Siouxsie at Liverpool Carling Academy
Siouxsie
Liverpool Carling Academy
Reviewer Gary Stanton
Siouxsie takes to the stage kitted out in an all-in-one body suit and it’s hard to prevent your thoughts from straying to carnal matters. Maintaining an erection during a live concert, though, is exceedingly bad manners and at such times I always try to visualize Mary Whitehouse giving me a stern lecture and wagging a bony finger at me. “Dirty, Disgusting!” says she. This always does the trick, which is a real bonus for the people stood in front of me.
She wastes no time (time is, after all, precious) and launches into some new material which goes down well enough but you suspect, for the most part, the punters are there to hear the old classics of which there are many. They are not about to be disappointed.
“Arabian Knights” arrives, but like my member, is now limp and flaccid, and sounding like the guitarist has forgot to knock the chorus pedal on. Things pick up with “Spellbound” and I am tapping my foot like a man afraid to join the moshpit due to a dodgy back.
Siouxsie is, by now, prowling the stage like a highly-sexed ocelot, or any of the other big cats native to South America and, at 50, shows no apparent sign of
Rheumatoid arthritis or any other symptoms of age, including hot flushes. As the saying goes, 50 is the new 40, which technically makes me just twenty-eight and still a virgin. (I was a later starter and frigid to boot.) Spellbound is followed by “Night Shift” which sounds like it’s about Prostitution but could equally apply to working long hours in a hospital where paid-for sex is commonplace on the wards, like a Carry-On film which stretched, among other things, the boundaries. It sounds as good as it did in the days of copious spitting and swastika armbands.
The average age of the punters is late thirties / early forties and I’m disappointed
there aren’t more fresher faces at the gig. The impulse to drag some youngsters in off the street and force them to listen to the post-punk Goddess is overwhelming, until I recall the last time I coaxed a youth in off the street in order to “educate them about music” only to become subject to a misdirected hate campaign by locals and was subsequently forced to move to a rented flat above a Chip Shop, fifteen kilometres from the nearest school. Luckily, the Haddock Chips and Mushy Peas Special was first-rate, a consolation for any externally imposed exile.
Two encores later the band leave the stage, note this is not the original Banshees line-up, which should be obvious from the name on your ticket. A chap next to me lights up what looks and smells like a joint in direct contravention of both the Carling Academy’s smoking policy and a good many of the UK’s drug laws.
A suitably punk ending.
Gary Stanton