Few drummers have left as distinct a print on post-punk as Budgie. Known offstage as Peter Clarke, he was the rhythmic backbone for The Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and The Creatures. His new memoir, The Absence, traces that remarkable journey with disarming candor and a welcome sense of humor.
Clarke begins in the soot and grit of St. Helens, a northern town in England, where dreams of music felt far away. Art school in Liverpool widened his world, and a stint in local punk outfits, The Spitfire Boys and Big in Japan, gave him his first taste of chaos. But it was The Slits that changed everything. When drummer Palmolive departed, Budgie stepped in with his taut, dub-inflected beats grounding Cut, one of the most fearless feminist records ever pressed to vinyl. The now iconic album cover of the three female band members topless, covered in mud, strength, and solidarity, which set the tone for a career that thrived on creative risk.
Soon after, Siouxsie Sioux’s camp came calling. Budgie joined Siouxsie and the Banshees mid-tour after Kenny Morris’s dramatic exit and found himself behind the kit for some of the group’s most adventurous years. His tribal, sensual, and precise drumming defined the band’s later Psychedelic influenced sound and carried into The Creatures, his more intimate collaboration with Siouxsie.
In the end, The Absence reads like an act of reclamation of self, of story, of rhythm. Budgie reminds us that behind every great front woman is often a man willing to listen, to adapt, to let her shine without diminishing his own light. His life, like his drumming, is a study in empathy and restraint. And in a music world still too quick to mythologize the loudest voices, Budgie’s quiet honesty feels like a radical feminist act of its own.
SATB “Song From the Edge of the World”
Image Courtesy of Orion Books
