Cathi Unsworth traces the origins of Goth music. Plus, catch Cathi at the Idler Festival – see below

As a new Conservative leader took office in May 1979, a new mood of music captured the transition from the Winter of Discontent into the Thatcher Spring. The outriders of this nascent manifestation were three bands summoned into existence by punk, and the ideas that came out of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop at 430 King’s Road. Joy Division, their Mancunian contemporaries Magazine and Bromley’s Siouxsie and the Banshees continued to push at the taboos the Sex Pistols had unlocked and unleashed, dancing with the fetishistic and the forbidden.

These bands were disdainful of authority and convention, as personified by their intensely charismatic lead singers: Joy Division’s tragic Ian Curtis, who actually voted for Margaret Thatcher and would die by his own hand a year after her election; Magazine’s Howard Devoto, heralded as “the most important man alive” by the NME in 1979; and Siouxsie Sioux, perhaps the greatest antidote to the pussy-bowed, Harrods helmeted Prime Minister – a glowering Cleopatra in fishnets with a crown of black spiked hair, she was the mystery every teenage misfit wanted to unlock.

The soundtracks to these bands’ visions appeared to have been entirely made at night in abandoned factories by musicians who were pushing the boundaries of instruments they’d only just taken up. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and Closer, Magazine’s Real Life, Secondhand Daylight and The Correct Use of Soap and The Banshees’ The Scream offered disturbingly different combinations of slasher guitars, swirling keyboards, loping, dub-informed bass and percussion that recalled the echo of jackhammers or the march of insect feet. A generation brought up on Captain Scarlet, Quatermass, JG Ballard and Hammer horror films fused tropes of sci-fi and the Gothic with satirical social commentary, all delivered with suitably icy Cold War disdain.

This mood wasn’t confined to Britain. A similar disgruntlement festered in the mausoleum of American rock’n’roll. From Akron, Ohio, The Cramps reanimated the hellbound hillbilly spirits of Link Wray and Johnny Burnette. Toweringly Elvine singer Lux Interior, six-foot-six in his stilettoed feet, and his paramour, ghoulishly glamorous guitar goddess Poison Ivy Rorschach, looked as if they’d just blasted their way out of the Addams Family crypt. “This music found us,” Ivy said. “We didn’t seek it out, it found us and grabbed us.” “We want to be a rock’n’roll band,” added Lux, “and I’ll do it till past when I’m dead.”

Vying with Lux for World’s Most Fearsome Stage Presence, Nick Cave and his Birthday Party fetched up in London in 1980, having discarded their previous, misleadingly named incarnation The Boys Next Door in their native Melbourne. Signing to the fledgling 4AD label, they duly “Release[d] the Bats”, played some incendiary live shows and got themselves a reputation. “Are you a damned soul?” Sounds’ Ralph Traitor asked the Cave who had just released an EP entitled Drunk on the Pope’s Blood. “Well, all this stuff that gets written about the popular Nick Cave mythology is garbage,” he replied, “but it amuses my mother.”

Meanwhile, from Los Angeles came The Gun Club, a band begun by the former president of the Blondie fan club, Jeffrey Lee Pierce. The spooked backwoods holler of 1981’s Fire of Love announced his intentions, with images of Baron Samedi on the front cover and bottles of voodoo potions labelled with the track listing on the back. Though the personification of simmering malevolence onstage – he channelled his persona from Robert Mitchum’s Preacher Powell in Night of the Hunter – interviewers were usually disarmed by Jeffrey Lee’s genial personality. “I’d love to be a really great singer like Winston Rodney or Billie Holiday,” he told Richard Cook of NME.

The Gun Club shifted through several line-ups, nurturing such Goth greats as guitarist Kid Congo Powers and raven-haired bassist Patricia Morrison along the way.

One of Goth’s most enduring names, The Cure emerged from Crawley, West Sussex in 1976, initially as a trio: singer-guitarist Robert Smith, bassist Mike Dempsey and drummer Lol Tolhurst. Though their penchant for tarantula hair and lashings of eyeliner has become fixed in the popular imagination, back in 1979 Melody Maker described them as a “no-image band”. Smith’s route to Boots’ make-up counter was signposted when The Cure got a slot supporting Siouxsie and the Banshees on their Join Hands tour in September 1979. When the headliners’ guitarist and drummer walked out at the start of the tour, Smith and Tolhurst stepped into the breach. The Cure mainman would return to serve the Banshees again in 1983, both on their Hyaena and Nocturne LPs, and detouring to make the Blue Sunshine album with Banshees bassist Steve Severin as The Glove.

Between Robert’s residencies, the guitarist who lent his sinister string bending talents to the Banshees at their most noir – on the albums Kaleidoscope (1980), JuJu (1981) and A Kiss in the Dreamhouse (1982) – was Magazine’s John McGeoch. “I saw John on The Old Grey Whistle Test playing ‘The Light Pours Out of Me’ with Magazine and thought: He’s the one,” bassist Severin recalled.

