As a member of Big in Japan The Slits and most famously Siouxsie and the Banshees and The
Creatures 'Budgie' was an era-defining drummer in the much-mythologised post punk scene of the
late 1970s and early 1980s. 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 Pete Burns and other luminaries of
the legendary Eric's Club before taking off for London and the big city heat of punk. Budgie's
unique technique and musical sensitivity endeared him to the all-female group The Slits who
asked him to play on their debut album Cut . Subsequent touring with former members of the Sex
Pistols and others from the post punk aristocracy firmly established Budgie's reputation for
innovation. But the beating 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. Their creative partnership produced some of the
most seductive and celebrated 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 the era's most exalted and mysterious bands has been told by one who survived inside the
belly of the beast.
