Jesus, I'm going to be late. Even so, I tell myself to quit hurrying. Hell, I haven't seen hide nor hair of the girl for years.
Sure, I used to be crazy about her. But I was just a kid then. Now I'm a grown man. I've been around. But the dame gets in touch after all this time, says she wants to talk to me, even lets slip that her husband's gonna be there.
And here I am, heart thumping, almost running through the mean streets of Islington for a riverside appointment.
I must be some kinda fool. Well, I'll show her. She may think I haven't got over her, but I can bet she's bitter, cold, and has lost at least some of the looks that made me fall for her.
Believe me, I'm gonna play it real cool.
When I arrive, Siouxsie's already there. She is reclining gracefully in a cafe in the photo studio, admiring the shots on the wall.
He - the drumming bird they call Budgie - is there too, being the stand-up guy he always was.
I give her the once-over. She hasn't put on an ounce of weight. She's dressed casual but elegant, with more colour than I recall.
And her face? Her face hasn't aged a day in almost 20 years.
At 41, she doesn't even need all that slap she used to break my heart before.
She looks at me and... can you believe this? ...smiles.
She bums a cigarette, and leans over so I can light it for her. I am a quivering bag of teenage flashback nerves.
She doesn't even notice. Damn.
The artists never formerly known as Susan Ballion and Peter Clark ar here to talk about The Creatures.
Anyone who was a Siouxsie And The Banshees fan will know that the duo are nothing new, having made a few great singles
and two interestingly flawed albums in the '80s.
But previously, The Creatures was the couple's side project, an experimental break from the institution that was their day job.
Now, with the band that made Siouxsie's name no longer together, The Creatures is what Siouxsie and Budgie do.
And, perhaps surprisingly, they are doing it small, underground and very, very well.
The first siting of The Creatures in our midst was at the end of May this year, when the pair did two rapturously
received shows at the tiny Garage venue in North London.
Then there was an EP - 'Eraser Cut' - on their own independent Sioux label. The songs were short, sharp, percussive and infectiously atmospheric. Soon there will be a single, '2nd Floor', and an album next year which has punk's leading female icon sounding as spontaneous and powerful as she did on those great early Banshees records. It is a 'comeback' which, unlike, say, the
turgid facsimile of former glories that is the group currently masquerading as Echo And The Bunnymen, seeks to wipe away the
increasingly compromised and contrived work of the Banshees' final years, and capture what Sioux repeatedly calls 'the spark'. They have rediscovered the cutting edge. Now they are just hoping the cutting edge rediscovers them.

Severin the ties
'Then, all of a sudden, nostalgia was screaming it's ugly face at me, and I thought... I don't wanna be a part of that.
The whole thing wasn't overnight. It was a gradual chipping away. And finally, enough was enough.
Siouxsie Sioux ponces another fag and explains the Banshees split in 1995.
After the interview, Budgie will admit that this is the first time they've talked in public about the end of their band.
When I say that I expected the standard operational whitewash of the past, he smiles and says, 'Yes, that's exactly what the Banshees would've done. we want to show people a bit more respect.' And the Siouxsie I meet today is the opposite of the bitchy and standoffish Ice Queen of pop legend. To the point that when I ask her how her songwriting partner, Steve Severin, felt about the end of almost two decades' work, she neither stonewalls nor slags him off.
  'He kind of accepted it, because I'd threatened it after "Peepshow", and we sort of... buried the hatchet." She laughs wryly.
'We made an effort to get some spontaneity back, but... it was a long relationship, and it's hard to say, "That's it.
I'm not giving it a chance." So I gave it a chance, and if anything, it got worse. The sparks got fainter and fainter.
I reached the point where I didn't want anything to do with the music business.'
  The pair admit that the sudden lack of trust, and lack of interest in their new Creatures material from Polydor and Geffen, hit hard. It was obvious that the labels were more interested in pushing them as a retro act, as Budgie notes. 'They saw little interest in our future as we saw it, but people are getting very interested in intellectual property rights these days...'
  What - they wanted to copyright 'Goth'? Siouxsie bauks at the idea of being responsible for the hordes of whey-faced Munster clones. 'I mean,  "Ju Ju" wasn't meant to be taken as a blueprint for "scary, scary shock horror".'
  But hang on, you did write 'Head Cut', an entire dramatic rock epic based around buying a spooky carved head from a second-hand shop. And then there was 'Halloween' and 'Voodoo Dolly' and... you were asking for it, basically.
  'I know,' she sighs and grins reluctantly. 'But that wasn't all there was to it.
"Night Shift" was about the Yorkshire Ripper, not Bela Lugosi, or whatever. Goth was pantomime.'
  But enough of goth, back to the post-Banshees story.
The pair spent the next year honing the Creatures material and deciding where to take it. Then fate intervened in the shape of Doug Hart from British dance label Hydrogen Dukebox. He persuaded them that he was a huge fan, and wanted to work with them. Suddenly, Budgie and Sioux were getting a crash course in how the underground dance scene works.
They were amazed by the energy.
  'We'd got used to being surrounded by all these jaded has-beens,' says Budgie.
'Suddenly we had these people who were excited about what we were trying to achieve. We were so filled with suspicion...
"What's their angle? What do they want from us? Maybe they want a cut of our intellectual property rights."'    
  Apparently not. The Sioux label is entirely self-financed and independent, run completely on trust with Hydrogen Dukebox.
Or, as Sioux puts it: 'There's no contract yet. It will probably be a bit of paper saying "I promise not to fuck you over."'

