Siouxsie And The Banshees Raid The Vaults For Reissues
Monday April 10, 2006 @ 06:00 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

Siouxsie Sioux

The first four Siouxsie And The Banshees albums are being remastered and expanded for release in the U.K. on June 1 to help mark the 30th anniversary of the British proto-punk group's founding.

While there will be bonus tracks on the band's 1978 debut, The Scream, the reissue won't include the "Track Sessions" that fans have been buying as bootleg recordings for the years. Bassist Steve Severin had wanted to add the tracks to the revamped album, but told Billboard.com that he was vetoed by the other group members because the sound quality wasn't up to standard.

The Banshees' second album, 1979's Join Hands, will now include a previously unreleased instrumental called "Infantry" and a remastered version of the single, "Love In A Void."

Kaleidoscope, which hit #5 on the U.K. chart in 1980, featured a couple of the band's best known songs in "Happy House" and "Christine." The new version features 10 extra tracks, including an unreleased demo of "Sitting Room" and the single, "Israel."

The reissue of 1981's Juju includes a previously unreleased version of "Fireworks," the 12-inch version of "Spellbound" and the rare vocoder version of "Arabian Knights." A double-disc deluxe edition of the album is in the works and could be out by the end of the year.

A DVD release of the Banshees' 1983 home video, Nocturne — featuring a 1982 concert taped in London, England and the Play At Home television special — is also planned for release. But, like with the albums, no North American dates have been announced yet.

The punk/goth/new wave band, fronted by shock-rocker Siouxsie Sioux, garnered a lot of attention during the early days of the British punk movement and kept on making interesting music through a total of 12 studio albums before disbanding in 1996.

Severin is still planning to reissue 1983's Blue Sunshine, the album he made with The Cure's Robert Smith as The Glove. It's tentatively scheduled for a July release along with a batch of Cure reissues. Smith is a Banshees alumni, as were The Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious and Adam And The Ants' Marco Perroni.

—Phil Villeneuve