Siouxsie Sioux

Susan Janet Ballion was born May 27, 1957 and is better known by her stage name, Siouxsie Sioux. Sioux is lead singer of the influential punk/gothic rock band Siouxsie & the Banshees and lead singer of The Creatures.

In the mid-1970's, Siouxsie Sioux was a member of the Bromley Contingent; a group of bored, suburban teenagers devoted to the Sex Pistols. Other members included Billy Idol, Sue Catwoman, Adam Ant, John Simon Ritchie (a pre-Sex Pistols Sid Vicious), fellow Banshees founder Steven Severin and others.

Siouxsie Sioux was born Susan Janet Ballion. She was the youngest of three children. She was born at Guy's Hospital located in South London to a bilingual mother and alcoholic father. She attended Mottingham Secondary Modern School for Girls in Kent.

The Ballions had met in the Belgian Congo. Sioux's mother was a French-speaking secretary; her father a laboratory technician who milked serum from poisonous snakes. When Susan was 14, her father died from alcoholism. At age 15, she suffered with ulcerative colitis, an experience she described later as "surreal." Later she stated that "it completely de-romanticised the body for me".

While growing up, Susan was often left to look after herself as best as she was able in an undisciplined atmosphere. Even before his death, her father's alcoholism kept him incapacitated, forcing her mother to work full time. Homelife was wild and untamed. Even the garden at their home north of Petts Wood grew into a jungle, with high hedges and rambling roses, until the neighbours ganged up and complained, insisting the Ballions prune their hedges.

During her teens, Susan was a self confessed loner and started getting into bands like: David Bowie, Lou Reed, T Rex and The Stooges beforing becoming a infamous member of the Bromley Contingent who were die hard Sex Pistols fans. She became very well known in the London punk scene for her outragous glam, fetish and bondage attire which became staples of punk fashion.

Siouxsie's first gig was as an unrehearsed fill-in at the 100 Club's "Punk Rock Festival" - two nights in September 1976 - organised by Malcolm McLaren. In 1976 the Bromley Contingent followed the Sex Pistols to France where Siouxsie was punched by an Arab. She was wearing a cupless bra, black vinyl stockings and a black armband with a swastika on it. Sioux later said that the armband was intended as a campy joke and that she did not, at that time, appreciate the implications of wearing a swastika. "The Nazis were not only anti-Semitic but anti-anyone different, anti-anyone like me."

One of Siouxsie's first public appearances was with the Sex Pistols on Bill Grundy's television show. It was on that show that the Pistols garnered attention for releasing a stream of expletives in reaction to Bill Grundy's provocation. In the course of Grundy's interview with the members of the Sex Pistols, he tried to flirt with Siouxsie:

Grundy: "Are you worried, or are you just enjoying yourself?"
Siouxsie: Enjoying myself.
Grundy: "Are you?"
Siouxsie: Yeah.
Grundy: "Ah, that's what I thought you were doing."
Siouxsie: I always wanted to meet you.
Grundy: "Did you really?"
Siouxsie: Yeah.
Grundy: "We'll meet afterwards, shall we?"
It was to this that Steve Jones reacted by calling Grundy a "dirty sod" and a "dirty old man," and the interview went downhill from there.

Sioux married Siouxsie & the Banshees' drummer, Budgie in 1991, with whom she performed also as The Creatures since 1981. Sioux is the featured vocalist on the title track to Basement Jaxx's 2003 album Kish Kash. She won the Icon Award at the Mojo Honours in London, June 2005. Siouxsie Sioux has started work on her first solo album which is slated to be released in early or mid 2007. In 2005, Siouxsie released a DVD from her "Dreamshow" tour which went to the top of the UK Music DVD Charts and was a huge hit with her fans.

Siouxsie lives a comparatively quiet life nowadays. Ostensibly "fed up with fans staring through the windows of their basement flat" in west London, she and Budgie moved to France in 1992. Now they live in a converted farmhouse in a small village in south west France where they have "a garden, cats and mountains of books". A few years ago they set up their own label, Sioux Records, and they have recently finished building a studio in their house.