The final track of the album is a studio recording of "The Lord's Prayer", the song that Siouxsie and the Banshees had famously played at their debut live performance at the 100 Club Punk Festival in September 1976. The positive lyric is upfront and the negative one is in the background. Over a music box, two voices sing simultaneous love and hatred for the same mother. Phil Sutcliffe called it "a raw wound of a song offered by Siouxsie from her own life and surely shared and picked and scratched at by everyone who hears it". The lullaby "Mother / Oh Mein Papa" is an interpretation of the German song " O mein Papa" with words by Siouxsie. Severin later recalled the head of A&R at Polydor telling him he expected a commercial failure.
The single did not sound catchy, but it nevertheless entered the top 30. It was the band's third single in less than a year and "probably the best", according to the music historian Clinton Heylin. It's not the sort of thing you're supposed to write pop songs about". Siouxsie explained: "It's about the cruelty of children and that whole aspect of being thrown out into the playground in the winter in howling gales and left to fend for yourself. The song "talks about adults who act like children and children who think they're adults". īeginning the second side, "Playground Twist" is a "swirling mass of flanged guitars" with church bells it includes a nursery rhyme section. The song's conclusion features what sounds like "a formal choir backing for a retreating Red Army in its magnificent defeat". For the writer Mark Paytress, the line "We're all sisters and brothers" looked like a mockery of the Summer of Love. It is, in Siouxsie's words, "an expression of claustrophobia, of being hemmed in both by society's and people's limitations". "Premature Burial", "ostensibly inspired" by Edgar Allan Poe's short story of the same name, is the track from which the album title had been taken. "Placebo Effect" addresses the use of placebos in medicine, while "Icon" displays echoes of iconoclasm, with the destruction of paintings featuring religious images, or statues and symbols of old authoritarian regimes. "Regal Zone", featuring saxophone by McKay, also covers the subject of war and is about the conflict in Iran. On the inner sleeve of the album, the mention "2 minutes of silence" was added next to the lyrics of the song. "We wanted to write a song that would fittingly fill that gap", he stated. "Poppy Day", a short track with a long introduction building over what one journalist called "shards of John McKay's guitar" and a "strident militaristic backbeat", had been shaped after Steven Severin had observed the televised two minutes of silence in memory of the war dead on Sunday, 12 November 1978. The words were based on John McCrae's poem " In Flanders Fields", which was written in 1915 after the loss of a friend during a First World War battle. The album opens with the sound of tolling bells before the beginning of "Poppy Day". For the critic Ronnie Gurr, "All lyrical options are left completely open". Some songs were also about families and nursing. The themes of the songs also included "child-like terror, attacks on social and spiritual conditioning, various kinds of death and torture, and loneliness". The album's references to poppies represented the idea of "loss, of flesh and blood and hopelessness". Miranda Sawyer stated that Join Hands took "the very un-rock'n'roll topic of World War I as its inspiration". The theme of war emerged through the songs: rather than a pro-military message, the lyrics were meant to capture the spirit of what things were like at the time. Siouxsie Sioux saw it as "a real time, everything in flux and uncertain but also festering underneath, and because this stuff from the past that was just left there rotting there and it needed to be acknowledged and then cleaned up, not just swept away still rotting".
In England, the political situation was also unstable, with rubbish piling up in the streets of London. In 1979, the band watched news reports from Iran, including scenes of repression and curfews it was one of the first times they had seen images of people being shot and killed on television. Join Hands was written over a period of six months.
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