Written By Some Journo From NME, So It Is A Bit Crap In Places. None The Less, It`s Useful For Those Who Are Not Very Well Versed In Goth. Just Don`t Blame Me For This.
For a genre that sounds so rich and varied on paper, Goth is the most sneered- at cult that rock'n'roll has ever thrown up. Sneered at by soulboys and music critics - who are much the same thing anyway - who fear Goth's elaborate vanity and its frightening sense of commitment because THEY THINK IT LOOKS STUPID.
The joke is on them. Goths are more dignified than Picadilly Circus punks and, although they all look exactly the same, they are *different*. There are three in every town in this country. Except Leeds 6, where there are only three kids who aren't.
You don't want to be one, you don't want to listen to Nick Cave and The Neffs and Skeletal Family, you don't want to wear patchouli oil, you don't want to belong to an adolescent trobe who do nothing but hang aroung The Friary looking dour, waiting for The End Of The World - but if you did, here's how to bluff your way through England's darkest style netherworld...
HAIR :
Dyed black using utterly unnatural Boots Sure'n'Simple so that it actually looks BLUE under artificial light. For archetypal Goth hair- style see Robert Smith, very much a figurehead, in that he's way into his 30s and still dresses like a rag doll from Nightmareland. Hairstyle must be sprayed so RIGID you could balance a tray of cider' n'blackcurrants on top of it. Plumage is all-important to the Goth, it represents an extension of the darkest parts of the soul, it is asexual it upsets grannies and it can't be 'put away' during the day when you go to work, proving all-importantly that you don't go to work.
CLOTHES :
Black, naturally, altho various shades of washed-out grey are acceptable, and tie-dyeing is not outlawed either. Gothgear is a strange hybrid of sex fetishist (straps, fishnet, leather, vests, high boots) and crusty traveller (trousers held together with incongruous patches and long johns worn underneath, all-weather long coats, army surplus shoulder-bag dyed black). The especially flamboyant Goth may favour ringed tights or purple velvet as a concession to Xmas Day or weddings.
The band-name T-shirt is fine, as long as it's from the 1983 tour or better still, a group who have disbanded or stopped being Goth - Bauhaus, The Cult, The Mission - in the OLD logo. How hard are Goths? About as hard as anyone who spends hours painstakingly hand-painting band-names on to the back of their leather jacket. But harder than bikers, who actually embroider theirs!
ACCESSORIES :
As a throwback to punk, Goths wear a foolish amount of rings and jewellery about their ears, wrists, necks and nostrils. having a softish part of your body pierced in Ratners (apt) is something of a regular weekly treat for Goths, they'll have an earring with a little skeleton on it hanging from any part of the body without bone underneath. As a result, you can always hear Goths coming, on account of the death-rattle.
Wearing a live rat on the shoulder is also de rigeur. Goths are all vegans, but think nothing of exposing their pet to all the danger and discomfort inherent in living on somebody's shoulder. Due to their total incompatibility with other ppl, Goths tend to mate with other Goths ex- clusively, thus an identical partner is the ultimate accessory. Either sex, there's litle in it.
SIT AROUND :
19th Century novelist Edgar Allen Poe used to do a lot of this, and as we know, Goths base their entire lives around E. A. Poe. Even though none of them have read any of E. A. Poe's books. If you are a Goth, you have devoted your life to sitting around, in effect. The apolitical act of burning joss sticks, sitting on bean bags, playing 'First And Last Ans Always' over and over, watching 'Nosferatu' with the sound down and teasing the kittens with a Jaffa Cake box and some wool is not just *opting out* in the Hippy sense, it is merely *staying in* in the Not Going Out sense. Strangely, all Goth music is about death and torture and being a bat, and *none of it* is about sitting around.
GO ON AN ORGANISED COACH TRIP TO SEE THE CURE LIVE :
Self-explanatory. Not many laughs on the back seat though.
DRINK CIDER'N'BLACKCURRANT :
Normal ppl go out to the pub for social raesons, to have a fight or play on the quiz machine. Goths do it to show other ppl that they think having fun is for shallow conformists; they sit in the corner of either the town's 'biker pub' or the recently renovated 'JJ Moon's Lager Palace' (for irony) and sip a purple semi-alcoholic drink, programme the jukebox to replay 'Inbetween Days' all night and discuss Camus novels they've never finished.
HANG ROUND THE WAR MEMORIAL :
Confined to small towns and villages only. It's a death thing, really.
