More than one month before the release of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ landmark 1978 debut, The Scream, BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel put it bluntly. After broadcasting the album from an advance copy on a cassette without interruption, he told his listeners: “That’s the one, boys and girls. That’s the one.”
Peel was, as usual, ahead of the curve. Blistering onto the UK post-punk scene on what was to be the eve of the bleak, icy years of the Thatcher government, the Banshees were quickly hailed as “one of the most audacious and uncompromising musical adventurers of the post-punk era.”
But what made the Banshees so influential on the sound of bands ranging from Joy Division to LCD Soundsystem was not the critical reviews. It was songs like “Metal Postcard”, which appeared on the B-side of The Scream.
Clocking in at four minutes and fourteen seconds, “Metal Postcard” begins with the spare sound of pounding on a reverbed-out drumset – a sound that Joy Division producer Martin Hannett would emulate on the group’s Unknown Pleasures, released a year after the Banshees debut. After a brief screech of a guitar, Siouxsie’s vocals – as bleak and haunting as any in the post-punk canon – cut in:
Reunion begins
With a glass of mercury
Whilst television flickers
For another news bulletin
Flints light up the eyes
Of the seated family
Metal is tough, metal will sheen
Metal won’t rust when oiled and cleaned
Metal is tough, metal will sheen
Metal will rule in my master scheme
“Metal Postcard” was inspired by the photomontage by John Heartfield “Hurrah, die Butter ist Alle!” (“Hurrah, there’s no butter left!”). The Banshees do an admirable translation. The screechy pulsing music is as unsettling to listen to as Heartfield’s artwork is to look at. Be forewarned that it is the worst earworm ever.
Heartfield, born Helmut Herzfeld, was part of the German branch of the Dada movement. Dada was started in Switzerland in reaction to the First World War by an international collection of bohemian expatriates and draft dodgers, who considered the mechanized slaughter of the war to be the logical outcome of bourgeois civilization. When the war ended, the various artists returned home, taking Dada with them. The German branch associated itself with the postwar German Communist revolutionary effort, and made a point of getting their art in front of the working class, whether as cheap pamphlets, political posters, or published in periodicals aimed at workers. Heartfield had his work printed in the German Communist Party journal Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) and Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) (Workers’ Illustrated News). “Hurrah, die Butter ist Alle” appeared in AIZ.
The National Socialists came to power in January, 1933, with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor, and Heartfield turned his talents against them on many occasions. He fled Germany in April of 1933 with the SS literally in hot pursuit (i.e, as SS agents broke down his apartment door, he jumped through a window and hid in a trash bin), and he remained in the top five of the Gestapo’s most wanted list throughout its existence. He crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, where he continued to work. He was preceded in exile by the publishers of AIZ, and so continued to contribute there.
Once in power, Hitler started shifting the German economy toward rearming Germany’s military, the size of which was severely limited per the terms of the Versaille Treaty at the end of World War 1. The priority of military spending put severe restrictions on other economic spending, leading to a shortage of butter and shortening, among other things, and it also led to public unrest. A rift formed in the Nazi government, with the Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht and the Price Commissioner Carl Friedrich Goerdeler on one side advocating re-establishment of a free market, and Reich Air Minister Hermann Goering on the other, who pushed for continuing emphasis on military spending. Goering, advocating for his side on Dec. 6 1935, in Hamburg, stated in a public speech that “Ore has always made an empire strong, butter and lard have made a country fat at most.” This is the source of the quote at the bottom of “Hurrah, die Butter ist Alle”. Goering won the debate within the Nazi government, and in August of 1936 was appointed to lead up the Four Year Plan, a program to get Germany ready for war in four years. As it turned out, war started in a little over three years.
Goering wasn’t the last world leader to insist that military spending should take priority over social spending. In neither the U.S. nor the U.K. did military spending return to prewar levels, as the Cold War succeeded World War 2. Militaristic, apocalyptic rhetoric was a constant feature throughout the era. As Thatcher and Reagan came to power in their respective countries, signaling the dawn of neoliberalism, social spending came under sharp attack from which it hasn’t recovered, while military spending seems to be untouchable. In fact, it is sometimes treated as social spending, a make-work program that the various representatives take great pride in bringing home to their constituents.
Siouxsie and the Banshees carried forth Heartfield’s sardonic humor and social critique in Metal Postcard, and both use a familial setting as a tableau for their criticism, but with differences appropriate to the propaganda being forced on their respective nations. Heartfield’s family is surrounded by militaristic, patriotic, and/or pro-Nazi symbols. Apropos to Goering’s words, this is an appeal to strength and aggression in the service of righteous self-defense and reclamation of Germany’s place in the world. The Banshees depict a typical postwar family going through the evening ritual of eating together, then turning on the television to receive a message from the regime, leaving them at the intersection of fear and hopeless acquiescence. Neither family is getting any nourishment from the diet fed to them. Their diets are for the benefit of the ruling classes. Heartfield’s family is supposed to accept their lot as a sacrifice, and the Banshees’ family is there to become cogs in a machine controlled by an anonymous force.
Ausgeseichnet!