Iterations: Siouxsie & The Banshees – “The Last Beat of My Heart”

Iterations: Siouxsie & The Banshees – “The Last Beat of My Heart”
Siouxsie & The Banshees - "The Last Beat Of My Heart"

I do love me some melodrama, so the third single from Siouxsie & The Banshees‘ 1988 album Peepshow certainly hit the spot. All slow burn and build and featuring one of Sioux’s best vocal performances, it’s an all-timer.

The version recorded at the final stop of the Lollapalooza 1991 tour in Washington state was deemed worthy enough to replace the album version on their 1992 best-of compilation Twice Upon A Time. It was also included as a bonus track on the 2014 reissue of Peepshow:

And another official live version was taken from their December 1988 performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London and included in their 2009 triple-CD At The BBC set:

None of these were the first time I heard the song, though – that would have been in 2006 on the Curse Your Little Heart EP by Denver’s DeVotchKa. The fact that the release isn’t on streaming services sent me scrambling to my CD wall – yes, I still have one of those – to make sure I still had my copy. And while you can stream it on YouTube, you can’t embed it for whatever reason. So if you want to hear Nick Urata gloriously chew through the song – and you should – click on through. It’s gorgeous. And where’d they get the idea to cover it?

“We were playing in Montreal, and Arcade Fire stopped by, back in the earlier days. We were doing this covers album and Win [Butler] recommended that we record The Last Beat of My Heart, and my violin player was a big Siouxsie and the Banshees fan. So we ended up recording it and really glad we did.”

– Nick Urata to The National Post, 2007

DeVotchKa – “The Last Beat Of My Heart”

There’s also this fan-shot video from a 2008 St. Louis show, but it looks and sounds like a fan-shot video circa 2008, so.

And finally, Toronto’s own Flowers Of Hell included a version on their 2012 album Odes, as in, “to their influences”. A “strings version” appeared on last year’s Outlanders compilation.

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