Hyæna is the sixth studio album by English post-punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees, released in 1984. It was re-issued, remastered, and expanded in 2009. In the United States, Hyæna was the first Banshees album to be released on a major label – Geffen Records (now sister label to their then-UK label, Polydor).

Prior to the release of the album, "Dear Prudence" became the band's biggest hit in the UK, reaching number 3 in September of the previous year. The song was intended to be a stand-alone single in Europe and as it was not issued in North America, it later only appeared on the American version of Hyæna.

It is the only studio album guitarist Robert Smith of The Cure composed and recorded with the Banshees.

The album received mixed reviews upon release but Melody Maker, however, wrote:

Retrospectively, Stephen Cook gave a four and a half star rating to Hyæna and wrote:

All music composed by Siouxsie and the Banshees.

The two "Baby Piano" tracks are, respectively, a short piano demo of "Dazzle" and the string backing to the album version of the song.

Thomas Hood (23 May 1799 – 3 May 1845) was a British humorist and poet. His son, Tom Hood, became a well known playwright and editor.

He was born in London to Thomas Hood and Elizabeth Sands in the Poultry (Cheapside) above his father's bookshop. Hood's paternal family had been Scottish farmers from the village of Errol near Dundee. The Elder Hood was a partner in the business of Verner, Hood, and Sharp, and was a member of the Associated booksellers. Hood's son, Tom Hood, claimed that his grandfather had been the first to open up the book trade with America and he had great success in new editions of old books.

"Next to being a citizen of the world," writes Thomas Hood in his Literary Reminiscences, "it must be the best thing to be born a citizen of the world's greatest city." On the death of her husband in 1811, Mrs Hood moved to Islington, where Thomas Hood had a schoolmaster who, appreciating his talents, "made him feel it impossible not to take an interest in learning while he seemed so interested in teaching." Under the care of this "decayed dominie", he earned a few guineas—his first literary fee—by revising for the press a new edition of Paul and Virginia.

Dame Janet Abbott Baker, CH, DBE, FRSA (born 21 August 1933) is an English mezzo-soprano best known as an opera, concert, and lieder singer.

She was particularly closely associated with baroque and early Italian opera and the works of Benjamin Britten. During her career, which spanned the 1950s to the 1980s, she was considered an outstanding singing actress and widely admired for her dramatic intensity, perhaps best represented in her famous portrayal as Dido, the tragic heroine of Berlioz's magnum opus Les Troyens. As a concert performer, Baker was noted for her interpretations of the music of Gustav Mahler and Edward Elgar. David Gutman, writing in the Gramophone, described her performance of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder as "intimate, almost self-communing."

Baker was born in Hatfield, South Yorkshire, northern England. Her father was an engineer who sang in a male voice choir. Members of her family worked at Bentley pit, in Doncaster, South Yorkshire.^{[citation needed]} She attended York College for Girls and then Wintringham Girls' Grammar School in Grimsby. The death of her elder brother, Peter, when she was 10 years old, from a heart condition, was a formative moment that made her take responsibility for the rest of her life, she revealed in a BBC Radio 3 Lebrecht Interview in September 2011.

John Davies Cale, OBE (born 9 March 1942) is a Welsh musician, composer, singer-songwriter and record producer who was a founding member of the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground.

Though best known for his work in rock music, Cale has worked in various genres including drone and classical. Since departing from the Velvet Underground in 1968 he has released approximately 30 albums. Of his solo work, Cale is perhaps best known for his album Paris 1919, and his cover version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", plus his mid-1970s Island Records trilogy of albums: Fear, Slow Dazzle, and Helen of Troy.

Cale has produced or collaborated with Lou Reed, Nico, La Monte Young, John Cage, Terry Riley, Cranes, Nick Drake, Mike Heron, Kevin Ayers, Brian Eno, Patti Smith, The Stooges, The Modern Lovers, Art Bergmann, Manic Street Preachers and frontman James Dean Bradfield, Marc Almond, Squeeze, Happy Mondays, LCD Soundsystem and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

John Cale was born 9 March 1942 in Garnant in the heavily industrial Amman Valley of Wales to Will Cale and Margaret Davies. His mother was a primary teacher and his father was a coal miner. Although Will only spoke English, Margaret brought John up to speak only Welsh. Being unable to speak the same language as his father naturally hindered their relationship. John finally began learning English around age seven at primary. Cale was molested by two different men during his childhood; one of the men was a priest, and the incident occurred in a church.