What is goth? God knows

The other day I got asked, "What is goth?", by someone who - lucky them - doesn't know anything about rock/pop music. Oh, blissful ignorance. How can you possibly answer this question? I should have said, "Forget it, it's a waste of time talking about it. I'll regret it - you'll regret it". Nope, I stupidly stumbled through about two minutes of desperate "explanation". Er, it's a sub-genre coming out of punk. It's all about a fascination with death and things usually considered 'morbid'. Graveyards, vampires, er ... See what I mean? Not easy. Especially when that person doesn't know anything about popular music. My bumbling efforts did - happily - include a reference to Nico (my interlocutor knew about Nico): Nico's voice and her love of dark German folk songs. Fine, but otherwise horror films and literature were about my only hope. This is all valid though. Surely Herzog's Nosferatu The Vampyre must have influenced a band like Bauhaus just as much as David Bowie or the spectral rattle of dub reggae. No man, goth was less about music and more about the power of Bergman's Death from The Seventh Seal or the atmosphere of the famous nocturnal story-writing competition between the Shelleys, Byron and Polidori in 1816. Or so I reckon. A quick mini-anecdote: there I was, 19 years old, seeped in post-punk and a smattering of this and that, and I'm magnetically drawn to a city centre clothes shop in my (then) home town Sheffield. The shop sells pricey "alternative" clothing which I can't afford living on the pittance they laughingly called "the dole". Why am I there, for about the third time that week? It's the atmosphere. The skull-print bowling shirts, the bullet belts, the fact that the main shop assistant (probably paid peanuts) is a guy about my age but in a far more "advanced" state of neo-gothdom: cut-down black t-shirt revealing a tattoo of what I vaguely recognised as the spindly "Death with a sickle" design adopted by Sex Gang Children who - almost by chance - I'd seen live the previous year.  

Sex Gang Children: chopping pretend-goths down to size

SGC: not much mentioned these days, but they had this great motif and their music (which initially I didn't really get) also still sounds pretty good in my opinion. But again, how to convey any of this to someone who just doesn't inhabit the same musical universe? Somewhat off-point, we - my interrogator and me - began to drift off into a wider incoherent chat about horror films, Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, vampire films. Off-point but also, as I say, probably actually very relevant. Why exactly did punk seem to stir up this revival of goth in the late 70s? This was something I also struggled to explain. Why did it? Or even - did it? My quick answer would be: yes, punk - as a major culture shift - did unleash a lot of repressed/underground tendencies, helping to validate pretty much almost anything previously considered marginal, obnoxious and unattractive. For what it's worth, I reckon the key bands were the Cramps (reviving the Munsters and fun-goth but also married to a fierce punk-rockabilly sound), Bauhaus (still one of the best of the crop), early-ish Cure (Seventeen Seconds, Faith, Pornography), Siouxsie & The Banshees, Joy Division, the Birthday Party and maybe Killing Joke and Theatre Of Hate. Plus, you could probably make a case for the subterranean influence of proto-industrial bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Suicide and Throbbing Gristle. In my view, the goth-rock scene when it matured and became formulaic was generally much less good: Death Cult, Sisters Of Mercy, Flesh For Lulu, Danse Society, Play Dead, New Model Army et al made not that much good music, though I reckon stuff like the Virgin Prunes or (later) the Cocteau Twins showed that the gothic was an important influence in music that still stands the test of time. Down the years I've seen some genuinely good bands with a goth component (Neils Children, O. Children, Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster and These New Puritans are a few that spring to mind) and it's good to see that it keeps cropping up in new forms all the time. The other night I saw Moist Crevice (oo-er, missus) who's heavy goth stylings were pretty mesmering for anyone who used to spend time in expensive Sheffield clothes shops pretending they were on the verge of buying something fashionably graveyard-y. On this blog I've frequently made a little stand for goth, but these days I don't think it's even necessary. Goth has easily proven itself and now reigns supreme (or almost so) in the dark scenes, death metal, grindcore, doom and so-called horror punk. For all that early punk can sometimes seems quite un-goth (dayglo colours and Sex Pistols cartoonishness), it was surely there all along: Dave Vanian's vampire cloak and make-up or the morbid deathwish of Richard Hell with his "Please kill me" t-shirt. Even uber-punk safety pins seemed to echo the stitched-together cadaver of the Frankenstein monster's body. Yes, it all goes back to Shelley and before that to the Mysteries Of Udolpho and the Castle Of Otranto. By 1987, my goth days behind me (a lumbering doppelganger), I was reading these novels for a course called (if I remember correctly) "Aspects of the English and Amercian gothic novel". We later got on to Poe and Dracula and Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, and it was, all in all, a fun course. These days any university course along these lines ought to weave in films such as Night Of The Living Dead and Carnival Of Souls, music by the likes of Alien Sex Fiend and Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel, and first-person reminiscences of the Batcave during the time it was always being featured in ZigZag magazine. So, anyway, all these years on, what's the answer? What is goth? God knows ...