Goth: The Dark Side of Pop that Refused to Die
Journey into the heart of darkness with one of popular music’s most iconic genres in GOTH NIGHT from Stephen McCauley. You can listen to the episode now on 大象传媒 Sounds with a dazzling array of Goth and Goth-adjacent music and an exploration and celebration of where Goth comes from, where it went and where it is now.
Music has always had a dark side. It was said that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads to become a master of the Delta blues. He wasn’t the first to make that bargain; Niccolo Paganini bewitched crowds with his virtuosity on the violin, but his critics claimed he was channelling the forces of evil to play the devil’s music. Rock was equally seduced by the darkness, The Velvet Underground dressed in black and wrote paeans to the crack of a master’s whip, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins summed forth pure voodoo with ‘I Put a Spell on You’, while The Rolling Stones cosied up to Old Scratch himself in ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.
Punk generally didn’t have too much time for dark eroticism, it was too busy wallowing in nihilism and indulging in some cultural demolition. By contrast, post-punk was all about architecture. But while Gang of Four and Wire were creating new ways of operating, a musically and visually darker aesthetic began to coalesce around a disparate collection of bands. The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Bauhaus would all be called goth before too long, but in reality, the thing that united them was that willingness to gaze into the emotional abyss, to find the beauty in misery, to draw upon the legacy of their forbears who’d embraced darkness in the name of art. And to fully commit to wearing leather trousers, something that was a bit of a no-no at the time.
Along with later fellow travellers like The Cult, The Sisters of Mercy, Fields of the Nephilim, and Killing Joke, goth would be one of the defining musical styles of the 1980s, the bands inspiring a legion of black-clad followers to backcomb their hair, hang around graveyards, and marinate in the macabre tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Retrospectively, many artists who seemingly had nothing to do with it at the time would find them being bundled in with goth. Echo and the Bunnymen went as far as covering The Doors’‘People are Strange’ for the soundtrack to The Lost Boys, while Depeche Mode would ditch the rinky-dinky synths of ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ for the Germanic strut of ‘Never Let Me Down Again’, before becoming a stadium electronic goth act in the United States by the end of the 80s.
鈥淲ith Goth there is this sense that every generation is dealing with its blues鈥�John Robb
Joy Division lacked the romanticism that would define many of the big goth bands, but their music is positively gothic in its construction, Stephen Morris, Peter Hook, and Bernard Sumner creating musical sepulchres out of the post-industrial landscape of Manchester. And then the vocals of Ian Curtis, a voice that seemed to have sprung from the seeds of Gregorian Chant via Jim Morrison and David Bowie. It raged from the frantic to the melancholic within the same song and, most importantly of all, it was a voice of introspection.
So much of what underpins this movement is a sense of brooding self-reflection and the search for alternative belief systems. Co-founder of The Cure, Lol Tolhurst was raised Catholic but found solace in the writings of French existentialist philosophers.
“There was a very heavy religious influence in my life when I was younger,” he told Stephen McCauley on his Goth Night special, available on 大象传媒 Sounds now. “Then, at some point when you’re a teenager, you’re like “I’m not quite sure that that works” and then you’re looking for something different. People like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre gave us a map out of how to look at that intellectually but also that means emotionally.”
That intellectual and emotional road map appealed to outsiders. The introspection and beguiling sense of misery was like a clarion call for the faithful, and in discos across the length and breadth of the land, cardigan and NHS specs-wearing indie kids shared space with trench-coated goths, who just wanted a blast of the Mission, and a pint of snakebite. But by the dawn of the 90s, goth had become old (top) hat. Baggy and the Madchester scene was firmly out in the sunshine, while the flannel shirt-clad gunge legions coming from Seattle were into misery, sure, but they didn’t need theatricality or white face paint to make the point.
Almost overnight, goth became terminally unfashionable, the bright light of the 90s causing it to wither and die in the glare. Britpop was all smart-casual clothes, Fred Perry shirts, alchopops, and New Labour, while goth seemed to be populated by people who smelled of incense, and wore beads and ethnic jewellery. And as the 90s gave birth to a new millennium, it seemed like every genre known to humanity underwent a revival, with ska, garage rock, and post punk getting their time in the spotlight, but poor old goth steadfastly refused to be dragged out its dark corner, utterly resistant to fashion and style. A relic of the 80s, most people wouldn’t go near it with a barge pole.
But the reality is that goth never died, it just evolved. One of the best loved cult movies of the 90s was Alex Proyas’ The Crow, a love letter to goth, featuring a soundtrack showcasing The Cure at their devastating best, while industrial noise merchants Nine Inch Nails honoured their goth roots, offering up a reverential cover of Joy Division’s ‘Dead Souls’. Marilyn Manson became a stadium sized controversy machine, but he drew heavily on the goth aesthetic to get him to where he needed to be. The music might be full-on metal crunch, but the look and the style is pure goth.
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Nu-metal would liberally steal from goth, with Linkin Park’s colossal angst owing more than a little to The Cure, and Deftones openly acknowledging the influence of goth upon their melancholic, crushing riffage. Indeed, metal always had a strain of goth running through it, right from the haunting doom of Black Sabbath’s ‘Black Sabbath’ (from the album Black Sabbath, in case you’re interested). The Norwegian underground bands used imagery that wouldn’t be out of place in goth, to become the first wave of black metal, upping the aggression, and fully opening themselves to the embrace of Old Nick, the devil himself. In the UK, bands like My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost pioneered a strand of metal known as gothic doom, sludge-heavy guitar riffs fused to atmospherics ripped straight off a Sisters of Mercy album.
But perhaps the biggest commercial impact of goth inspired music would come in the form of the emo-influenced bands who looked back to the 80s for inspiration. Wales’ Funeral for a Friend had the screaming and riffs of hardcore, but there was something in that melancholy embrace of misery that was quintessentially goth. In the US, Gerard Way built his own vision of goth emo with My Chemical Romance, his Black Parade bringing together a new generation of misfits and outcasts, drawn to the darkness. Even Blink 182 made a bee-line to collaborate with Robert Smith.
Cinema would wear its goth trappings in the open, the films of Tim Burton are as goth as at gets, The Matrix walks that line between cyberpunk and industrial goth, while Twilight is goth romance for a new generation. You could even say that goth has finally gone respectable, with the publication of two comprehensive new books on the subject, The Art of Darkness – A History of Goth by musician and author John Robb and Lol Tolhurst’s own look back at his roots, Goth: A History.
And with The Cure set to release their 14th studio album after a lengthy absence, Siouxsie Sioux returning to live performance, and Lol Tolhurst and former Banshees drummer Budgie about to release their first collaborative album with Jacknife Lee, which they have defined as ‘goth-adjacent’, it seems like finally, goth can come in from the cold once more. Even though it’s probably happier outside in the darkness.
“In the grand scheme of things and the way the world is going these days [Goth] probably doesn’t matter,” Lol Tolhurst told Stephen McCauley. “But, in terms of a way to live a life, it matters very much to me because it’s a lens through which I tend to look at everything”
It seems that once again, the flowers of evil are in full bloom.
