Melt! by Siouxsie and the Banshees: Handcuffs, Discipline, 1982

Melt!, the 1982 single by Siouxsie and the Banshees, is not a plain BDSM manual. It is a polished post-punk song with an erotic map. It is the final single from the band’s fifth studio album, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, issued as a double A-side with the Christmas carol Il Est Né, Le Divin Enfant. Lace handcuffs, sweat as a screenplay, and a lethal kind of intimacy put restraint inside a Baudelairean haze. The S&M imagery sits in a fever dream.

The lyrics set an intense sexual interlude next to dying. Orgasm and annihilation run together. The lines are sensory: “Handcuffed in lace, blood and sperm,” “Swimming in poison,” “Gasping in the fragrance,” and “Sweat carves a screenplay of discipline and devotion.” Discipline is the language of devotion here, and the excess of semen and blood is the image of a boundary already crossed. The band never labeled the track a technical guide. The power-exchange vocabulary is still plain to hear.

Dave Morrison, writing in Select, said Melt! evokes the claustrophobic scents of opium, sex, and sickly flowers. The line “You are the melting man and, as you melt, you are beheaded” ties perfume-heavy lust to a beheading metaphor and keeps the song in gothic erotic territory. For post-punk listeners, bondage aesthetics were already wardrobe and atmosphere. This single makes that wardrobe a scene of fatal intimacy.

The B-side, Il Est Né, Le Divin Enfant, adapts a traditional French Christmas carol. For years it existed only as a single. The box set Downside Up (2004) finally collected it for LP and CD. Melt! itself hit shops on 26 November 1982, peaked at number 49 on the UK Singles Chart, and came out on both 7-inch and 12-inch. There is no scene tutorial in it. Restraint, discipline, and devotion are the words, and that is why the track sits near BDSM inside goth and post-punk.