A blockflute doesn't belong on a post-punk record. Yet there it was, in the hands of guitarist John McGeoch, alongside tubular bells, glockenspiels, and tape loops, as Siouxsie and the Banshees built their fifth studio album, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse. The record arrived on November 5, 1982, via Polydor Records, and it sounded like a band refusing to be pinned down. This was the group that had helped define the jagged edge of British punk, now layering strings and echo over Siouxsie Sioux's voice until it became something almost hallucinatory.
No synthesizers, live strings only
The whole project was a gamble from the start. The band produced it themselves, with engineer Mike Hedges encouraging them to push sound effects as far as they would go. Sioux was adamant about one thing: no synthesizers. She wanted live strings, and she got them. Cellists Caroline Lavelle and Alison Briggs, along with violinists Anne Stephenson and Virginia Hughes, were brought in to give the music a richness that rock records rarely attempted in 1982. The musicians themselves later called A Kiss in the Dreamhouse their most experimental work.
Hedges worked the mixing desk like an instrument. He multiplied Sioux's vocals, stacking take upon take and washing them in effects until her voice floated somewhere between a whisper and a cathedral. The sessions ran from May to August 1982, split between Playground Studios in Camden Town and Abbey Road. For a band used to the raw, confrontational sound of their early singles, this was a deliberate leap into the unknown. They wanted the music to feel dense, saturated, almost overwhelming.
A Klimt-inspired sleeve and a private joke
The cover reflected that ambition. Inspired by Gustav Klimt's paintings, it glowed with gold and deep, bruised colours. The band felt the music inside was just as rich, and they wanted a sleeve that matched it. There was also a private joke hidden in the artwork: a line on the inner sleeve about Nellie the Elephant packing his trunk was a farewell to former manager Nils Stevenson, sacked just before recording began. The title itself came from bassist Steven Severin, who had watched a television programme about 1940s Hollywood prostitutes who had plastic surgery to look like film stars.
When the album came out, the British music press did something rare: it agreed. NME's Richard Cook called A Kiss in the Dreamhouse "a feat of imagination." His colleague Paul Du Noyer went further, praising it as "a genuine departure from rock tradition" and possibly the band's best work. Melody Maker's Steve Sutherland welcomed the new direction. The record reached number 11 on the UK Albums Chart and received a silver certification from the BPI in January 1983.
The music itself was full of strange, tactile details. Sioux played glockenspiel on "Obsession". McGeoch handled keyboards on three tracks and recorder on "Green Fingers". The band had a clear idea of the atmosphere they wanted: strings, bells, tape manipulation, and a wall of vocal overdubs. Uncut magazine would later award the album five stars out of five, a mark of how far ahead of its time it sounded. This was not punk rock by any old rulebook; it was something stranger and more seductive.
The album's afterlife has been long and quiet. In September 2018, it was remastered from the original quarter-inch tapes and cut at half speed at Abbey Road Studios by Miles Showell, a process that revealed every layer Hedges had buried in the mix. The vinyl reissue gave listeners a chance to hear the record the way the band had intended: dense, glittering, and slightly dangerous. A Kiss in the Dreamhouse still sounds like a band walking away from everything they were supposed to be.