Quote Of The Day By Siouxsie Sioux: 'I Think A Certain Amount Of Anger Has Been ...'

The dawn of punk saw the beginnings of a musical revolution on both sides of the Atlantic, which, along with a host of new male icons such as the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, saw more female-fronted acts than the rock landscape of the late 1960s and early 1970s could have contemplated. British singer Siouxsie Sioux was one such figure, whose influence as the frontwoman of Siouxsie and the Banshees has been incalculable.

Born Susan Ballion in the London borough of Chislehurst in 1957, Sioux was a teenage rock fan who revered the Beatles, the German band Can, and other iconic groups of the 1960s and 1970s before being swept up in the budding London punk scene, where she quickly distinguished herself for her daring, provocative outfits. However, as her involvement in making music grew, Sioux was also suspicious of the label "punk," as well as other labels that became attached to her, such as the "Queen of Goth." And her self-awareness as to what motivated her art is what makes her our Quote of the Day.

"I think a certain amount of anger has been a fuel of mine, if you want — but also some sort of sadness, and plain mischief, of course."

Today's quote comes from an interview Siouxsie Sioux gave with The Guardian back in 2005. In it, the singer, who by then was living with former Banshees drummer Budgie as a married couple in the South of France while collaborating on their ongoing band the Creatures, looks back over almost three decades as a music icon.

The quote comes during a discussion of what motivated the first generation of artists on the British punk scene, and whether their creative impulses were accurately characterized. "Looking back on those days, nothing can really capture quite how out on a limb the primary people were," she also said. "How brave it was, I suppose — without it really seeming brave at the time; more a kind of recklessness. But the term 'punk' was so lazy and easy and inaccurate."

"Anger can be power," sang the Clash frontman Joe Strummer on the 1979 song "Clampdown." And indeed, the common understanding of the punk ethos is that it is motivated primarily by a sense of righteous anger, harnessed by alienated young people to challenge the status quo of the world around them. But as Siouxsie Sioux's Quote of the Day makes clear, she didn't consider her own rebellion to be so easily characterizable. She noted in The Guardian that in many ways, the punk explosion was over almost as soon as it began, with the Sex Pistols' notorious interview on the TV show "Today" — at which she was present, wearing mime-esque make-up and attire — making the movement the target of abuse from much of the British public. 

While purist punk has continued to find an audience in the five decades since the genre was born, subgenres including post-punk and new wave emerged almost concurrently, allowing for a wider sonic and emotional palette than the parent genre would typically encompass. In this way, Sioux is right to distance herself from the purely snarling posture of the punk movement through which she originally rose to prominence. Simply listen to how Siouxsie and the Banshees' 1981 classic "Spellbound" marries aggression with vulnerability, post-punk with neo-psychedelia, to see why.

• "Certainly music was the one big thing that made everything seem okay. It was a cause of happiness within the family, and laughter, and fun."

• "Things have to go on. We're trying to show that it does not have to be pop punk next, it doesn't have to be the same old rock 'n' roll riffs. We don't like trends. We formed initially because we felt we had something of our own to say."

• "Many of the audience don't understand, but that's irrelevant as long as they get the feel that we're doing something different."

• "For every following of some sort, you get followers who distort things. If people don't understand things, they should say so. There's too much pride. We don't understand."

• "Nothing could derail us. Except ourselves."