John McKay's Reactor
Thursday, June 19, 20:00adv £22
The Scream, the debut album from Siouxsie & the Banshees, was released late enough in the punk era to bear some claim as the first post-punk album, with only minor traces of ‘punk’ and enough hints of what had come even earlier to feel utterly new.
Siouxsie was clearly the focus of the band, but the sonic dynamo was John McKay, composer of most of the album’s music and hit singles, such as Hong Kong Garden, while simultaneously creating a wholly new guitar sound that was harsh and brittle, yet melodically intoxicating, best articulated by a confounded Steve Albini many 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”.
Many of the most influential guitarists of the past four decades credited John as a major influence, including 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 who followed him into The Banshees – The Cure‘s Robert Smith and Magazine‘s John McGeoch.
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