COPIES SIGNED BY BUDGIE!
But before he was Budgie, Peter Clarke was a boy growing up in working-class St Helens in the 1960s. The loss of his mum at a young age created the absence that haunts the pages of this book.
As a teenager 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 Eric's Club before taking off for London and the big city heat of punk.
But the heart of this at times painfully honest account of a life often sabotaged is, of course, his long-term position as Siouxsie and the Banshees' drummer and co-writer alongside his ex-wife Siouxsie Sioux. In the Banshees and their seminal side project The Creatures, Budgie and Siouxsie's creative partnership produced some of the most seductive pop music of the decade. Eventually, their personal relationship started to fall apart, with inevitable consequences for both bands. The Absence is bravely unflinching in its dissection of how and why this happened, and powerfully moving in its account of the angels that emerged to heal both these wounds and those of a mother's lost love.
A man and musician whose creativity and singular style came to define the goth-pop 1980s, Budgie's life is both fabulously glamorous and a cautionary tale.
For the first time the story of one of the era's most exalted and mysterious bands has been told by one who survived inside the belly of the beast.
