‘Peepshow’: Siouxsie & The Banshees’ Late 80s Creative Rebirth
Nine albums in and with a new lineup in place, the enduring British outfit continued to innovate.
Inspired early releases like The Scream and Juju quickly secured Siouxsie & The Banshees’ legend, but the enduring British outfit never stopped innovating. Indeed, the band’s ninth studio album, Peepshow, contains some of the most adventurous music the Banshees ever committed to tape.
Released in September 1988, Peepshow arrived in the wake of a significant lineup change. Guitarist John Valentine Carruthers departed following the release of 1987’s well-received covers album Through The Looking Glass, but he was replaced by two new recruits in guitarist Jon Klein and multi-instrumentalist Martin McCarrick.
Listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow now.
The new personnel clearly reinvigorated the band. With its reverse tape loops, samples, Gallic-flavored accordions, and drummer Budgie’s dextrous, hip-hop-styled beats, the album’s first single “Peek-A-Boo” sounded unlike anything Siouxsie and her team had ever attempted before. The heady, dancefloor-friendly track seduced both fans and critics, topping Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart and scoring rave reviews in U.K. music weeklies Sounds and NME.
Impressively, Peepshow included plenty more music of a similarly ground-breaking caliber. The sinister-sounding “Carousel,” for example, brilliantly evoked its title with its whirling fairground organs and a nightmarish Siouxsie lyric (“The snarling horse that waits for you/Its motor whirrs and colors curl/Inside your head the monsters whirl,”) while “Burn-Up” rode rattling rockabilly rhythms punctuated by blasts of mean blues harmonica. The album reached its pinnacle with “Last Beat Of My Heart”: a majestic paean to eternal love wherein Siouxsie’s show-stopping vocal was embellished by timpani, strings, and tumbling accordions.
Elsewhere, the album trod slightly more familiar ground on tracks such as the ghostly “Scarecrow” and “The Killing Jar,” with the darkly anthemic latter song providing the Banshees with another Top 5 hit on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart. Peepshow was thus well-placed to build upon the success of its two hits and it did exactly that, making the Top 20 in the U.K and (for the first time) cracking the Top 75 of the U.S. Billboard 200.
While this commercial success was welcome, the critical acclaim was especially pleasing. On release, Peepshow was greeted with a raft of five-star reviews, with most writers praising the new-look Banshees’ desire to rip up the rule book and return with a daring record Stereo Review described as sounding “utterly unconventional and thoroughly intoxicating.”
“This record was very easy, possibly the easiest of all the Banshees albums to make,” Siouxsie Sioux said, reflecting on her band’s creative rebirth in an NME at the time. “I felt I was literally kicking away the crutches. [The feeling was] if it goes wrong, it goes wrong, f__k it, let’s at least do it. It’s very important to scare yourself into doing things as it gets the adrenalin going. Some people’s fear paralyzes them, but [on Peepshow] I’ve managed to be motivated by it.”
