He was married to punk princess Siouxsie. Here's how it all went wrong

The Herald Scotland

20-07-2025

Today he comes into the room still looking like the rock star he was. The hair is no longer bleached, there are a few more lines on his face, but he is recognisably Budgie - the drummer with Siouxsie and the Banshees, half of The Creatures, also with Siouxsie, and for a time, of course, Siouxsie's husband.
But the man in front of me is less rock god today, more human being. He's soft-spoken, open, honest.
Budgie is on a book tour which started in Glasgow last night. Yesterday morning he took his kids to school in Berlin, walked the dog and then caught a flight to Scotland to talk about his fine new memoir The Absence.
Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie And The Banshees in 1980. She was known as Janet to her band (Image: Michael Putland)It's the story of a kid from St Helens who moved to Liverpool, became a member of the band Big in Japan alongside Jane Casey, Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford (later of Frankie Goes to Hollywood) Bill Drummond (The KLF) and Ian Broudie (The Lightning Seeds), then joined The Slits for a short time before becoming a Banshee.
Almost inevitably, it's a book about rock and roll and excess in all its forms.
But it's also the story of an 11-year-old boy who loses his mother and how that shapes all that follows. And it's about alcohol and substance abuse, and about the breakdown of his marriage to Siouxsie.
As such, it's a book full of pain. But there's love in it too. He has rebuilt his life, remarried, become a dad, after all. But for a long time he was a lost boy. Pop music is full of them.
Both on the page and in person it's clear that the death of his mother is the key event in Budgie's life.
'The trauma of somebody dying changed everything,' he admits. The whole world didn't feel the same. I had to figure out as a young boy what does all this mean? It meant less than anything. I was already going, 'God doesn't exist.' I thought, 'Well, sod it, I can do anything I want because she'll never know what I do.' And that left me feeling totally bereft.'
Music was to become his attempted escape route. And a place to hide. In a band, he points out, 'you don't have to do anything that is too close to reality.' For a while at least. Reality, though, has a nasty way of catching up with you.
It was Holly Johnson who gave him the name Budgie - a throwback to when the young Peter Clarke used to breed them. Now, he says, 'my wife calls me Peter. The people in Liverpool call me Pete, because I was Pete before I was Budgie. Mostly in the business they call me Budgie.'
He joined the Banshees in 1979. The band had just imploded. Siouxsie and bassist Steven Severin were the only ones still standing at the time. Scottish guitarist John McGeoch was also hired and the new line-up set the course for the band's imperial phase on albums such as Kaleidoscope, Juju and A Kiss in the Dreamhouse at the start of the 1980s.
McGeoch would later be fired because of his issues with drinking. He was initially replaced by The Cure's Robert Smith - who would call Siouxsie by her middle name, Janet. Budgie, meanwhile, had become an integral part of the band and eventually Siouxsie's partner in music - in side-project The Creatures - and in life.
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Siouxsie, who had emerged from the Bromley Contingent at the beginning of punk, would become alt-rock's ultimate Gothy ice queen. But who was the woman Budgie met when he joined the band?
'Within the band she's Janet. And Robert picked up on that straight away. 'Oh, come on Janet.' And she hated it in a way, but she loved it because it's teasing.
'She would say things with all seriousness and tell people to f*** off and then go, 'Heh, heh, heh, they fell for it.'
'Some of the guys at Polydor, they loved it. 'You know what Siouxsie said to me? She told me to f*** off.''
And she clearly made an impression on Smith, Budgie suggests. 'He leaves with the hair different, crimped and make-up. He took the look.'
But behind the make-up and the backcombed hair and the attitude, Siouxsie, like Budgie, was a child of grief. Her bacteriologist father had been an alcoholic and died when she was just 14.
'Siouxsie does say somewhere we both had that loss in common,' he admits, 'but what I realised was we never really talked about it. We never sat down and said what it was like.
'In her family they had a man killing himself. He was drinking himself to death. And everyone reacted in a different way. But it was pushing them apart, making them all isolated.
'When my mum died we did a similar thing. But it wasn't aggressive because she hadn't done anything, so we were tender. But we didn't know how to embrace and help. We were also isolated.
'When Siouxsie came up to see my family in St Helens, she'd say, 'You're all so quiet and placid.' When I'd go down to their house it was crazy, it was Abigail's Party gone mad. And Siouxsie loved Abigail's Party because she could relate to it.'
Budgie married Siouxsie and the couple moved to France - with disastrous consequences for their relationship (Image: Redferns)The problem for both of them was that they carried their traumatic pasts with them and a relationship that started in passion evolved into an unhealthy form of co-dependency, a situation exacerbated when they moved to a French chateau in the early 1990s.
'We were told it was a dangerous place to be,' Budgie acknowledges. 'We were isolated. My drinking was getting worse.'
Dangerous even. 'Yeah, I had to take risks. I didn't understand how to just be. I enjoyed walking the knife edge, literally and metaphorically. I took risks physically, as everybody does if they have a binge drink. But then you have to grow up. You have to lose all the things that you think you need and see what it feels like to start again.'
It would take a while for him to get to that point. He and Siouxsie had been in France about three years when he finally stopped drinking. In its wake, he essentially became a househusband.
'I looked after the garden, I did all the driving, I did the shopping and then I learned skills on the computer making Anima Animus [the second album by The Creatures, released in 1999].'
Whatever issues the couple were facing they never addressed them. 'We didn't discuss or talk, we just got on with the next album, the next project. I think I just burnt out.'
More than that, he adds, 'I had actually ceased to be anything in the relationship.'
And though he had stopped drinking, Siouxsie hadn't. It's almost inevitable that it would end badly.
The book climaxes with an account of Siouxsie loudly demanding to be let into his room at four in the morning, then physically attacking him while screaming 'I'll f****** kill you.'
It's maybe significant that these few pages are written in the third person. When I bring it up he shifts between trying to understand and explain what happened while also wanting to acknowledge that it did.
'I don't blame Siouxsie. If I look at it and I examine it I'm in danger of condoning it and denying my right to speak about it. My nature is, 'I shouldn't talk about that.' But I feel I had to give voice to myself in that situation.'
You were being attacked, Budgie.
'And yet I was still being careful that she didn't injure herself. I wasn't sure when it was going to stop, and then it stopped. And it wasn't just one night. That particular incident was one night, but there were other …'
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He pauses, resets, tries to tell the other side of the story. 'The voice outside the door was from someone who was also lost. It's not that she was an ogre prowling on me.
'I've been that drinker. And then living with it, living with the drink, its unpredictability, you're on eggshells.'
The couple divorced in 2007 and he admits he was lost for a while. But he's built a new life in Berlin. Writing the book, he says, has been both traumatic and therapeutic.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, he adds, 'my mum came back. That's what happened. In terms of … I felt like she's not gone anywhere.
'It's nothing strange. It's just a very reassuring, comforting thing. How could the love die?'
Which means? The lost boy has been found, perhaps. 'I was in danger of losing myself," Budgie admits. ' I realised I didn't need to risk losing myself anymore.'
The Absence by Budgie is published by White Rabbit, £25