A certain sense of mystery attends Siouxsie Sioux’s sudden reappearance, 16 years after she last released an album and a decade on from her last live show. There have been no interviews, no talk of a new release, just an intermittent string of gigs and festival appearances, the latter of which have found little favour with the singer: “Bloody festivals,” she grumbles between songs, “with their short sets.”
The more elaborate London shows – with which, it appears, her brief tour is concluding – seem to suit her better. Instead of a support act, top-hatted and sequined dancers and musicians crowd the stairs at either side of the Troxy’s auditorium, doing old-fashioned showbiz moves to 30s swing, underlaid with a ferocious techno pulse.
The old RKO Pictures logo shines out from the huge onstage screen, presumably in reference to the venue’s past life as the East End’s glitziest cinema, to the accompaniment of Cab Calloway singing Minnie the Moocher.
“How lovely to be on stage at the Troxy,” Sioux purrs delightedly, the sunniness of her mood at odds with the song she’s just performed. There is something impressively take-no-prisoners about opening the set with Night Shift, Siouxsie and the Banshees’s grim 1981 meditation on the Yorkshire Ripper murders, with music that sounds like bad weather and a refrain of “fuck the mothers, kill the others”.
In truth, this doesn’t need the dancers and references to Hollywood’s golden age to feel like an event: the audience create that atmosphere themselves. There are people here who have travelled from the US and others who clearly aren’t minded to let a punishing heatwave affect their sartorial choices. It’s hard not to be slightly awestruck by the sight of devoted goths in full makeup and black PVC, which, given the temperature inside the venue, feels less like a fashion statement than a death wish.
Still, it attests to Sioux’s lasting impact. You can argue for hours about the exact roots of goth, but the Banshees – whether they like it or not – were the heralds of one of the most pervasive subcultures of all: even in a post-tribal landscape, you still see kids hitting the black hair dye and eyeliner, albeit rebranded as emo.
Tonight’s set underlines the strength of the band’s music, even if Sioux occasionally struggles amid the murky PA. What’s striking is its breadth. For every song that defines the sound of goth – the rumbling drums, ominous bass and effect-heavy guitar of Sin in My Heart and Arabian Knights – there’s something that strikes out beyond far its confines: Kiss Them for Me’s booming breakbeat and buoyant melody, the stripped-back drums and vocals of The Creatures’ But Not Them.
The set picks its way through Sioux’s past, walking a line between crowd pleasing – Christine and Happy House – and pleasing itself. There’s no sign of Spellbound, arguably the quintessential Siouxsie and the Banshees hit, but there are quite a few album tracks, a scattering of them from Sioux’s solitary solo outing, Mantaray.
The best of the latter is set closer Into a Swan, which employs grinding industrial guitars and tabla drums. It reflects on the turbulence of an adolescence that saw the singer go from a troubled suburban schoolkid to the stuff of 1976’s suburban nightmares: the “punk shocker” plastered across the tabloids’ front pages, combining sonic gut-punch with lyrics that are strangely moving in their devotion to the transformative power of music and makeup: “What in the world is happening? … this change is my design”.
It makes you wish Sioux would follow Mantaray up, however belatedly. Perhaps she will, but she isn’t saying: after an encore of Hong Kong Garden, she disappears, the huge sleeves of her baby-blue dress floating behind her, the enigma of her reappearance unsolved.
• At the Troxy, London, tonight
