A new memoir from Peter Edward Clarke (better known by the taut, terse moniker Budgie), entitled The Absence (out June 5 via White Rabbit), unfurls the tale of famed drummer. The Absence beats out Budgie’s tale with the thunder of sticks on skin: his journey through the snarling, sweat-soaked stages of late-’70s and early-’80s post-punk, drumming for the Slits, Big in Japan, The Creatures, and the Banshees.
Born to the brittle bricks and weary whistle of working-class St Helens, Clarke pounded his first drums under a roof heavy with loss. His mother gone too soon, the silence filled with the clang and clatter of a town that shaped but never contained him. He found a way out, or maybe a way in: first through sticky-floored social clubs, where the beer was bitter and the music numbed the loneliness, then to Liverpool, a city crackling with possibility, an electric crucible of art and ambition.
The bones of The Absence rattle with rhythm…some steady, some stumbling, some silenced too soon. At its core beats the tale of Budgie, the stick-wielding storm at the centre of Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Creatures, the quiet architect of an era’s most hypnotic, honeyed, and harrowing hymns. His hands, quick as whispers, built the backbone of masterpieces like Juju, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, and Peepshow—records that shimmered and slashed, seduced and scorned. But behind this artistry the wreckage gathered: a love unraveled, a band splintered, a man lost.
Budgie moves through the ruins with raw hands, peeling back the past to find the flickering light within. He writes of the Banshees at their height, of the slow, painful descent, of the pull of drink and drugs, and of the angels who emerged to show him that a mother’s lost love could, perhaps, be replaced.
“Damned if you do, denied if you don’t,” Budgie said in a press release. “To remember, revisit and to write, was traumatic and cathartic. To be published? Terrifying! I prepared my apologies, and anticipated rejection. I received mostly love, understanding, and affection. To those still hurting from the way things were, I can only empathise and offer a prayer. I present my mistakes that I may learn and others may avoid.”
Follow Budgie:
Or via: