Let’s play goth bingo. Black lipstick, leather, eyeliner, hair dye, fishnets, corsetry, PVC, snakebite and black. Red velvet, silver piercings, white make-up. Hair extensions, hair spray, crimpers, vampires, graveyards, androgyny, pointy boots, 19th-century poets, bedsits, angst, crucifixes, bullet belts, buckles, bathtub speed. Pernod and black, jerky dancing, strobe lights. Bats, cats, wolves, Leeds. Men wearing make-up like it was no big deal. Women as femmes fatales channelling dominatrix chic.
When we think about goth, we tend to focus on a movement which emerged in Leeds in the early 1980s — a dramatic undead aesthetic soundtracked by haute goth classics like Bela Lugosi’s Dead or anything from the Banshees or the Sisters of Mercy. Inspiration from proto goth icons like Vampira, Morticia, Siouxsie Sioux, Nosferatu, Dracula, Dave Vanian.
Goths were creatures of the night who melted in the sun, and who mostly came from white, suburban backgrounds. Mysterious, melancholy souls who flocked together, their look requiring quite a bit of effort. (My make-up could take an hour of solid plastering). And then rave came along, we swapped snakebite and speed for Evian and E, changed our outfits from tight and black to bright and baggy, and that was the end of that.
Except it wasn’t. Unlike punk, goth never died. It remains amongst us, having morphed from its ’80s core to all kinds of digital sub genres — cybergoth, gothabilly, geisha goth, goth pop, nu goth, co-existing alongside the enduring appeal of trad goth. The Slimelight, “the longest running dark scene club in the world” — goths hate the term ‘goth’ — has been operating out of the same Islington venue in London since 1987.
Because goth has never been fashionable, it has never gone out of fashion. Its influence is everywhere: from Rihanna’s #GhettoGoth range of Fenty black lipstick to Vogue’s “Best Gothic Runway Looks of All Time” to cartoon goth Noel Fielding presenting Bake Off. Tim Burton’s current Netflix series Wednesday has introduced a new generation to Wednesday Addams and the glamour and gallows humour of her macabre fam, while South Park has its own Goth Kids. Even Lisa Simpson has had a goth alter ego, Ravencrow Neversmiles.
In the digital era, goth lives on TikTok and YouTube, with fabulous creatures like It’s Black Friday, Toxic Tears and Emily Boo, as it continues to influence musicians from Savages to Billie Eilish, Mogwai to Grimes. Even the original ice queen Siouxsie Sioux is headlining Latitude Festival this summer, her first live performance in a decade.
And now a 650-page book on the history of goth has arrived from music writer, broadcaster and bassist with the Membranes John Robb. The Art of Darkness — gloriously knowledgeable and inclusive, rich with words like crystalline, lysergic, spectral, and stuffed with stories about the bands who may have changed your life as a teenager — has everyone in there. From the obvious headliners (Siouxsie, Bauhaus, the Cure, the Sisters of Mercy, the Mission) to those who were part of that vast creative web (Birthday Party, Killing Joke, Sex Gang Children, Lydia Lunch, Throbbing Gristle, Laibach, the Gun Club, Fields of the Nephilim, Dead Can Dance, dozens more).
John Robb of the Membranes and author of The Art of Darkness: A History of Goth
“I was really worried about leaving anyone out,” says Robb. “It’s not always the most famous people that have the biggest, most long-term influence — the foot soldiers, the more minor characters, are very important. People like [poet and author] Joolz Denby — she was instrumental in the New Model Army house in Bradford, which was an important place where things happened. Southern Death Cult rehearsed in their cellar — it’s where Ian Astbury auditioned to be in the band.” (The same Ian Astbury who later went on to US rock superstardom with the Cult).
The story does not, however, begin with some freaky looking 1980s people in a Leeds club called The Phono — considered goth’s ground zero — or the briefly infamous Batcave in London. Instead, Robb takes us all the way back to August 24, 410AD and the fall of Rome, when the first goths showed up from the north — the Visigoths, led by dark lord Alaric, plundering their way south, building their austere, angular cathedrals as they went. The word ‘Gothic’, in relation to architecture, was coined in 1518 in a letter from the artist Raphael to Pope Leo X. It was not a compliment.
“Goth was seen as a dark force coming into classical Europe,” says Robb via Zoom. “Gothic architecture — those great cathedrals — was looked upon as being inferior to classical architecture, but had its own aesthetic — similar to goth [music], which wasn’t classical rock, but constructed musical cathedrals that the classical rock canon never really ‘got’.
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“I’m sure the Visigoths were walking around saying, ‘we’re not goths either,’” he laughs, referring to the idea that nobody ever wants to be identified by the word. (Not even the gothiest goth of them all, Andrew Eldritch of the Sisters of Mercy, who was so keen to disassociate from the term he took to wearing white T-shirts and baseball gear. It didn’t work.)
Original ice queen: Siouxsie Sioux, who inspired entire movements. Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns
Siouxsie Sioux — whose music, appearance and attitude inspired entire goth movements — despises the term, referring to it sarcastically as ‘goff’; apparently she doesn’t mind the term ‘gothic’, but unlike the hundreds of musicians, performers and scenesters who spoke to Robb for his book, we’ll never know for sure because she doesn’t like doing interviews either.
“You can never blame a band for not wanting to be in a scene, because once you’re in it, you can never get out of it,” he says. “But it’s a balancing act. All the bands that hated the term goth didn’t mind having goth audiences.”
So how would you describe the idea of goth to a Martian, I wonder.
