John McGeoch

John Alexander McGeoch (25 August 1955 – 4 March 2004) was a Scottish pop music guitarist who played with several bands of the post-punk era, including Magazine, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Visage, and Public Image Ltd. He has been described as one of the most influential guitarists of his generation. In 1996 he was listed by Mojo in their "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" for his work on the Siouxsie and the Banshees song "Spellbound". Signature characteristics of his playing style included an inventive arpeggios, string harmonics, the uses of flanger and an occasional disregard for conventional scales. Musician and producer Steve Albini praised McGeoch for his guitar playing with Magazine and Siouxsie and the Banshees, qualifying as "great choral swells, great scratches and buzzes, great dissonant noise and great squealy death noise What a guy" and further commenting: "anybody can make notes. There's no trick. What is a trick and a good one is to make a guitar do things that don't sound like a guitar at all. The point here is stretching the boundaries".