IN THIS INTERVIEW FOR JOHN ROBB'S NEW BOOK THE ART OF DARKNESS, THE BANSHEES BASSIST AND SOMETIME SIOUXSIE BEAU TOOK THE AUTHOR THROUGH THE BAND’S FORMATION AND FLOWERING. “IT WAS MEANT TO BE ABRASIVE,” INSISTS STEVE SEVERIN.

ANOTHER DISAFFECTED SOUTH east London teen looking to music to establish his distance from suburban Britain, Steven John Bailey appeared destined to squire Siouxsie Sioux to stardom. But for the future Banshees bass man, it all began with glam…

THE FACT THAT Bowie came from Bromley was more weird than inspiring really. When he was in the charts with Space Oddity in 1969, I was only in the third year but there was a lot of gossiping about his life at the school, like when he had driven a Mini onto the school bandstand one lunchtime.

A lot of people talk about their defining moment of seeing Bowie on Top Of The Pops doing Starman, but my defining moment was Roxy Music doing Virginia Plain in August 1972 because I could see and hear the progression from the kind of music I was into before. They were slightly prog but there was something more going on and that really appealed to me. You have to credit Bowie, though, he was always name-dropping people in interviews. That’s how I got into reading William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch when I was 16. You were like a hawk. Any little snippet you leapt on it because there was so little of it.

We had a gang of us at school who were avid music devourers from 1969 onwards. One of our posse had an older brother who was stationed in Hamburg in the military. He became a junkie and came back to England in the late summer of 1970 and he brought with him the first Can album Monster Movie and The Velvet Underground’s White Light/ White Heat. We listened to them one Sunday afternoon around a friend’s house and it was like, What the fuck is this? It’s brilliant!