Sue Webster has a lot of obsessions — but Siouxsie Sioux undoubtedly takes first place.
The Leicester-born artist, 56, found fame in her collaborative sculptures with her ex-husband Tim Noble, whom she met at Cheltenham Art College. They married in a service conducted by fellow artist Tracey Emin in 2008, before splitting in 2013 after 20 years together. A decade on, she is still figuring out how to go it alone.
“I had a career with Tim, we made sculptures together and got worldwide critical, international fame — all that stuff,” she says. “That does still exist, but we split up as a couple, we don’t really work together anymore, so I started making my own.” That meant delving into the nostalgia of her childhood. “I went back to a point before I met him as a starting point. I don’t know why, but it was like BT — before Tim,” she says.
“I had these boxes I used to carry around with me when I moved house, full of my teenage bedroom. When we split up, I opened them and it was just a minefield of memorabilia. Siouxsie and the Banshees concert tickets, posters, booklets and I pinned them to my studio wall like a crime scene to work out how I got to where I am today. What drove me? I based it on a theory that everything I’ve ever learnt in life was from listening to Siouxsie’s first four albums.”
A Künstlerroman, first-person book followed in 2020, entitled I Was A Teenage Banshee. A top-end collector of her earlier sculptures was a Siouxsie fanatic, too, and bankrolled its publication. As a thank you, Webster dug through childhood diaries, and painted the rock legend on a beaten-up biker jacket, just as she had as a teen. “The thing was: I couldn’t part with it. I just became too attached to it,” she says. She made another one for him, and fell in love with that too. Then the pandemic came, so Webster bought up a stock of leathers from Spitalfields Market and got to work. “I was painting and painting, and before I knew it I had 80 jackets, enough for a show. It got me through lockdown.”
After an invite-only catwalk presentation in 2021 — where 18 friends were given the Banshee treatment: backcombed hair, Cleopatra eyes, the works — she is now ready to open up her Hackney Wick studio, where she and Noble used to work, to show them off: studded, badged, hand-painted and all tied together with Sioux’s portrait, name (often, both) lathered across in leather dye.
“I must have been 11 when I first heard her. When I think about 11-year-olds now, it almost makes me cringe — they’re all into Harry Styles and the colour pink,” she says. “When I was that age, we were very dark.” She was not inspired by her mother. “I was looking for an alternative mother figure. I mean she was into Slim Whitman and Gene Pitney,” she says. “I discovered the pages of NME really early, and you flick through them and go ‘Oh my god, there’s this woman with dyed black hair backcombed, wearing clothes from junk shops’. It didn’t feel acceptable — you were laughed at at school, singled out for being a freak.”
Webster well understands the all-consuming interest is extreme. “I’m having a teenage fantasy here, relieving my teenage years. I’ve done the book, I’ve done the leather jackets, now doing portraits too — it’s a continuation of my new career.” She also makes it clear that she doesn’t want to know her hero, though they have met her briefly. “It would be too embarrassing to make all this work and be her best friend. I’m sure she’s aware of it — but if she dissed this, it would ruin me.”
Webster will be jostling in the crowd at Sioux’s London concert at The Troxy this September, but not at the Latitude festival in Suffolk, where she will be playing her first set for 10 years. “It’s a children-friendly festival where they dye their sheep pink. I’m not sure how she will sit in that — I’d much rather see her at some sweaty club in the East End,” Webster says.
In her post-Tim world, I pose the idea that she might be clinging to the rocker as a replacement to the collaborative work that moulded her career. “Two heads are better than one, in a way,” she says. “But now I’m working individually on a new body of work. What you’re saying is I’m using Siouxsie as a collaborator. That I need someone to lean on, or bounce off?”
“Do you?” I ask. “I’m not sure, I never looked at it like that. Maybe I do.”
