![]() I remember feeling not particularly gay, not particularly straight. “Of not feeling like you fitted in, of not wanting to fit in. If the goth aesthetic was an outer manifestation of an inner worldview, how would Jonny Slut describe his? “It was an expression of your ‘otherness’, wasn’t it?” he muses. Beautiful, androgynous and terrifying, he was a defining goth figurehead who escaped provincial Peterborough to join the band aged 19. Jonny Slut (AKA Jonny Melton) was the keyboard player with fright-wigged, fishnet-draped, glam-spooks Specimen, the Batcave house band (who also founded the club), famed for his towering deathhawk hair (a deathhawk being an even more voluminous mohawk). Photograph: Antony Jones/Getty Images for Spotify New extremes … Parma Ham flanked by friends. I venture a theory: that the least threatening people are actually the ones who look most frightening: because their madness is all on the outside, not the inside, where the danger lies. “I always found goths were the sensitive, bright kids, very gentle.” “It was romantic, intellectual, Byronesque,” says Ball. Never truly goth themselves, they found it irresistible anyway, and by 1981 were black-clad, stud-festooned pop stars at No 1 on Top of the Pops. ![]() “Leeds was the goth capital,” notes Dave Ball, who formed synth-pop pioneers Soft Cell with Marc Almond in the city in 1978, where they wrote Martin, about a troubled, vampire-fixated boy. For disaffected provincial kids like me, this intense, often preposterously grandiose subculture offered not only an alternative reality but a life. Up in Perth, Scotland, I was one of them, a post-punk obsessive drawn to this glamorous tribe, both deathly serious and fantastically absurd. Atmospherically, what began with the haunting Bela Lugosi’s Dead by Bauhaus in 1979, the spectral Christine by Siouxsie and the Banshees a year later and the agonised album sleeve mourning scene of Joy Division’s Closer, the music evolved into frenetic, electro-glam, industrial art-rock headed for the nation’s dancefloors.īy 1982, still a year before the term “goth” was widely used, the UK provinces were populated by plume-haired fiends, inky apparitions in bullet belts, buckles and black lipstick. The original goth phoenix of the late-70s and early-80s rose from the still-smouldering embers of post-punk, its renegade spirit adapting the dressing-up thrills of the fearless new romantics. It’s a spirit these days I find really rare.” “We could all just dress up, be really stupid, take loads of drugs, I’d play Bowie, the Gun Club and then a ridiculous Ken Dodd record. A stunningly comprehensive, 90-track compilation, it features the iconic ghouls heard at London’s early-80s goth mecca and includes a lusciously illustrated, 80-page history book, featuring the scratchy, B-movie, Batcave artwork that defines the goth aesthetic to this day.įright night … a flyer for the first night of the Batcave in 1982. This month brings the definitive original soundtrack, Young Limbs Rise Again: the story of the Batcave Nightclub 1982-1985. And summer sees the return of the long elusive goth sphinx herself, as Siouxsie Sioux headlines Latitude festival. ![]() Now, two hefty books are about to arrive documenting goth’s endurably undead history, John Robb’s The Art of Darkness: the History of Goth and Cathi Unsworth’s Season of the Witch: the Book of Goth. It came after Burberry showed a dramatic, extreme-goth collection soon after, the Cure sold out three nights at Wembley Arena. L ast November, the Tim Burton-directed, Netflix Addams Family reboot, Wednesday, saw a dance scene go viral on TikTok: Wednesday herself, played by Jenna Ortega, flailing beautifully in black organza to the Cramps’ goth-schlock-psychobilly 1981 cover, Goo Goo Muck.
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