who's a pretty boy then

One moderately intriguing counterfactual in rock history is what would have happened if John McKay and Kenny Morris had not quit the Banshees at the start of a major tour - after an altercation at an LP  signing session in an Aberdeen record shop

For sure, you wouldn't want to have missed all the amazing music that the John McGeoch and Budgie version of the band generated.

But equally a bit more of the severe (yet pop punchy, often) early sound would also have been nice.

Things like this flange-ferocious beauty - a medium-size hit single

I inadvertently left on the subtitle function when playing this video and before the lyrics start it says "intense postpunk music" - quite!

Well, look, here's a turn-up: some music made by McKay (who, like Morris, more or less disappeared from music after their abrupt departure) - a "lost album", Sixes and Sevens, made not long after leaving the Banshees. You can hear a track now but the whole release is not out until May. 

Release irrationale: 

"The Scream", Siouxsie & the Banshees' first album, was released late enough in the punk era to bear some claim as the first post-punk album, with only minor traces of 'punk' lingering) and enough hints of what had come even earlier to be, paradoxically, new.

Siouxsie was clearly the focus of the band, with her unique vocal style and lyrics, but the real star, we've always known, was John McKay, who wrote most of the album's music (as well as singles like "Hong Kong Garden"), creating a wholly new guitar sound - harsh and brittle, yet melodically intoxicating . . . best articulated by a somewhat confounded Steve Albini years later ". . . only now people are trying to copy it, and even now nobody understands how that guitar player got all that pointless noise to stick together as songs".

McKay's influence lives on; many of the most influential guitarists of the past four decades credit him as a major influence - Geordie from Killing Joke, Jim Reid of The Jesus And Mary Chain, U2's The Edge, Thurston Moore, Johnny Marr and even the two guitarists - The Cure's Robert Smith and Magazine's John McGeoch - who followed him in The Banshees. 

McKay's burgeoning status as the anti-guitar hero was halted when he and Banshees drummer Kenny Morris - at odds with Siouxsie and bassist Steve Severin - fled the band just after the start of a tour supporting the group's second album, Join Hands. It was a weekly music paper scandal, later the subject of a BBC documentary, and Siouxsie's vitriol working its way into the lyrics of a later Banshees b-side, "Drop Dead / Celebration". Aside from a solitary single on Marc Riley's In Tape label nearly a decade later, no music was heard from McKay again.

So it comes as a major surprise to learn of a pile of excellent recordings made in the years just after he left The Banshees, unheard by all but a very few, some of which feature drummer Kenny Morris, plus Mick Allen from Rema Rema, Matthew Seligman of the Soft Boys and longer-term collaborator Graham Dowdall and John's wife Linda . . . the latter three of whom are now sadly deceased.

Sixes And Sevens is an historic lost album. Brazenly genius and bearing fair claim as the lost treasure of the post-punk era, the album collects eleven studio tracks, carefully mastered from original tapes. It's a masterpiece which best speaks for itself. 

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Severin's good looking and Siouxsie of course is a forbidding goddess, but in many ways, if you were going to point to a potential pin-up in the original Banshees it would be McKay. 

 

Those lips, that chin, the intense gaze, the Byronic hair. Moody and magnificent. 

If not pop, then - if he'd had more of a voice - McKay could probably have given Pete Murphy or Ian Astbury a run for their money in Goth's idol-atrous stakes.

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from an argument I had with someone about the Banshees: 

....in many ways it's as much sense to see them as a second-wave glam group as it is a postpunk group. 

In that perspective, the Banshees's real peers would not be PiL or Joy Division, but Japan and the John Foxx-era Ultravox - what could be called "late glam". And also Adam and the Ants.

Siouxsie and Severin are intensely invested in the visual and theatrical sides of music. 

I's also interesting that Siouxsie has on at least occasions situated herself in a larger tradition of glamour and showbiz - with the brassy cover of the Mel Torme standard "Right Now" in the Creatures, and then with "Kiss Them For Me" with all the Hollywood glamour goddess references.

.... The two core members met at a Roxy Music concert; their second B-side was a cover of a T. Rex song. When they did Through the Looking Glass, several of the songs covered were from glam-aligned artists. Glam was at their core....