She's a real one

Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren was quick to recognise the Bromley Contingent's aesthetic potential. These were arrogant youths, stylish, brash and sexually extrovert. Siouxsie herself would attend Pistols shows in a cut-out bra exposing her tits, staged her own "Sex Olympics" at a debauched house party and took gay friend "Berlin" to the pub on a leash. She was kicked out for requesting "a bowl of water for my dog". More contentious still, at a time when NF membership was on the increase, the Bromley Contingent opened up punk's wardrobe to Nazi chic. For much of 1976, Siouxsie wore swastika armbands in an attempt to enrage the Establishment's 'we fought a war for the likes of you' mindset. She succeeded, though today her naivety- what NME's Julie Burchill decried as "making a fashion accessory out of the death of millions of people"-seems unforgivable. Siouxsie is surprisingly frank, if unrepentant.

The swastika was still on Siouxsie's arm on September 20,1976, the day she made her singing debut after cajoling McLaren into letting the band she'd only tentatively started fill a vacant Pistols support slot on the first night of the 100 Club Punk Festival. Listed as "Suzie [sic] & The Banshees" (after the 1970 Vincent Price chiller Cry Of The Banshee), their hastily assembled line-up featured future Adam Ant guitarist Marco Perroni and, on drums, the man who claimed he'd invented the pogo "so I could knock over the Bromley Contingent" - Sid Vicious.

“It was always very much an anti-mums-and-dads thing," Siouxsie told Jon Savage in his book, England's Dreaming. "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."