The Private Canon: The Gormless Air of "Standing There"

This post is part of a series.

I don't recall exactly how I came by the Creatures' Boomerang, which I used to own on cassette, but I do remember happening upon an eye-catching music video at a friend's house some years before: alternating closeups of a shirtless man hammering on thunderous timpani and of Siouxsie's Louise-Brooks-esque glare. I wouldn't call it an earworm exactly, but it did burrow its way in deep enough that when I finally laid my hands on the album and heard the opening track, "Standing There," it was a sort of homecoming: Oh, so this is that song.

And quite a song it is: three minutes-plus of coolly contained rage at the catcalls of streetcorner "creepos," over a rolling tattoo ostensibly inspired by flamenco (an association corroborated by the foot-stomping and palmas in the video) but closer to the full assault of batucada. After a teasing stop-start intro in G-minor in which Siouxsie gives notice to whom the song is addressed in almost formal terms, the music drops to a persistent F-minor for the song's main groove, with a simple three-note trombone riff powering the transitions and a cascading chorus that touches on C-minor, and whose long notes ("See them standing") offer the song's only hint of sympathy for the sad men who seem to find meaning in their bullying, only to end with the punch of "See them...wearing that same stupid face."

Indeed the harshness of Siouxsie's language throughout is bracing—I'm honestly surprised this song hasn't become a sort of #MeToo anthem. She names the root of the catcallers' taunting as their own "self-hate and loathing," and concludes with the unveiled threat, "Somebody should show them where to go." The song's relentless groove has one variation, a brooding sax-and-trombone storm on E-flat (at roughly 2:22 in the video) that backs up the song's most confrontational lyrics, spit out tunelessly by Siouxsie:

Does what you won't understand scare and make you mad?
Resentful and envious, don't you disgust yourself?
So funny to see how pathetic some men can be

The comingled contempt and pity of that "pathetic," which momentarily stands alone as the accompaniment drops out, is positively withering, and the song ends with an appropriately abrupt snap rather than a fadeout.

The Creatures were born as a side project of Siouxsie's Banshees when she and Budgie, the band's drummer, to whom she was married for some time, happened to notice how complete a vocal-and-drums-only mix could sound (apparently on the Banshees song "But Not Them"). The sound of Boomerang, recorded in Spain, is decidedly beat-driven, but not quite as single-mindedly atavistic as the band's earlier Feast. Some of it is downright lush ("Manchild") and even breezy ("Pity", "Fury Eyes"); I especially love the bent bounce of "You!," which sounds a bit like an alien imitating Prince, and all the exotic sounds that find their way into its grooves (harmonica, accordion, marimba).

None of it is as pointed or pulsing as "Standing There," but then a whole album at that level of pounding intensity might be a bit much (Feast is a bit that, come to think of it). Even on his percussion-forward records, Tito Puente varied it up the sound; and there's a reason the wall-of-drums climax of Revueltas's La Noche de Las Mayas has so much impact—because he saves it up. Boomerang may open with its biggest bang—and arguably it whizzes back, as its title would suggest, to similar stomping grounds with the saxy "Strolling Wolf," the album's penultimate track—but it doesn't just stand there.