Since my teens, I have always loved punk and post punk music. As a teenager, I wanted to be Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie & the Banshees. Siouxsie was already well established as a goth punk princess goddess by the time I hit my teenage years.
Her seminal album, "Nocturne", came out in 1983, the year I turned twelve, and contained such classics in the goth cannon as "Spellbound" and "Happy House" and Robert Smith from The Cure on guitar (and he would go on to do great things, hello, the album "Disintegration").
If you've never heard her music, think of a psychedelic rock meets punk. Siouxsie has a beautiful voice and a captivating stage presence and basically created the punk girl look with her preference for patent leather and thick kohl lined eyes.
In 1988, when I was sixteen, Siouxsie came out with her "Peepshow" album, a mix of psychedelic punk poppy tunes with Siouxsie's wailing voice, and synthesizers. My best friend Tracy and I loved the "Peepshow" album. We would sing along to the song "Peek A Boo", "Golly Jeepers where'd you get those weepers?"
We dressed like Siouxsie in high school, mimicking her short pleated skirts and high boots past the knee with a black knit vest over a white punk rock tee. We lined our eyes so thick that the eyeliner would take days to come off, drawing on a Cleopatra like cat eye before that was "cool".
Another band I loved to distraction were The Smiths. Their first self titled album is the soundtrack to my teens. The lead singer Morrissey is now a controversial figure due to some of his political views, but he joins a large punk and post punk crowd including John Lyndon of the Sex Pistols and Exene Cervanka of X in that regard, so I just go for the music and I still love him so.
Morrisey's lyrics and music saved my life. I mean that seriously, as I was quite depressed in high school, all my childhood chaos had caught up with me. Quite simply, his music (and his own struggles with melancholy) showed me that life could go on.
Plus Morrissey's pompadour, and his rockabilly post punk look just slays me. I've always been a sucker for a gorgeous man with a huge head of hair.
In fact, when my husband Adrian walked up to me and asked me to dance at a dark wave club some thirty moons ago, I initially turned him down without looking up, then gasped when I caught a side view of him as he was turning away. My first thought was that he looked like Morrissey. I ran after him, grabbed his arm and said yes. To quote Joyce's character of Molly Bloom from Ulysses, "yes I said yes I will Yes."
I remember when the Smiths' magnum opus album "The Queen is Dead" came out. My parents would (as usual) be fighting and I would blast the record to drown it all out. I was in my sophomore year of high school and that record was everything to me. I had two copies of the vinyl because I played the first one so much that it was scratched beyond repair. My favorite song on that album is "There is a Light That Never Goes Out". It's me and my husband's "first dance" song that we learned a tango to (although we later cancelled the huge costly wedding and eloped). The words are every dark witchy poo girl's love song, "and if a double decker bus crashes into us, to die by your side, is such a heavenly way to die."
That song became the anthem for my life, as it's about love enduring despite everything (in Morrissey's case a sadly unrequited one but in mine, happily, the opposite) but to me, it's also about the love and light that one has to nurture in one's own self. I never give up. I'm always striving to do better and be better, or at least I like to think so. I always tell myself, this is not your last act, keep going. And growing.
This weekend, we flew to Houston to see Morrissey take the stage on Halloween. It was a helluva day. The flight is usually three hours direct from California. This took seven. We had to circle overhead due to a storm and then fly to Corpus Christi to refuel and wait out the storm. Then I soon realized the truth of the saying that you get what you pay for when I went with an easy rent discount rental car company. We waited an hour for the shuttle to a barn like structure miles from the airport. Then we faced an hour of traffic to Houston downtown to check into our Airbnb. By that time it was 6 pm. We had left Ontario, California at 6 am. But that's when our Halloween turned from tragic to epic.
Our musician friend Jeff (who lives across the street from where we were staying) had ordered barbecue for us and a bunch of his friends (who were all very attractive women). After scarfing down some brisket and downing beers, we got in a limo to take us to the music hall auditorium. We sang along to The Smiths and Morrissey (who has a huge solo catalogue) the whole way there. Clearly we were with our people.
In our front row seats, we were astonished to see people standing in front of our seats. I was my usual lawyer like loud mouthed self and so eventually a man and I got into a shouting match. My husband is the most gentle person, but when this man got in my face, my husband jumped in the middle and pushed the man back. I almost shrieked in astonishment. I've never seen my husband that upset. The guy walked away as my husband is 6'4 and has filled out in his fifties (much like Morrissey as they both used to be gangly). I will never forget how protective Adrian was of me in that moment.
The concert was beautiful. Morrissey crooned. I danced and sang along and even wept at one point and although I've seen him about 20 times live by now, it was just as exhilarating as the first time I saw Morrissey when he fronted the Smiths in the late 1980s.
I think that is the power of music for me. It makes me feel young again. It brings back the memory of being sixteen when my life was full of possibilities.
And now at fifty-three, and still loving Morrissey and being head over heels and still married to the same man I met at twenty, I have come to know one thing. There is a light that never goes out. Truly.
