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Aug 31, 2015 Siouxsie Sioux By Christopher Roberts

The critically adored, ratings starved drama Hannibal had its series finale on Saturday night after being cancelled by NBC after three seasons and failing to find a new home for the show on another TV channel or streaming service. It was clearly the best adaptation of the Hannibal Lecter character since Silence of the Lambs, with Mads Mikkelsen bringing fresh dimensions to the character and the show being one of the most visually impressive and psychologically complex currently on TV. Luckily Hannibal watchers who also happened to be Siouxsie Sioux fans got a nice parting gift on Saturday as the finale contained the first new song from the former Siouxsie and the Banshees singer in eight years. You can listen to it below via both Brooklyn Vegan and Pitchfork.

Hannibal’s composer Brian Reitzell co-wrote the song with Sioux and helped convince her to do it. Reitzell has also now written some other songs with her. Reitzell did an interview with Entertainment Weekly about the experience and had this to say: “I met Siouxsie when I did a movie called Marie Antoinette back in 2006 and we’ve remained in contact every once in a while. It turns out that she was a big fan of the show, and she hasn’t done anything - like, she hasn’t been in a studio - in seven or eight years. But I thought, if she was a fan of the show, it’d be really great to do a song with her. As it happens, she was interested. In November of last year, the show was behind, schedule-wise, because they had to do a lot of shooting in Europe. So since they were behind, I found myself with a little extra time and I decided to write a song for her to sing, so I recorded some stuff, and then I had to put it down because then I had to score.”

Later in the interview, Reitzell added: “Siouxsie hasn’t even stepped foot in a studio for eight years, and she said that this piece was the first thing that she heard that inspired her to do anything. And the good news is that I’m going to do a few more tracks with her. I’ve written a few more, and we’re not sure how we’re going to release the track, and that’s kind of unfortunate, but it will be out. We’ll get it out there somehow, soon.”

TV Guide meanwhile talked to Hannibal executive producer Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me) about the song and he had this to say: “Brian Reitzell knew I am a huge Siouxsie Sioux fan and have seen her in concert more times than any other artist in my life. We knew that she was a fan of the show, and we reached out to see if she’d be interested in writing a song. Essentially, she hasn’t had a single in eight years, and she said she hadn’t been inspired to write in a long time, but that Hannibal had inspired her and she would write a new song. It was an incredible honor. I told her it should be a love song between Will and Hannibal. She came back with this wonderful Bond theme of a ditty, and I just said that has to go over the finale. It was pitch-perfect.

“Then it became the battle over… how do we pay for it? We didn’t have any money left in the budget, and the studio wasn’t going to put any more money into the show than they already had. I went to NBC and Sky, who are our American and U.K. broadcasters and said, ‘I know the show is canceled… and it’s absolutely unheard of for a showrunner to come back to you and ask for more money for a show that has no further revenue potential for you. But it’s Siouxsie Sioux and it’s an honor and it’s her first single in eight years.’ They both said, ‘Yes, absolutely, we’ll split it right down the middle, and we’re doing this because we love you, we love the show, and we love Siouxsie.’”

Hopefully we’ll hear more new Siouxsie Sioux music soon and there’s been very tentative talk of Hannibal living on as a feature film.