Kevin Mahoney of SIEGE: 1965-2011
Kevin J. Mahoney, the former vocalist of Siege, passed away on Friday October 14th. The official cause of death has not been reported, but it is believed to have been sudden.
Mahoney was born on September 6th, 1965, and played saxophone in a ska band before joining Kurt Habelt, Henry McNamee and Rob Williams to complete the line-up of Siege. The band’s first official show was at a “Battle of the Bands” in the spring of 1984 at their Weymouth, MA high school, where they were disqualified when McNamee smashed his bass onstage.
Although the band’s members lived in and near Braintree, MA (near Boston and also home to Jerry’s Kids and Gang Green), the band was never fully accepted by the XClaim-dominated Boston hardcore scene. They were definitely not lacking sonically, however, playing furious music at breakneck speed and pioneering a new style of brutal and nihilistic hardcore.
In 1984, Siege went into Radiobeat studios to record a demo with Lou Giordano. The tape made its way through the hardcore punk underground, and clearly made an impression on Pushead for one, who included Siege on his seminal 1985 compilation Cleanse the Bacteria. The band split up the same year, and the three songs on Cleanse the Bacteria were to be the only “official” release by the band, until Relapse and Deep Six reissued the demo on CD and vinyl in 1994 and 2006, respectively.
At the time of his passing, Kevin was working in the IT department at Children’s Hospital Boston, where he had served in many capacities in his several years there. Prior to Children’s, Kevin worked for many years – beginning in 1992 – in the IT department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston.
