Cathi Unsworth meets the drummer to discuss his new book, Goth: A History

In the Saturday afternoon sunshine of Brick Lane’s Upmarket, merry hipsters cavort, consuming everything from Bavarian bratwurst to Korean kebabs as they wend their way around London’s most infamous quarter. The sinister aspect of the site of the Old Truman Brewery – where Annie Chapman’s ruined body was found in the September of 1888, the second of Jack the Ripper’s grisly calling cards, left in the shadow of Hawksmoor’s ominous Christ Church Spitalfields – seems distant in the warmth of an autumnal afternoon.

But night must fall, leaving the detritus of the day stacked in towering piles of rubbish sacks that slouch against the walls three deep and up to eyeball height. Nearby a growing snake of people forms outside Rough Trade East, many dressed in not dissimilar fashion to their Victorian forebears. It’s the perfect location for a talk about Gothic music with The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst, whom the aforementioned crowd have come to hear speak.

For Lol, still not fully readjusted after his recent flight from California (his home for the past quarter century), the sight of those bin bags brings back strong memories – of the Winter of Discontent in December 1978, when The Cure had just released their debut single “Killing an Arab” for Chris Parry’s new Fiction label; and when James Callaghan’s Labour government were battling against strikes that left the dead unburied and the rubbish piled high in the streets. It’s a time Lol comes back to at the beginning of his new book, Goth: A History (Quercus), which he is here tonight to discuss – and, as his interviewer, I have the enviable job of travelling back there with him.

My own Book of Goth, Season of the Witch (Nine Eight Books), begins at the same point in history, which I remember just as vividly as a time of impending doom, with the Yorkshire Ripper, the death of Sid Vicious, the assassination of Airey Neave and the murder of Blair Peach on an anti-fascist rally in Southall all hanging heavily in the aether.

On 3 May 1979, The Cure released their first album, Three Imaginary Boys. The day after, Britain had a new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who entered 10 Downing Street with the prayer of St Francis of Assisi on her lips.

Former Catholic schoolboys The Cure would become pivotal players in the youth culture that began to emerge from those days of monumental upheaval – a culture which was given a name that all of its greatest adepts would refuse to acknowledge, but which remains a place of refuge and inspiration to the Romantically minded, gender-fluid individual, despite the criticism and mockery that’s been thrown its way ever since.

Fortunately, 40 years on, both Lol (who created some of its finest moments) and myself (an adherent to the genre from youth) can agree we’re Glad to be Goth.

But why is it that, in Lol’s words, “something so completely amorphous could have endured for so long”? Because, we decided, the Eighties bands were responding to a trauma the way their antecedents the Romantic poets, the Decadents, the Dadaists, Surrealists and Existentialists had – making immortal art out of the brutality of reality.

And why was Goth such a dirty word anyway? Are we dismissed as the “Walter the Softie” of youth culture because we like reading, art, ideas. Because we’re so female-friendly and LGBT+ inclusive? Are they trying to defang us with their mockery?

As both Goth and Lol’s previous memoir Cured make plain, Tolhurst has suffered for his art, having grappled with the demons of substance abuse and depression and spent time at The Priory (whose architecture, he notes wryly, bears a strong resemblance to Horace Walpole’s supreme Gothic confection, Strawberry Hill).

What saved him was the magic language of music and the realisation that time itself moves in concentric circles: later in 1979, Robert Smith would be lured by The Banshees’ call to spend half his time in their world, making music with Steven Severin; through the looking glass into the present, Lol has just made an album with Budgie – “drummers never forget” – and together they host the excellent Curious Creatures podcast, where they continue to debate what is and isn’t Goth.

Goth is, as Lol writes, “a way to understand the world… It’s in every downpour… It’s in the walls of ancient pubs and still-cobbled Dickensian streets…” What binds its adherents, he says, is something akin to “the golden thread” which, in the words of the Big Daddy of them all, William Blake – buried just around the corner in Bunhill Fields – will “lead you in to Heaven’s gate”.

It felt just like that tonight.

Goth: A History by Lol Tolhurst is out now from Quercus Publishing. Buy it here.

Lol Tolhurst, Budgie and Jacknife Lee’s album Los Angeles is out on 3 November: loltolhurst.com.

Listen to Lol and Budgie’s podcast Curious Creatures here.

Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth by Cathi Unsworth is out now from Nine Eight Books. Buy it here.

Our September/October issue is available is available in Waitrose, Waterstones, Smiths Travel outlets, select Smiths high street branches and in around 100 indie stores. Click here for your nearest stockist.