Marking 10 years since her last performance, Siouxsie Sioux has today been announced as a headliner for Latitude Festival. The leading music and arts festival returns to the picturesque grounds of Henham Park, Suffolk, on 20-23 July 2023 with Pulp, Paolo Nutini and George Ezra topping an eclectic bill where music meets the arts in full colour. Siouxsie will headline the ‘BBC Sounds Stage’ on Sunday night. Weekend and day tickets for the festival are on sale HERE.
Over four decades after Siouxsie burst onto the scene at the birth of British punk rock, Sioux remains a defiant musical maverick. Her unique and uncompromising style continues to shape and inspire alternative culture. The list of musical pioneers she has made an impact on is truly astounding.
Latitude Festival Director, Melvin Benn commented, “What a privilege it is to welcome the iconic Siouxsie to the Latitude Festival. Siouxsie has been an enduring trailblazer and her impact across musical culture is colossal. Uncompromisingly defiant, Siouxsie’s powerful body of work is incomparable. There has never been a live performer like her and there probably never will be!”
Siouxsie’s first ever time on stage saw her perform a truly chaotic and twisted version of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ at the 100 Club Punk Festival in 1976.
What followed was an astounding career that heralded a succession of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Creatures and Siouxsie records so groundbreaking and glorious that it is hard to imagine groups being able to emulate their sense of gleeful experimentation and their total chart success right now.
Siouxsie, always a star, became an antidote to everything that was wrong with the music industry and for the most part the world in the seventies with its attitude towards strong women.
As the hits and records kept coming it very soon became apparent that her influence was even greater than just her remarkable music, the Siouxsie look, a beguiling mixture of aggression, power and strange fragility, became as iconic as that of Ziggy Stardust . As the years rolled on from that fateful stage debut her ever changing looks have all remained iconic to this day.
Her legacy is more than a catalogue of brilliant records and live shows that none of her contemporaries could ever match, for Siouxsie herself left a much stronger impression behind her.
Siouxsie’s debut solo album ‘Mantaray’ was released in September 2007. On this record she revelled in a sense of freedom, something much more expansive than her previous work. Had the Ice Queen melted? Well the first single, the spellbinding ‘Into A Swan’ proved that the Ice Queen was still very much in control. The ensuing tour sold out wherever it went and for those who had only dipped into her previous work a new slew of delights and surprises met them on the record itself and in the theatres and festivals she played at. In 2008 Siouxsie performed at the World Soundtrack awards with Angelo Badalamenti performing Careless Love from John Maybury’s film ‘The Edge of Love’.
In 2013 Siouxsie once again took to the stage at London’s Royal Festival Hall as part of Yoko Ono’s Meltdown, performing an unprecedented two sold out shows as a guest of the curator. Siouxsie, never one for being predictable, surprised the 5000 attendees with an unannounced complete and full rendition of Siouxsie and the Banshees 1980’s ‘Kaleidoscope’ album alongside a myriad of hits from ‘Face To Face’ to ‘Here Comes That Day’.
A few years later Siouxsie recorded ‘Love Crime’ the final haunting track that closes the last ever episode of the ‘Hannibal’ TV show, that event made national news in the UK.
Given her illustrious career, surprisingly little is known of the real Siouxsie Sioux, a rare situation for any artist who has been in the spotlight for four decades, probably because Siouxsie does exactly what she wants to do and thankfully even now, some 46 years later, nothing has actually changed there.
