The idea for the ‘drums-and-voice’ WILD THINGS E.P. by The Creatures (Siouxsie & Budgie duet) sparked with the song ‘BUT NOT THEM’ which was 'born by accident' during the sessions for the Banshees 1981 JUJU album while both bassist Steven Severin and guitarist John McGeoch were off the studio for their tea break and soon got completed with the addition of 4 more songs. Then all 5 of them got recored at Playground Studios, London (25-27 May 1981) produced and mixed by The Creatures and engineered by Mike Hedges (May the 28th).
The sleeve artwork of the E.P. featured some sensual and provocative b/w photos of Siouxsie & Budgie as a pair in a bathtub at a hotel suite in Newcastle - upon - Tyne. All photos were shot in the night of 10 August 1981 by photographer Adrian Boot while Rob O'Connor (sleeve designer with Stylorouge Design) ‘…perched precariously on the toilet seat with shower head in hand.’ Besides her obsession with Hitchcock’s shower scene in ‘Psycho’, the idea for the shooting came to Siouxsie from some homoerotic photos of men in showers that one American fan had sent around that time.
The E.P. was released in UK on 25 Sep 1981 and entered the UKTop75 Singles Chart at #34 on 03 Oct 1981. It stayed in the charts for a total of 7 weeks, peaking at #24 on 24 Oct 1981 and exited for good on 14 Nov 1981, last seen at #44. The lyrics of the song were penned by Siouxsie and based upon a local character found at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park in London. In an interview by Tim De Lisle with Smash Hits mag in Oct 1981, Siouxsie said that: "MAD EYED SCREAMER is about a guy who was at Speaker's Corner on Sundays when I used to go down there; one man in particular that I remember who was just crazed, obsessive and quite frightening."
The promo video was shot by director Clive Richardson with the use of impressive fast-editing techniques and a concept partially inspired by Samuel Beckett’s short dramatic monologue ‘Not I’ written in 1972.
Siouxsie: "One of my favourite writers is Samuel Beckett, who often wrote/adapted his work for the stage. Back in ’81, I was hugely impressed and affected by footage I saw of the performance of ‘Not I’ from the 60’s, which centres, by use of clever but simple set and lighting design, exclusively and unusually around the mouth! […] I’ve seen it for the first time on VHS in 1981 with our video director Clive Richardson, who had an extensive film archive and maybe you can see the influence of ‘Not I’ in our video for MAD EYED SCREAMER.”
Budgie: "The promo video is amazing. There are 160 scenes in just 1 minute and 50 seconds! You watch it agape! It was regarded very ‘arty’ and ‘avant guard’ for TOTPs and so they didn’t show it… The BBC wouldn’t show it either. […] The video was banned - too dangerous - the rapid number of edits may have induced epileptic seizure." Because of its success in the UK charts, The Creatures 'mimed' the song at BBC's TOTPs on 01 Oct 1981.