Unstrung Heroes
The most unintentionally comic thing about the Banshees' career was their total inability to keep a guitarist for more
than 15 minutes. Spinal Tap may have killed off all their drummers for satirical effect, but the strictly non-metal Banshees were almost the six-string equivalent, usually losing their strummer in mysterious psychological
circumstances, in a blaze of public bad feeling.
  'I dunno... They always went wobbly,' muses Siouxsie, still baffled. 'Perhaps we were just too tough on them.
And every time a new one joined, he had to learn more and more guitarists' styles.
John McGeoch's, John McKay's, Robert Smith's. Mind you, Robert Smith didn't play much guitar for us.
He wanted to play piano. We had to force him to play guitar.'       
  Who was the best Banshee guitarist?
  'McGeoch,' Budgie answers immediately. 'And McKay,' adds Siouxsie.
Budgie suddenly comes over all thoughtful.
  'The McGeoch thing was the most poignant. When he parted, we'd just come out of a completely mad period. John was having
a serious breakdown, but we were all too busy with ourselves to worry about what someone else was getting up to.
We'd all just fallen into big-time abuse.
It's sad looking back because we should have helped more - we should have stood up for each other more than we did.
We must have seemed like total bastards.'
  'We all had breakdowns,' Sioux remembers. 'But we were... what do they call it?... functioning breakdowns.
And John wasn't functioning at all. We were like, "Excuse me, but I've got my own breakdown to be
getting on with, thanks." But the music didn't suffer. If anything, it helped it.'
  They agree that the first albums - excepting the rushed second album, 'Join Hands' - were their best,
and that fifth LP 'A Kiss In The Dreamhouse' represents the band's creative peak.
Sioux immediately picks up what I'm getting at.  'After that, the band became it's own worst enemy.
We'd become...established. It became a job.
If anyone had said that to me at the time, I would've punched them out.'

