During a recent appearance on the “Turned Out A Punk” podcast, Billy Idol talked a bit about what it was like to be a part of the punk scene in the ‘80s. Specifically, Idol recalled an incident that took place when opening up for Sex Pistols in Paris when he was a part of an early iteration of Siouxsie and the Banshees.
As Idol remembers, Siouxsie Sioux’s controversial use of sw*stikas on her outfit nearly led to violence at Sex Pistols’ gig. But, as he explains, Sioux wore them as “performance art.”
“It was kind of wild because it was some end of the Second World War thing in France [at the time],” Idol said. “And then Siouxsie was wearing her night porter gear, where she had the sw*stika on, and she was driving these left wing French people crazy because they didn’t get that it’s a performance art kind of thing. They just thought she was – because they were practically communists – they were thinking she was an anti-communist and they didn’t realize it’s part of punk performance art.”
The audience was “really upset” by Sioux’s attire, according to Idol, forcing them to sneak out after their performance.
“We sort of escaped across the stage,” he admitted. “Pistols had come up across the stage and we went backstage to escape from the audience. They were getting really upset.”
Noting the differences between audiences in London and Paris, Idol added: “They just didn’t understand the sort of London fashion performance art aspect of punk. We were reflecting back on the British society what they were doing to us by wearing these sort of political symbols.
“Like Vivienne Westwood would combine the sw*stika with communist symbols, Karl Marx. And that was all a bit of a ‘f*ck you’ to the conservative forces in England that we were sort of feeling that they were going fascist. So we were going, ‘Oh, if you’re going to go fascist, then we’re going to reflect that back to you.’
“It was a performance art aspect of the way we dressed that people don’t get now. They don’t get that aspect of the punk rock way of dressing. [It] was a kind of a reflection back on the powers that be. ‘This is what you want us to be? You want us to be fascist? Oh, what about we’ll dress like that to frighten you?’ And it worked.”
Use of controversial symbolism in the ‘80s punk rock scene was fairly common. Sex Pistols’ Sid vicious often wore sw*stikas as a statement against authority, while designer Vivienne Westood would include inverted crucifixes in her designs.
Siouxie Sioux even explained her reasoning for her use of controversial symbols in the book “England’s Dreaming. “It was always very much an anti-mums-and-dads thing,” she wrote. “We hated older people. Not across the board, but generally the suburban thing, always harping on about Hitler, and, ‘We showed him,’ and that smug pride.
“It was a way of saying, ‘Well, I think Hitler was very good, actually’; a way of watching someone like that go completely red-faced.”
