Description
Description
As a member of Big in Japan, The Slits and, most famously, Siouxsie and The
Banshees and The Creatures, ‘Budgie’ became one of the era-defining
drummers in the much-mythologised post punk scene of the late 1970s and
early 1980s.
Growing up in working class St Helens in the 1960s, Peter Clarke lost his mum as a young
boy and it’s her ‘absence’ that haunts the pages of this book. Disenchanted with art school
inLiverpool, Peter became Budgie and befriended the likes of Jayne Casey, Holly Johnson,
Pete Burns, Bill Drummond and other luminaires of the legendary Eric’s’ Club, before
taking off for London and the big city heat of punk. Budgie’s unique technique and musical
sensitivity endeared him to the all-female group The Slits, who asked him to play on their
debut album Cut. Subsequent touring with former members of the Sex Pistols and others
from the post punk aristocracy firmly established Budgie’s reputation for innovation.
But the beating heart of this painfully honest and frank account of a life often sabotaged
by substance abuse and alcoholism is, of course, his long-term position as Siouxsie and
The Banshee’s drummer and co-writer alongside ex-lover, and ex-wife, Siouxsie Sioux. In
the Banshees and seminal side project The Creatures, their creative partnership produced
some of the most seductive and celebrated pop music of the decade, from Juju, through A
Kiss in the Dreamhouse to the salutary valedictory album, Peepshow. Eventually, their
personal relationship started to fall apart, with inevitable consequences for both bands.
The Absence is brave and unflinching in its dissection of how and why this happened.
Angels emerged, many of them female, to show Budgie that a mother’s lost love can be
replaced.
A man and musician whose creativity and singular style came to define the goth-pop
1980s as much as any other individual, Budgie’s life is both fabulously glamorous and a
tawdry cautionary tale. For the first time the story of this most exalted and mysterious of
bands has been told by one who survived inside the belly of the beast.