DO ART :
Every graphic design/illustration course in the country has a Goth on it. Why? Because artistic self-expression denotes social inadequacy. You are a genius therefore you can't make friends. Goths make ideal art students; their introspective yet visually confrontational nature inevi- tably bears fruit in the form of spiky doodles on the backs of Friary napkins. The 'outlet' for the tormented soul can easily be channelled into a career in textile design or illustrating child abuse articles in trendy listings mags. Also, art is a doss. Ideal.
TAROT CARDS :
A load of old mumbo jumbo toss. Goths don't believe in God or the devil, but they are quite willing to plan their lives around the random order of some pretty playing cards, as long as the future looks miser- able and rubbish. Easy to play while you *sit around* (see: Sitting Around).
BUY CANDLES IN THE SHAPE OF SKULLS :
Well, electric light is so *artificial*, isn't it And light. And not shaped like a skull.
BAUHAUS: 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' (1979, Small Wonder)
The first Goth record. Goths have no sense of history whatsoever, and even though the music they love and cherish owes a massive debt to all manner of disparate music (Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, The Velvet Under- ground, early Ultravox, Wagner, Ennio Morricone, 'The Munsters' theme, Brian Eno, Leonard Cohen, Chopin) they won't allow it into their homes. Thus, Goth was born in 1979 in Northampton, when local boys Bauhaus cut this ten-minute, epic, blood-curdling creep through the crypts and catacombs of midnight movies and adolescent doom-fantasy. Very long, lovely scary voice. "Back-k-k on the rack-k-k...". YEAH.
SOUTHERN DEATH CULT: 'Fat Man' (1981, Situation Two)
It is not in Goth's nature to rebel against The System, as a rule. The traditional Goth anthem usually revolves around a weighty agenda like bats, or how frightening shadows are in a gloomy part of Berlin. Thus, Ian Astbury's first single about (yes!) The Man is an unlikely mile- stone. But Southern Death Cult, at least two name-changes away from being a Heavy Metal band, were from well-known Gothcentre Bradford and flirted with all the right tribal drumming and mohawk chic.
SISTERS OF MERCY: 'First And Last And Always' (LP) (1984, Merciful Release)
Four men who *really* understood what Goth was all about, the Sisters' first album contained such caustic, deadly-nightshade requiems as 'Black Planet' (self-explanatory), 'No Time To Cry' (being po-faced as a vocation) and the ultimate stick-pins-in-yourself tortured girl homage poem 'Marian". The Sisters filled the Albert Hall at this point, a Goth watershed, and this record's relentless, raining drum machine and moaning zombie vocals are a celebration of the event. None more black.
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES: 'Kaleidoscope' (LP) (1980, Polydor)
Proto-Goth during the later punk years, Siouxsie fine-tuned the ice- queen look for future generations ans she ans Steve Severin injected plenty of post Cheddar bad-dreaminess and sex-death-mania into later pop product. But this album was the turning point, a far and echoey cry away from the badly-produced monolith 'Join Handa', it intriduced trendy Arabian mysticism ('Lunat Camel') and jolly schizophrenia ('Christine') into the Goth equation. Ground rules were set, the lyrics were hand-scrawled in an ever-decreasing (unreadable) spiral and Budgie was a Goth lovegod.
THE CURE: 'Faith' (LP) (1981, Polydor)
Putting the 'creepy' back into Crawley, Bob Smith's maturing three-pce ditched the powerpunkpop and the fannying around with a vacuum cleaner and made the 1980s' most *unbearable* (ie. spot-on) anti-celebration of death and all its greyness. It was called 'Faith'; there was a track on it called 'Doubt'. Voila! Gerard Manley Hopkins, Albert Camus and Alfred Lord Tennyson on one log-player! A Goth meisterwerk, 'Faith' has drowning, emptiness, childhood innocence and the ace Goth girl's name Fuchsia all covered. Morrissey, by comparison, is the Laughing Police- man.
FIELDS OF THE NEPHILIM: 'Moonchild' (1988, Situation Two)
It got to 28 in the charts; it was as daft as Neil out of 'The Young Ones'; it was made by men in cowboy hats and eyeliner who had their own talcum-powder roadies. Yep, The Neff's credibility hit its own minor peak with this ground-breaking single - after this they would be laughed out of town and daubed The Caricature Goth Band. Which they were. Fantastically so.
THE MISSION: 'Severina' (1987, Phonogram)
Still worshipped as elfin kings of Hippy Goth today, this single (from the equally noteworthy first album) incites massed on-the-shoulders finger-dancing at live shows. A Goth who doesn't know all the words and 'actions' to 'Severina' - a wonderful, rampant, chiming funny-girl's- name anthem - is a charlatan and/or weekender. No girl in the world was ever called Severina. but most Goth kittens are, nowadays.
