The Absence: Memoirs of a Banshee Drummer by Budgie
Revealed by: White Rabbit
Launch date: seventeenth July 2025
This memoir by Banshees drummer and Siouxsie’s inventive and romantic associate is a uncooked, courageous guide and one of many darkest musical memoirs I’ve learn.
It seems that Budgie, the musician, does have a reference to precise budgerigars. As a baby rising up in St Helens, a Lancashire city ten miles from Liverpool, the younger Peter Clarke saved and bred budgies. The revenue helped pay for his first correct drum equipment, which he was nonetheless utilizing on tour with the Slits and on their debut LP, Lower, in 1979.
The nickname Budgie was given to him by bandmates Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford. As a part of the legendary punk-era Liverpool music scene, he performed first within the Spitfire Boys (“my first gang”) with Paul after which in Large in Japan with Holly. The Spitfire Boys have been, he remembers, “naïve, foolish and reckless, but pushed to do one thing.” That sums up the spirit of that point and place, fantastically recalled within the three Liverpool-set chapters that act as a prologue to his future musical profession.
After Large in Japan broke up, Budgie left Liverpool for London, taking his new title with him. “Peter was fading and Budgie, as he was to develop into, was taking on.”
It was an excellent transfer for his profession and his creativity: session work meant intense studying, and becoming a member of the Slits to tour with the Conflict gave him Topper Headon as a mentor, gratefully remembered. By the point he was invited to affix the Banshees, he was assured sufficient to say sure.
From the skin, there appears to be some serendipity about these profession strikes, however the “steps into the unknown” have been actually concerning the impetus to maintain shifting: to flee from the absence that offers the guide its title. “I might all the time say sure with out considered consequence. What did I’ve to lose? It might take a few years for me to understand that what I needed to lose was my sense of self.”
That absence, a continuing undercurrent within the guide, stems from the demise of his mom when he was a baby. As he tells it, this was the reason for Budgie’s steady loneliness, his disastrous dependence on alcohol and his doomed romance with Siouxsie.
There’s a poignant parallel once we discover out that Siouxsie additionally misplaced a mother or father, her father. In each instances, there have been different traumas, too. It seems that they have been two broken souls who, in a cycle of “intense love” and “intense anger”, might solely injury one another. Regardless of this, and the facility imbalance that may all the time be there, the connection lasted for 17 years. Maybe that’s all the way down to their ongoing “inventive connection”, notably with the Banshees spin-off group, the Creatures. Budgie acknowledges: “I nonetheless suppose it’s an achievement to have lasted so lengthy, for much longer than many musical or private relationships I do know, and to be repeatedly prolific. Maybe being repeatedly prolific is a clue to our longevity as a pair.”
Regardless of the dysfunction within the relationship and the continued dysfunction throughout the numerous Banshees line-ups, there are lighter moments within the story. Even in a goth band, life within the studio and on the highway permits for some enjoyable and frivolity, to not point out globe-trotting glamour. There was, too, loads of inventive development: one other sort of enjoyable.
As a author, Budgie avoids the clichéd story arc of dependancy and redemption: he will get sober midway via the guide, nevertheless it doesn’t remedy his issues. Solely after marriage breakdown and remedy does he lastly begin to regain that “sense of self”, and “Peter” re-emerges from the shadow of “Budgie”.
There’s a touch of private development on the finish of the guide, and I wish to suppose that Budgie’s life story has a contented ending. He has remarried, has youngsters, and continues in numerous, properly acquired inventive collaborations. That’s not, although, what this guide is about. Because the subtitle says, that is merely “Memoirs of a Banshee Drummer”, and the epilogue, describing his divorce, attracts a line below that exact story. It’s as uncooked and brutal as something that has gone earlier than – typical, in truth, of the braveness and honesty that runs via the entire guide.
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The Absence is accessible in any respect good guide shops.
Phrases by Penny Kiley. You may learn her Louder Than Warfare opinions at her creator profile and her archive music journalism on Substack.
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