The Absence

'This is not a musical memoir. It is a memoir about loss, grief, surviving abuse and recovery from addictions that just happens to have a musical career at its core. Siouxsie and The Banshees, The Creatures, The Slits, Big in Japan, and Spitfire Boys are all here to tell my story - I am not here to tell theirs. Against the backdrop of this life in music, I chart my relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, my struggle to make sense of what happened to me, and how it shaped the unrecognisable person I was becoming.' This is the story of the most famous drummer to come out of Liverpool after Ringo Starr, Budgie. Growing up in the sixties in working class St Helens (of which there will be a portrait comparable to Bobby Gillespie's writing in Tenement Kid), Budgie's life was impacted by the loss of his mother as a young boy. Nourished and excited by rock and roll and punk, Budgie became the drummer in legendary Liverpool new wave outfit, Big in Japan (with Bill Drummond and Ian Broudie), then the only male member of the iconoclastic Slits alongside Ari-Up and Viv Albertine. In 1979 he joined Siouxsie and the Banshees, with whom he would co-create alongside Siouxsie, some of the most influential and groundbreaking music of the postpunk era. At this point Robert Smith of The Cure was also in the band. As the band became more and more successful both here, in the States and in Europe, Budgie found himself vulnerable to alcohol and other substance abuse problems; and as his relationship with Siouxsie crossed the border from creative to romantic, towards the end of the decade things grew darker between them and eventually fell apart. The Absence documents the career and achievements of a postpunk hero but also the life of an addict unravelling in what would become an unhealthy and co-dependent relationship, initially in the Banshees and later in their subsequent and final creative pairing as The Creatures.