My Top Ten Favorite Bands/Musical Acts of All-Time list actually has 11 bands on it, because I tie Siouxsie & The Banshees and Nine Inch Nails as #1. I became a fan of the Banshees sometime in the spring of 1999, around the time of the start of my Goth period, when I purchased their second collection of singles Twice Upon A Time (which I would say is also one of the ten best singles collections of all-time). I quickly fell in love with their music and began collecting any albums from them that I could get my hands on. Around the same time I was getting into the Banshees I was also discovering the films of Alfred Hitchcock (mainly through film courses at college), and the two definitely seemed to go hand-in-hand: as I noted in my entry on Hitchcock earlier this year, the Banshees were very much inspired by his psychological thrillers, from naming the song "Spellbound" after one of his films to the way that the guitars of "Suburban Relapse" mimic the shrieking strings of the shower sequence in Psycho. Oddly enough, for a band as visually striking and photogenic as the Banshees were, there have been very little books about the band (one wishes for a lavish coffee table-sized book filled with photos). However, in the year 2003 a biography for the band was released, written by Mark Paytress (who also did the liner notes for the band's albums when Polydor reissued them from 2005-2014).
In truth this book (which, like some of the other books I've covered in this series, I finally, "officially" read "for real" this year), is more like an oral history, in which long interviews with various people are cut-up and re-arranged to tell a chronological story, from the band's origins to their break-up in 1995 to their brief and final reunion tour in 2002. It also has a rudimentary discography, a list of all the gigs played by the Banshees (and Siouxsie's side project The Creatures), a foreword by Garbage's Shirley Manson, and an all-too-brief black-and-white photograph section. As one might expect, the majority of the quotes come from the core trio of Siouxsie Sioux, Budgie, and Steven Severin, but many of the former band members have their say as well, like Kenny Morris (the original drummer), Martin McCarrick (strings/keyboards), and of course, their many, many guitarists: John McGeoch, Robert Smith, Jon Klein, and John Knox (only original guitarist John McKay and John Carruthers aren't involved: and yes, the band had a lot of guitarists named John/Jon). Other people involved with the Banshees or who were part of that whole scene/their peers get some words in as well: super-fan Billy Chainsaw, tour manager (and later band manager) Tim Collins, Glen Matlock (The Sex Pistols), Marc Almond (Soft Cell), Phil Oakey (The Human League), Patricia Morrison (The Gun Club), Marco Pirroni, John Cale, and more (oddly enough, none of the band's producers outside of Cale are interviewed, not even Mike Hedges). It's a really entertaining and at times very funny book (Severin's quips especially tend to be amusing), and it really covers the entire spectrum of the band's career, focusing on the creation of all of the albums, memorable live shows, and so on. For fans of the band, I highly recommend it.
Dark Entries: Bauhaus and Beyond (Ian Shirley, 1994)
This book was published by SAF Publishing, who have done some very good music books over the years (see also Tape Delay: Confessions from the Eighties Underground by Charles Neal). I got into Bauhaus in the spring of 1999, around the same time (though slightly before) I got into Siouxsie & the Banshees. That was towards the end of my freshman year at Rhode Island College, and my interest in the band began when I saw a cute Goth girl wearing a Bauhaus T-shirt around campus, the image on the front being the iconic art for the band's "Bela Lugosi's Dead" single (historical note: this same girl did a weekly radio show on the campus' radio station called something like "Mistress Mayhem's S&M Hour," and which played a lot of Goth/Industrial/Darkwave music... I was a big fan of the program, and through that show discovered bands like Ministry and Die Form. Also of note was that the girl's first name was Karen, which inspired me to name the main female character in my Trinity fantasy series after her). The very first Bauhaus CD I got was the "greatest hits" one (Crackle), and like with the Banshees I quickly fell in love with them, though in truth, aside from their singles and their underrated final album Go Away White, it's only their debut album, In The Flat Field, that I listen to with any regularity... but what a debut album it is! As for Shirley's book, at under 200 pages it's a brisk but still informative read, and written in collaboration with all four of the band members. The first half of the book deals with Bauhaus, while the second half deals with Love & Rockets plus Peter Murphy's solo career. Like the Siouxsie & the Banshees book, I finally and formally "officially" read this one complete this year.
Wire: Everybody Loves a History (Kevin S. Eden, 1991)
I am at best a casual Wire fan, mainly only familiar with their groundbreaking first three albums and also the albums of their second phase like The Ideal Copy and A Bell is a Cup... (the latter of which I rank in my Top Ten favorite albums of all-time). This is another oral history-type book (again from SAF Publishing) made in collaboration with the band's four members, and it also boasts a full discography (well, up to the start of the band's Wir era), gigography, and over 70 photographs spanning their collective history. It's a pretty entertaining book, and learning what some of their at times cryptic songs were actually about was really interesting.
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