SISTERS OF MERCY: 'This Corrosion' (1989, WEA)
To their credit, Goths can handle the mainstream success of 'their' bands. Thus, Andrew Eldritch on 'Top Of The Pops' with a Top Ten hit produced by 'Bat Out Of Hell' maestro Jim Steinman, grumbling away in dark glasses and leather gloves was not, to them, a grotesque travesty, but a sacred moment. In the video, Eldritch dressed in a cream safari suit - AND GOT AWAY WITH IT! Such is the lenience of the Goth consumer.
MORTICIA (The Addams Family):
A piss-take of Elsa Lanchester in 'The Bride Of Frankenstein' and all the women in 'Dracula', Morticia could walk un-noticed through i Leeds city centre tomorrow. See also: Mrs Munster out of 'The Munsters'. Ironic reference points, since both shows are comedies, and Goths never laugh.
COUNT ORLOK:
Bald-headed geek from seminal German Dracula flick 'Nosferatu', made in 1921. The silent vampire with no nail-clippers - usually inaccurately referred as Nosferatu - was played by Max Shreck, and is scarier than anything Christopher Lee or Vincent Price ever did in lurid Eastmancolour. Goths don't look like him, but they all walk like him.
EDGAR ALLEN POE:
Haunted old lush with no mates in the early 1800s. The Stephen King of his day, except without the word processor and the in-bred features, Poe wrote creepy short stories about belfries and ravens and pendulums (honest) which are impossible to read. Roger Corman made them all into trash movies in 1970 with Jack Nicholson in. Goths will be interested to find this out, since they know f--- all about anything.
THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW:
High camp, all-singing, all-dancing spoof of horror movies written by Richard O'Brien (now presenter of C4's New Age 'Crystal Maze' quiz show - not very goth, too active) in the '70s. Made into a film, and then it all went a bit mad, with cross-dressing show-offs turning up to sing along, dance in the aisles and shout lewd remarks at the screen! Again, too active for the average Goth (also involves leaving the house, which is a problem), but the hardcore 'Rocky Horror' fan (and they still do it!) is very definitely a rareified splinter-Goth.
GHOST DANCE:
Signed to Chrysalis and then refused to admit they were Goths. Dropped by Chrysalis after one AOR album. Splitters!
SKELETAL FAMILY:
First band our current Editor ever interviewed for the paper. Lead singer left to join The Colour Field - what a giveaway!
DANIELLE DAX:
Appeared briefly, starkers, in 'Company Of Wolves' and pretends to be all mystical and macabre, but she's just an unmusical flake with a nice line in catsuits. Real Goths, avoid!
THE BOLSHOI:
The best 'girl's name' song they ever came up with was 'Lindy's Party' - say no more.
ALL BATCAVE BANDS:
There was once a tiny Goth nightclub in Soho called The Batcave. 'Sounds' used to hold editorial meetings there in 1983 (probably) A ropey collectiveof Goth bands played to a captive audience and all came out on one LP ('The Batcave LP'). The Specimen (who used to run the club), Brigandage, Alien Sex Fiend - these shouting, cobwebbed stringbeans were labelled 'Positive Punk' in the 'NME' at the time. There was nothing positive about them; they - collectively - gave Goth a bad name. Like Syndrome without the laughs.
ALSO NOT RECOMMENDED:
The Screaming Marionettes, now called The Marionettes
Toyah
All About Eve
Lydia Lunch
Gene Loves Jezebel
Flesh 4 Lulu
Wasted Youth
Mirabda Sex Garden
Every New Dead Ghost
Claytown Troupe
Danse Society
Getting The Fear
Looking bleak, aptly enough. The sound of the chiming, soaring, discordant guitar has made a comeback recently in the Shoegazers' agenda ( Slowdive, Chapterhouse and especially Catherine Wheel all make good use of the Banshees/ Cure chord-change, but the neither-here-nor-there image leaves plenty to be desired, Goth-wise - sorry, folks).
Curve are the best contemporary bet; there has, after all, always been a dance element to Goth music (Death Cult's 'God Zoo', and The Cult's 'Resurrection Joe mixes to name but two exhibits). Toni Halliday's look could well be Ms Macabre for the '90s, but The Friary's most regulat patrons are clearly unsure about Curve. Too muscular and glossy, perhaps. Kitchens Of Distinction make the right noises but, sadly, favout the streamlined librarian look. The Dead Dead Good label in Northwich promises great things with a demo by That Uncertain Feeling, but this is not a subculture where trifles like Next Big Thing matter. Being a Goth means never having to relate in any way, shape or form to the real world. With loads of crimping.
A hex on all soulboys! Whooo-oooo-oooooh!