Budgie in Conversation. Memoirs Of A Banshee Drummer
15 Jul 2025 - 15 Jul 2025
We're thrilled that Budgie is coming to Swansea as part of his book tour.
As a member of Big in Japan, The Slits and, most famously, Siouxsie and The Banshees and The
Creatures, Budgie became one of the era-defining drummers in the much-mythologised post punk
scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Growing up in working class St Helens in the 1960s, Peter Clarke lost his mum as a young boy and its
her absence that haunts the pages of this book. Disenchanted with art school in Liverpool, Peter
became Budgie and befriended the likes of Jayne Casey, Holly Johnson, Pete Burns, Bill Drummond
and other luminaries of the legendary Erics Club, before taking off for London and the big city heat
of punk. Budgies unique technique and musical sensitivity endeared him to the all-female group The
Slits, who asked him to play on their debut album Cut. Subsequent touring with former members of
the Sex Pistols and others from the post punk aristocracy firmly established Budgies reputation for
innovation.
But the beating heart of this painfully honest and frank account of a life often sabotaged by
substance abuse and alcohol is, of course, his long-term position as Siouxsie and The Banshees
drummer and co-writer alongside ex-lover, and ex-wife, Siouxsie Sioux.
In the Banshees and seminal side project The Creatures, their creative partnership produced some of the most seductive and
celebrated pop music of the decade, from Juju, through A Kiss in the Dreamhouse to the valedictory
album, Peepshow. Eventually, their personal relationship started to fall apart, with inevitable
consequences for both bands. The Absence is brave and unflinching in its dissection of how and why
this happened. Angels emerged, many of them female, to show Budgie that a mothers lost love can
be replaced.
A man and musician whose creativity and singular style came to define the goth-pop 1980s as much
as any other individual, Budgies life is both fabulously glamorous and a tawdry cautionary tale. For
the first time the story of this most exalted and mysterious of bands has been told by one who
survived inside the belly of the beast.
Budgie said: Damned if you do, denied if you dont. To remember, revisit and to write, was
traumatic and cathartic. To be published? Terrifying! I prepared my apologies, and anticipated
rejection. I received mostly love, understanding, and affection. To those still hurting from the way
things were, I can only empathise and offer a prayer. I present my mistakes that I may learn and
others may avoid".
Publisher Lee Brackstone said: The postpunk period has bequeathed us some of the most
interesting, moving and entertaining rock and roll stories over the past decade or so from Viv
Albertine to the recent book by The Jesus and Mary Chain. The Absence is Budgies story: a native of
St Helens, a crucial figure on the Liverpool scene, the only man in The Slits and then, of course, the
beating heart of Siouxsie and the Banshees in their Imperial Phase in the Goth-Pop Eighties. An
insiders account of life inside a band that left a legacy like no other, this is a book that hits as hard as
its author did on their most celebrated tracks and required reading for anyone with an interest in the
band and their extraordinary legacy".
Peter Edward Clarke aka Budgie was born in 1957 in St. Helens in the Northwest of England. He
studied Fine Art at the Gamble Institute and at Liverpool College of Art, before taking a sabbatical in
1977 to join a band... or two.
As Budgie, he is known internationally for his unique style of drumming on The Slits debut album,
Cut (1979), and as writer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, with both Siouxsie And The Banshees
(1979 - 1996) and The Creatures (1981 - 2004). Self-taught, his influences range from Ringo to Rothko
(via Ravel). Budgie was described by John Cale of The Velvet Underground as a musicians musician
He lives in Berlin, Germany with his wife, two children, three cats, and a Giant Schnauzer.
