ALL POINTS BULLETIN: Find Siouxsie Sioux

Have you seen this woman? She was last seen walking off toward the sunset in the company of a rare male Banshee named Budgie. Left in a precarious state of mental health after a particularly nasty encounter with a bat and a robin, they have gone into hiding and will only answer to the name “The Creatures.”

Several hits collections have recently been added to the group’s discography, and their first four albums, The Scream, Join Hands, Kaleidoscope, and Juju, have been remastered and will be released as single-disc editions with bonus tracks, but Siouxsie and the Banshees have produced no original material for more than a decade.

Their 30-year career encompassed punk, gothic rock, and new wave genres. One of the most successful groups to emerge from the punk rock movement of the late 1970s, they have sold nearly 50 million records worldwide. In the U.S., their career reached its zenith with the release of Superstition in 1991. The album reached #65 on the Billboard 200, and spawned three singles, the first of which, “Kiss Them for Me,” climbed to #23 on the Billboard Hot 100, #8 Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart, and #1 The Modern Rock Tracks chart. In the wake of this commercial success, Siouxsie and the Banshees were given the dubious honor of having a track, “Face to Face,” included on the soundtrack to the accursed Batman & Robin. Their subsequent album, The Rapture, was a commercial failure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees effectively closed up shop.

Siouxsie and the Banshees are not the only ones to suffer from their affiliation with Batman & Robin; that movie was a miserable vortex that basically ended the previously successful careers of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chris O’Donnell, Alicia Silverstone, and Coolio. The only person to escape the carnage relatively unscathed was the mystically-protected lothario George Clooney. Even Uma Thurman’s career stalled after the movie’s release; were it not for Quentin Tarantino and his fondness for long legs, Uma Thurman might have been perpetually stuck in the six-year rut she was in before the Kill Bill franchise revived her career. Hopefully, Siouxsie and the Banshees will be similarly rejuvenated through their affiliation with Sophia Coppola and the inclusion of one of their earliest songs, “Hong Kong Garden,” in her movie about Marie Antoinette.

Siouxsie and the Banshees, we miss you.