“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 he was the first studio guitarist of Siouxsie and the Banshees. He was a member of the group from July 1977 until September 1979., who wrote most of the album’s music (as well as singles like “Hong Kong Garden”), He recorded two studio albums with the band, their debut album “The Scream” in 1978 and “Join Hand”s in 1979.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.
releases May 6, 2025
The Fat Angel Sings 