John McKay - Sixes And Sevens LP

$31.98

"The Scream", Siouxsie & the Banshees' first album, was released late enough in the punk era to bear some claim as the first post-punk album. Siouxsie was clearly the focus of the band, but the real star, we've always known, was John McKay, who wrote most of the album's music, creating a wholly new guitar sound - harsh and brittle, yet melodically intoxicating, best articulated by a somewhat confounded Steve Albini 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.

McKay's influence lives on: many of the most influential guitarists of the past four decades credit him as a major influence - 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 - The Cure's Robert Smith and Magazine's John McGeoch - who followed him in The Banshees. 

McKay's burgeoning status as anti-guitar hero was halted when he fled the band just after the start of a tour supporting the group's second album. It was a weekly music paper scandal, later the subject of a BBC documentary, and Siouxsie's vitriol working its way into the lyrics of a later Banshees b-side, Drop Dead / Celebration.

Aside from a solitary single a decade later, no music was heard from McKay again. So it comes as a major surprise to learn of a pile of excellent recordings made in the years just after he left The Banshees, unheard by all but a very few. Brazenly genius and bearing fair claim as the lost treasure of the post-punk era, the album collects eleven studio tracks, carefully mastered from original tapes.