from 1978 of the Banshees performing on the Old Grey Whistle Test (or, as my friend Clare Mullady always called it, the Old Grey Bob Test). My hunch is that it probably dates from the the end of the year, around the time their debut album, The Scream, was released.

I have to say, The Scream was more or less ruined for me because it was years and years before I managed to track down a copy and, by then, I'd heard (and loved) the 1977/1978 Peel Sessions LP. If you haven't heard that LP, it's basically the blueprint for The Scream, with most of the songs featuring on that album or else being released as stand alone singles in that period. Only the Peel session versions are both rawer and much, much faster. I couldn't get my head around how slow The Scream felt in relation to the Peel Sessions, and while I do like it, I also still prefer the Peel Sessions.

The Peel Sessions LP was my first punk record. It was bought for me by my sister in about October 1992 after we spotted it in Double Four Records in Stockport. Despite it being purchased as a Christmas present, my sister, very generously, let me have it early. There followed a delightful week in which we played it over and over again very, very loudly while jumping up and down a lot. Mum and dad were less delighted and, after a week of this, mum intervened and  the record was taken off me and wrapped up for Christmas. I think she was hoping the novelty would have worn off by the time I got it back in late December: It hadn't.

As to 'Metal Postcard' the song, the version you'll see above is played at the speed it is played on The Scream, enhancing it's brooding menace. The lyrics were inspired by a montage of anti nazi propaganda by the German Dadaist John Heartfield ('Hurrah, die Butter ist all!', Arbiter - Illustrierte - Zeitung (AIZ, Prag) 19.12.1935, S.816. Kat-NR. Z92) which I always thought was a somewhat random choice of inspiration, until I (very recently) discovered, via Jon Savage's chapter in the Linder book, that there had been a big Heartfield exhibition in London at the ICA in 1976, and extrapolating from that, this may well have been the event that introduced a number of the London punk set to Heartfield and to Dada.