“It’s an embrace of melancholy,” says Robb. “It’s dancing with death, a fascination with sex and death. It’s different from other youth cultures in that it’s far more art-focused, far more literate — goths read books. They write poetry. It’s a stylistic thing, a musical thing, a spiritual thing. It ticks a lot of boxes. It’s a love of the dark side.”
It was also — and remains — the ability to withstand ridicule. Not everyone quite understood what would make you want to flounce around in black, looking like an ashen extra from a horror film. Unlike the gobbiness of punk, or the razor-sharpness of post-punk, goth was more ethereal. It didn’t smile much. (Although underneath all the Edgar Allan Poe facedness there usually lurked dark humour; if goth couldn’t laugh at itself, it was doomed).
“Goth never got great media at the time — bands like Bauhaus were mercilessly slagged off in the music press,” says Robb. “Yet they were one of the great art-rock bands. There were hints of goth before — in 1967, the Doors were described as a gothic band, the first to be so, followed by the Banshees and then Joy Division.”
Of course Joy Division were not remotely goth, with in their industrial raincoat aesthetic, but their music was played in goth clubs. Goth was, and remains, a broad church, a cultural umbrella that covers everything from the art of Millais, Munch and Goya to the poetry of Byron, Blake and Coleridge to the schlocky novels of Stephen King and hammy Hammer Horror B-movies, via The Munsters and The Addams Family and Tim Burton’s entire filmography. Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Dracula, Frankenstein and The Raven are all classics of goth literature. Today, thanks to the reach of social media, there are goths everywhere from Japan to South America, India to Israel.
“It’s a very visual thing now,” says Robb, adding that this can mean the music is not as central as in the days of analogue. Pre-internet, goth would erupt unbidden in unlikely places, dark creativity bursting through like flowers through cracked concrete. Bauhaus, for example, came from Northampton in England, a place not famous for its art or music scenes.
“Sometimes in isolation, you can come up with stuff without being distracted — you’re going against the grain because you don’t know what the grain is.”
Or the grain could be so weighted by conservatism that you would retreat into an imaginary creative world, like a bunch of young guys in mid-70s Dublin, who created a space called Lypton Village. In this made-up place, they gave themselves new names and identities, where they could freely express ideas of art and music and how to live. This group of friends went on to form two bands. “It’s a fascinating story — one band decided to be commercial, the other decided to be a freakshow,” says Robb, about U2 and Virgin Prunes, the latter with their own chapter in his book.
“We knew exactly what we were doing,” Gavin Friday tells Robb. “We were following our animal instincts. We were trying to make a new music to try and get somewhere different. In our heads, we thought we were changing the world.”
Connecting to the wider scene, such as it was, required serious effort. Friday would spend the weekend on the car ferry to Liverpool, to a record shop staffed at the time by a terrifying Pete Burns, with a shopping list for 15 copies of the latest Cabaret Voltaire or Pere Ubu single, or whatever was unavailable in Dublin at the time.
Guggi (Derek Rowen) and Gavin Friday of the Virgin Prunes. Photo by David Corio/Redferns
“Dublin was very repressed,” says Friday. “It was repressed by the church, poverty, unemployment and was very conservative. It was a pretty f***ed-up country but Bowie and glam were the beacon of light.” In turn, as their fellow Lyptonites went on to become the biggest rock band in the world, Virgin Prunes remain one of its most subversive, particularly given the time and place of their inception.
“What they were, what they represented, replicated outward,” says Robb. “Credit is due to them. And their music was totally listenable, it was great pop. These were the children of Ziggy, just as lots of newer Irish bands are the children of Virgin Prunes. Which is ironic really, because ‘prunes’ was their nickname for old people.”
“Modern Ireland comes from what Virgin Prunes were doing,” says Robb. “I think they changed the place. It’s cool now, Ireland. But in the 1980s, outside of Dublin it was like going back a hundred years.”
My goth awakening happened in 1981 in Cork, aged 13, when — amid the Bucks Fizzes and the Sheena Eastons — Siouxsie & the Banshees appeared on Top of the Pops performing Spellbound. It felt like she had reached through the telly and grabbed me by the throat. The following year, Bauhaus came on Top of the Pops doing Bela Lugosi’s Dead and later their cover of Ziggy Stardust.
As soon as possible — 1987 — clutching the NME gig guide, I moved to London, got a crap job in Kensington Market — then goth central, now a branch of Currys — and met a sensitive, melancholy goth boy at the Slimelight, where I went every weekend with my goth roommate, who was from California but moved to cold rainy London because she hated sunshine. We would watch films like The Hunger and Beetlejuice, read everything from Aleister Crowley to Anne Rice, and wallpaper our tiny bedsit with posters of Diamanda Galás and the Cure.
We went to all the gigs, from post-Bauhaus Peter Murphy to New Model Army, the Cramps to Einstürzende Neubauten. We were deliriously miserable. That is, until rave came along at the end of the 1980s, and we sold our souls to the techno devil, exchanging willowy froideur for non-stop ecstatic dancing. But that’s another story.
The Art of Darkness: A History of Goth by John Robb
John Robb will discuss his new book ‘The Art of Darkness’ at Prim’s Bookshop in Kinsale, Co Cork on Saturday June 3. Tickets at eventbrite.ie
Classic tracks for the goth curious
Dark Bela Lugosi’s Dead — Bauhaus (1982) Spellbound — Siouxsie & The Banshees (1981) A Forest — The Cure (1980) Baby Turns Blue — Virgin Prunes (1982) Temple of Love — Sisters of Mercy (1983)
Slightly less dark Dance With Me — Lords of the New Church (1983) Love Like Blood — Killing Joke (1985) Since Yesterday — Strawberry Switchblade (1984) Let’s Go To Bed — The Cure (1983) She Sells Sanctuary — The Cult (1985)
