Saw them at Wembley just the once.
Got two tickets because I liked the songs,
liked her more. As Hammer as at the beginning,
she kept charcoal round the whites of her eyes,
caked her lips in clay from eighty-three,
wore the slave collar that set her free.
A raven mini-dress. Pitch hair to pale skin.
He should have been irrelevant at the drum,
but after two hits I wanted to be him,
and not just because he got to sleep with her,
who’d become irrelevant when they let us hear
the new stuff, but just for the sheer
electricity he was banging at that kit.
I needed to be a part of it,
needed to smash the tom-toms into next week,
have my earring fly around, persistent wasp,
the perfect crash always just out of my grasp,
the snare roll a kind of lust.
So I had to tell Jayne it wasn’t Siouxsie
who had me going. It was Budgie.
I thought she’d be pleased, take it easy,
but the ride we were on seemed to finish
that night, leading to times when we’d just punish
each other, then to nothing. There were other fish.
So yeah, I saw the Creatures, and they made
the things that go on between my dates
that little bit different. Not, you know, like Slade.