FROM THE CRUCIBLE OF PUNK, ONE OF ITS KEY FACES EMERGED TO INSPIRE THE NEXT DECADE OF MUSIC AND MORE. FROM HIS ENGLAND'S DREAMING TAPES, JON SAVAGE SALVAGES THE FIRST TRULY REVEALING SIOUXSIE SIOUX INTERVIEW...

ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS ABOUT THE EARLY STAGES OF LONDON punk is that it was a haven for outsiders. Everything was new and up for grabs: music, fashion, aesthetics and gender politics. These freedoms were gleefully taken up by a number of women, who in 1976 and 1977 acted out in public in a way that had never been seen before. Together with the non-macho masculinity presented by Buzzcocks and Subway Sect, the effect of Poly Styrene, Gaye Advert, Pauline Murray and The Slits was incredibly exciting.

Siouxsie Sioux was one of the most prominent, if not the most prominent among these pioneers. During 1977 I saw her performances grow from tentative thrash into a powerful theatre of suburban repression and sexual domination. No woman had done this before. The Banshees – Sioux, Steve Severin, John McKay and Kenny Morris – were one of the very best groups in the country in 1977 and 1978, during which period they went from outcasts seemingly unable to get a record contract to Top 10 pop stars. They were terrific.

Because of her central part – not least her backchat to host Bill Grundy on the December 1, 1976 Today show that precipitated Pistol Steve Jones’s verbal torrent – Siouxsie was on the top of my list of interviews for the book that became England’s Dreaming. It was easy to arrange, and she was as forthcoming and as sharp as I had hoped, happy to re-emphasise the sheer strangeness and excitement of being a total teen outsider in her time and place.

Everyone talks about punk being workingclass, but to me it was very suburban.

I always gravitated towards the city, I hated suburbia. Some people stuck to their local town, like Bromley. You could hang out there and feel pretty grown up, but I hated it. I thought it was small and narrow-minded. There was this trendy wine bar called Pips or something, and I got [fellow punk pathfinder] Berlin [AKA Bertie Marshall] to wear this dog collar, and I walked in with Berlin following me, and people’s jaws just hit the tables. Later on if I’d have done that I’d probably have been assaulted. But I walked in and ordered a bowl of water for him. It was hilarious.

(opposite) Sioux in 1980 with fellow pioneers (from left) Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, Viv Albertine, Poly Styrene and Pauline Black.

Michael Putland/Retna/Avalon, Camera Press/Steve Emberton

What did you get into?

Edgar Allan Poe, and having an older brother and sister there was always music there: R&B, Tamla Motown, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. But stories, gruesome stories. Old books of my father’s, Aztec mutilation rites, done in matchstick diagrams, someone’s entrails being ripped out. I hated the street we lived in, bordering on middle-class. More puritanical than proper middle-class in a way, almost spiteful.