Dear Violence
Siouxsie and Budgie were married in 1991 and moved to Toulouse, France, six years ago.
They tell a particularly nice story about settling into their rural idyll, safe in the knowledge that no one recognised them.
Until their first Christmas Eve, when a familiar tune wafted in from the chilly outdoors.
They opened the curtains, to see a group of punked-up teen carol singers, singing their hit, 'Israel', in perfect harmony.
  We start to talk about punk, with Budgie positing the theory that the Sex Pistols sounded more like Alice Cooper
than the New York Dolls.
Siouxsie suddenly turns to me and says, 'I never play the Sex Pistols now. I mean, do you?'
  Yes, I explain, but it's slightly different. When 'Anarchy In The UK' came out,
I was a clumsy adolescent living in a godforsaken New Town, and punk became the meaning of my life.
You, on the other hand, were a teen goddess trendsetter appearing on TV with the Pistols.
You'd be a really weird person if you still listened to your mates' records while you did the Hoovering.
Sioux considers this, and delivers her verdict on the importance of 1976 and all that.
  'The best thing about punk was the violence of it. The very real confrontation, I actually liked that. Not the thuggery, but the
sinister, really edgy, uncomfortable feeling you got. I still can't really like something unless it's got that.'
  On that subject, I bring up a provincial gig on the 'Ju Ju' tour in 1981, where the hall was invaded by the full complement of red-faced and pug-ugly skinheads. They began to do the 'seig heil!' bit during a song.
The Banshees stopped playing, Siouxsie ran to the wings, returned wearing a Star of David T-shirt, leaned forward from the
stage, hit the shits with a torrent of abuse, and then dedicated the next song to them.
With nary a pause, the band slid gracefully into a passionate version of 'Israel'. It was one of the most wonderful things
I'd ever seen, particularly when the boneheads slunk off into the night. She remembers it all vividly.
'There were a few gigs like that on that tour, nights when I'd see skins beating up one solitary, skinny
little punk kid. I'd either hit them, or put a light on them and get the audience to do it. I hated them so much.'
  There was a time when people didn't believe that.
In the early years, Sioux was an enthusiastic wearer of swastikas, while the first version of live favourite 'Love In A Void' was rumoured to have included the line 'Too many Jews in here for my liking'. Siouxsie carefully picks her words,
but doesn't shrink from answering the charge.
  'Yes, it was true about that line. The swastika was a symbol to be used as a crucifix could be.
It was an attempt to arouse some passion about nationalism in Britain. It was... childish.
But we wanted to stir something up. And we certainly were not condoning what it represented.
I never saw how it could be misconstrued as a political belief. I remember how the word 'Jew' used to be used, especially in the
playground, to call someone a miser and tight-fisted, without really thinking about how it discriminated against a whole race.
But as soon as people thought it had a political significance, and the NF started turning up for gigs, we realised we had to do something to make it very clear where we stood. So we picked up another symbol - the Star of David - which seems the antithesis. But, if you want to take that symbol literally, it can represent the same kind of nationalism.
I was also really into John Heartfield's artwork at the time, and I naively assumed all these elements would be taken the way I meant them to be.I was really stupid.'

The Ice Queen melts
So Siouxsie, were you really The Icy Bitch From Hell? 'I think it's because that's what I gave off on stage.
I mean, in certain situations I won't stand for any crap. So people reported that a couple of times and the myth just built up.
People presume I'm like that indescriminately.'
  When my friends and I used to try to speak to you after a gig, you'd always just walk straight past us with your nose in the air...
  Budgie: 'Still does.'
  Sioux: 'No I don't!'
  ...whereas Scouser Budgie would always stop and speak to us. Is it a friendly northerner and standoffish southerner thing?
  Budgie: 'Definitely. I was warned off joining this group.
I used to roll my own cigarettes and drink pints, and they used to smoke Gauloise and sip vodka and tonic.'
  It must have been an even bigger strain on the band when you two became an item. All that canoodling and whispering...
  Sioux: 'If anything, we went out of our way to be strangers on the road.'     
  Budgie: 'That's why I was always outside talking to the punters.'
  Sioux, ignoring him: 'And to a certain extent we're still like that. We're not the couple hiding away.
We have separate rooms. Which is quite nice actually, 'cos then we can go and see each other.' Aw, bless.
But the glue that sticks them together is made of more primal stuff than the understanding of each other's sensitive muse.
At least, according to Siouxsie.
  'Our mutual respect is based on the fact that I respect anyone who is physical and sweats a lot.
When we come off stage, we're the only ones who ever needed to change, and to shower, and mop our bodies up.
The others just wipe their brows and go off to the bar. Fucking bastards.'
  Okay, so she's still a looker. And she's got talent, any fool can hear that. Plus she hates Dadrock, and strikes a nice balance between hatred of the business and a complete lack of personal bitterness.
But, I bet, underneath it all, Siouxsie Sioux fancies herself just a little too much, is too aware of what an icon she was.
I have to ask her one question, just to find the fatal flaw. How does it feel, really feel, to know that you were the picture on thousands of adolescents' walls - adolescents like me, for example?
  Sioux's face crumples into puzzled embarrassment. 'How does it feel?
Incredulous. Really? Are you sure about that? No, it would have been Debbie Harry, wouldn't it?'
  Debbie Harry??? No!!!
The Ice Queen can't be self-deprecatingly modest as well!
As I wend my way back from our riverside rendezvous, I get a horribly familiar feeling. That one where you feel like you're
bouncing instead of walking. All those years, and the dame still reeled me in like a sucker. Be warned, ex-Siouxsie lovers.
This Creature is comng back to steal your dark heart.

The Creatures play ULU Sept 11, 12.
The single, '2nd Floor', is out Sept 21 on Sioux Records.
The album, 'Anima Animus', follows early next year.
BBC2's new series of 'Rock Family Trees' includes 'Banshees And Other Creatures' on Sept 25, featuring Siouxsie,
various Banshees, John Lydon and Adam Ant.