Stats 21 July 2006

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To change tack completely: this week's blog title theme has been brought to you by Siouxsie and the Banshees. Juju is that rarity, a favourite album that I have never got around to acquiring on CD. I have been playing a lot of The Banshees of late (weren't they great?) and I went out with the express intention of buying the album, and was delighted to find that the first four albums have recently been repackaged. (You know the form: the original album remastered and incorporating associated single tracks). All were on sale, too, at less than the store's on-line price, but price was no object.

I already have last year's deluxe edition of The Scream, but I bought the new editions of Join Hands, Kaleidoscope and Juju and promptly copied these across to my iPod, and having been listening to nothing else this week. The other Banshees studio albums are due to be rereleased in this revised edition later this year, as are deluxe editions of mid-period The Cure, so that gives me something to look forward to/dread, as the quality of output of both bands went into steady decline from 1983.

Now here's a conundrum. I am generally a completist, and have embraced the advent of CD releases of studio sessions that I spent hours (and lots of cash) tracking down and acquiring in bootleg form in the 1980s. Severin is quoted as having combed the archives and arranged for the release of everything available, and these emerged last year. Except that the sessions on The Scream omit a version of Love In A Void that had the now-regretted line "Too many Jews for my liking." Some time later, Siouxsie attempted to explain away the lyric by claiming that the line didn't mean Jewish people but fat middle-aged businessmen! (On the same basis, she explained that the swastika she used to wear in 1976 was designed to shock the establishment, and was in no way meant to empathise with the Nazi creed.) The Peel Sessions version of the song had "too many WACs" (huh?) and the official release had "too many bigots".

Over the past few years, Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni have been releasing a whole load of rare unreleased material, some of it of bedroom recording sessions of academic interest only. However, the so-called The Complete Radio 1 Sessions, which manages to include Puerto Rican ("I'm gonna light up a beacon on a Puerto Rican/Gonna put a matchstick to his head") and an unsound version of Deutscher Girls ("Camp 49" "O why did you have to be so Nazi?"), both of which had been too politically incorrect for The Peel Sessions CD, still omits You Smell, presumably because it's a bit, well, rubbish.

The upshot is that I have to retain two old cassette tapes for tracks that will never be released on CD. My question then is: should we let artists get away with airbrushing their early history, either on artistic or political grounds?