Letter from Clapham: Erik Donald France to Wallace Fowlie, July 10, 1991 (Part IV)

[Though earlier I'd donated to Duke letters from Wallace Fowlie (1908-1998) to me, more recently, in sorting through my files, I came across photocopies of at least some of the letters I wrote to him. Here's Part IV of a long one I wrote in longhand from Clapham, London, dated July 10, 1991. Ellipses indicate slight editing (deletion of a few personal details). Extra paragraph breaks added for easier reading. For his other letters, please see Wallace Fowlie Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Here's a link to the collection guide.]

Other bands Rimbaud has influenced --we've talked about Patti Smith, and of course the Doors and Bob Dylan; probably the Velvet Underground, certainly [John Cale and] Lou Reed; indirectly, David Bowie and Iggy Pop. A Dead Kennedys book has a direct quotation from Nietzsche, but not Rimbaud.

There is a current band, which I expect has been influenced so, and that's Siouxsie and the Banshees. I was able to see them here, and was most impressed. This is an understatement. I was "blown away" by their performance. I saw them at the Town & Country, a rock club in an old theatre about the size of Memorial Hall at UNC [Chapel Hill], but with much better fittings and services -- in Kentish Town.

What blew me away was the continuous, relentless precision, the brilliant, glittering originality and dedicated studiousness of their performance, without the usual rock star egos and accompanying sexual flaunting: here is a band that is serious, philosophical, visionary, hardworking, and continuing. They have an almost decadent lustre, a smoky, intelligent lyrical style, and the right attitude toward themselves & toward their audience.

As the show progressed, I drew down from my balcony perch into the swirling mass beneath the stage, drawn by the energy of the band's delivery, the strange textures which included a cowbell and cello, strong guitars, drums and percussion, played upon with collaborative light swaths, an enormous Tantric Hindu icon, a god and goddess in conjugal embrace. I can recall it clearly, feeling like a hoplite in the sixth rank of a phalanx, until pressing & pressed forward as the first rank seemed to fall away crushed between the crowd and the stage, scattering to the sides, filtering back through the crowd, as I sweated and danced like a Bachannal. I could almost feel the crowd's expatiated nihilism forced upwards into a smoking overhead dome as Siouxsie sang Cassandra-like the words to "Cities in Dust," the imagery shimmering like an opium vision --

"Your city lies in dust, my friend
. . . All our cities will rise in dust . . ."

It was indeed a dithyrambic performance, Siouxsie & the Banshees playing the role of urban shaman, forcing the hollowness out of the spectators until they, we, became the performance & the dance. Long afterwards, I felt the afterglow of the experience. I still do. It was rock at its richest, and I feel in a position to judge, after experiencing a strange variety of different performances in a short time.

I feel certain that Siouxsie & the Banshees, besides maintaining a vital thread in rock music, have been and are guided by nineteenth century impulses like French symbolism and twentieth century movements such as the Surrealists, but I have no lyric sheets in hand and no cultural reviews to back me. I think that what has kept them on track is their only modest success; they are too strange, apparently, for mass popularity, unlike the Doors, who despite their strangeness, managed to be too successful in too short a time, which drew Jim Morrison onto the rocks. (I wonder what he would have been doing if he had gotten through that time. Poetry & pictures, or exile to remote places. . .)     

[The experience strongly persists in memory, somehow floating outside of linear time. "Esta es musica / Del otro mundo" = This is music from the other world," -- "El Día de Los Muertos," part of the first encore, after "Trust in Me." 

The night's performance ended with "Cities in Dust." 

Siouxise earlier joked before starting "Dear Prudence," after "Fear of the Unknown:" "Doesn't it make you sick?" 

"Kiss Them for Me" and "Peek-a-Boo" were real cool times, too.

The Town & Country had a capacity of about 2,100. It's now the O₂ Forum Kentish Town, with added capacity.]