McGeoch wasn’t the only member of Magazine’s impressive line-up to be swiftly redeployed – bassist Barry Adamson was drafted into The Birthday Party when bassist Tracey Pew was jailed for a combination of drink driving and theft in early 1982. Adamson would go on to play a key role in the original Bad Seeds with Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Einstürzende Neubauten guitarist Blixa Bargeld, songwriter Anita Lane and guitarist Hugo Race. After three albums, Adamson went solo and was replaced by Kid Congo Powers – who, between shifts with The Gun Club, demonstrated his skills on The Cramps’ second album, Psychedelic Jungle (1981). Goth’s danse macabre would continue in this vein throughout the eighties, with ideas fermenting and partners swapping between like-minded bands as regularly as they adjusted their gravity-defying barnets. And nowhere was a more fertile “swinging” ground than Goth’s glamour nightspot The Batcave, which opened for business in July 1982 at 69 Dean Street. An impressive address, it was once home to Charles II’s mistress Nell Gwynne and then host to 1920s bohemian hangout the Gargoyle Club, where Henri Matisse and Augustus John rubbed noses with Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward and Virginia Woolf et al.

Run by singer Olli Wisdom and guitarist Jon Klein of house band Specimen, other eye-catching artists who liked to hang out there included The Immaculate Consumption – Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave, Marc Almond and JG “Foetus” Thirlwell – Danielle Dax, Marc and the Mambas and Goth’s greatest magic shows, Bauhaus and Killing Joke. Specimen’s Jonny “Slut” Melton summed up the scene as: “A lightbulb for people like myself, who were from the sticks and wanted a bit more from life. Freaks, weirdos, sexual deviants. It was more Rocky Horror Show than Aleister Crowley.”

Northern Soul transformers Soft Cell’s 1981 Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret captured those neon-lit Soho thrills while luring in the nascent Goth generation with their million-selling single “Tainted Love”. But a rival scene was growing in the city where Marc Almond and Dave Ball had met as students: Leeds. Leading the way was the Stetson-wearing enigma that remains Andrew Eldritch and his dry-ice-swathed Sisters of Mercy, who first flittered out of an attic in that city in 1980. Dispensing with a drummer in favour of a machine called Doktor Avalanche, The Sisters – Eldritch and guitarist Gary Marx, soon joined by bassist Craig Adams and guitarist Ben Gunn – released a string of memorably malevolent singles and EPs on their own Merciful Release label. “The name’s nice and ironic,” the man also known as Lord Spiggy elucidated to Melody Maker’s Adam Sweeting. “A nice 50-50 balance between nuns and prostitution. All this pseudo-faith business and high ritual, and yet… prostitution.”

The fact that the Yorkshire city that spawned the great Victorian Gothic painter of the night, John Atkinson Grimshaw, should also make a significant contribution to Gothic music seems entirely apt. Dark flowers blossomed under Leeds’ medieval spires: The March Violets, Gang of Four, The Mekons, The Three Johns and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, whose mournful tunes, electro refashioning of Northern Soul standards and plaintive Country and Western cover versions lured generations of young people into hairspray abuse, the consumption of snakebite-and-black and the art of throwing shapes on a dimly lit dancefloor.

Goth created a necessary escape portal from the grim years of Thatcher’s reign, a time when the forces of darkness could only be countered by other forces of darkness. It inspired and consoled its youthful adherents in equal measure – and has never really left us since. How could it, when the music created at this fractious, frightening time still sounds as mysterious, malevolent and decadent as it did back then? What else, when reanimating Charles Addams’ original Family saga, could Tim Burton have chosen but The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck” for Wednesday to rip up her school disco in swathes of black chiffon to? Millions of TikTok viewers can attest to the fact that, although Lux departed this world in 2009, his wish to go on rocking from beyond the grave has been answered.

“When the sun goes down and the moon comes up…”

This article is from Idler #90.

Cathi Unsworth’s Season of The Witch: The Book of Goth tells the full story of the fascinating subculture of Gothic music which bloomed under the dark shadows of the Thatcher years. 

DIVAS FROM THE DARK SIDE
AT THE IDLER FESTIVAL

Come and see Cathi Unsworth at the Idler Festival on Saturday 11 July, when she’ll be presenting “Divas from the Dark Side”, her exploration of women in Goth through the decades, featuring illustrative video clips.

Cathi will also be helming a Goth Disco in the Orchard, playing tracks from Dressed in Black, a new double album she compiled for Ace Records spanning eight decades of Divas from the Dark Side.

The Idler Festival runs from Friday 10 to Sunday 12 July at Fenton House and Gardens in Hampstead, London NW3.

See who else is performing and buy tickets with our Festival poster here. Click on the performer’s name for details.

See you there!

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