It’s Thursday night, it’s seven o’clock, it’s Goth of the Pops!
Cathi Unsworth talks all things Goth in the time of Thatcher with Andrew Stevens, ahead of her Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth, out May 11 (Nine Eight Books).
3:AM: Patricia Morrison just owns this, sometimes I barely even notice Andrew Eldritch. LA glamour dropped into Leeds, the epicentre of Goth.
CU: Interesting that you start the Sisters strand here, with Eldritch and Pats Morrison after the fatal Sisters schism of 1985. Talking to David Peace for the book about his teenage Goth activities, he remembered seeing what we both consider the ‘classic’ Sisters line-up – Eldritch, Gary Marx, Ben Gunn, Craig Adams, Doktor Avalanche – playing at Leeds Warehouse in April 1983 as support to The Gun Club, for whom Patricia was then of course, playing bass. Both of them would subsequently be unceremoniously dumped.
Eldritch first by Marx and then by Craig and his new pal – and Gunn’s replacement – Wayne Hussey, following the torturous completion of the Sisters’ 1985 First And Last And Always album. Which – spooky fact – was originally going to be called Black October and was scheduled to come out at the same time the IRA blew up the Brighton Grand Hotel at the October 1984 Conservative Conference. Marx went off first to found Ghost Dance with Anne Marie Hurst of Skeletal Family. A short time later, Wayne and Craig swanned off with their new pals The Cult to fulfil their Led Zeppelin dreams in The Mission – after a bit of internecine warfare during which time both parties called themselves The Sisterhood.
Patricia was already a veteran of the wayward ways of mad genius Gun Club singer/guitarist Jeffrey Lee Peirce, who modelled his stage persona on Robert Mitchum’s Preacher Powell from Night of the Hunter, and could have held his own in a drinking competition with Hank Williams, whom he out-lived by only eight years. Fromer Bags bassist Patricia – whom, spooky fact #2, Elvira actress Cassandra Peterson modelled her look on – joined one of the early incarnations of The Gun Club in her native LA and had survived several line-up changes before Jeffrey Lee decided they should relocate to London at the end of 1984 and then promptly swanned off with Romi Mori after a pre-Christmas show at Dingwalls, leaving Patricia and second guitarist Kid Congo Powers standing at the bar.
For a while, Kid and Patricia had their own band, Fur Bible – with the fantastic Australian singer Tex Perkins and produced by JG ‘Foetus’ Thirlwell – and during that time they both shared a flat in Shepherd’s Bush with my pal Billy Chainsaw, then PA to their mutual friends Siouxsie and the Banshees. Then Kid got his call-up papers for The Bad Seeds and some kind of enigmatic stranger called at Goth Towers W14, whisking Patricia away to join him in the most glamorous incarnation of The Sisters of Mercy.
When I look at this now, I just think how brilliant they BOTH look with all that hair and shades and their pointy little noses – no wonder he wrote ‘Lucretia My Reflection’ for her. And how glad I was at the time that Eldritch was back with a song this awesome – that he had bided his time well and revenge was served. I was pretty outraged when Pats was subsequently dumped and replaced by Tony James, of all people – but she ended up becoming the second Mrs Vanian, so that wasn’t a bad outcome for her.
This story does illustrate how a small handful of people were responsible for so much good music during the course of the 1980s – or the Season of the Witch. Which is why the book is written like a series of concentric circles within that time. The Banshees connect up to practically everyone.
It’s the rock and goth room in the Newcastle Mayfair on a Saturday night, I can almost taste the snakebite and black. A song equally at home at the fairground, the ice rink, the scooter rally disco back then…
Yes, this is early 1986 and The Damned’s highest ever chart position, a lavish cover of the sublime ‘Eloise’ by Barry Ryan (originally from 1968), a fascinating lost boy of pop, who would go on to invent T-Rex on his 1970 single ‘Kitsch’, marry an Indian princess and disappear. Like The Cramps, The Damned were excellent at leading you down the Time Tunnel back to artists they loved who never really got their due and may never have been heard of again since otherwise. Spooky fact 3 – the front cover of the parent album of this song, Phantasmagoria, features the future Mrs Nick Cave, Vampire’s Wife Suzy Bick, photographed in Kensal Rise Cemetery by Bob Carlos Clarke, now a resident of Old Brompton Cemetery himself.
The Damned do look particularly fetching here, dressed as excellently as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in any Hammer production. That’s down to the fact that the first Mrs Vanian, Laurie, is a first-class designer and seamstress, who still runs her own company, Symphony of Shadows. At the time this single came out, I was in my final year as a fashion student at Great Yarmouth College of Art and Design with access to proper industrial sewing machines and interlockers, and my look was heavily influenced by Dave’s here. On a summer holiday trip up to London, I actually saw him appear on his black motorcycle, outside Hyper Hyper on Kensington High Street, where Symphony of Shadows was then based. I could not believe he could actually survive in daylight!
Anyway, this comes after a period of about six months during which TOTP paid regular host to a bunch of very influential bands – Siouxsie and the Banshees with ‘Dear Prudence’, The Cult with ‘She Sells Sanctuary’, Killing Joke with ‘Love Like Blood’ – after which I can first remember hearing the word ‘Goth’ being used as a pejorative term, by older punk rockers of Gothic appearance who took on the Matthew Hopkins role at our local weirdos’ pub, The Oakwood. The implied crime was that the ‘Weekend Weirdo’ in question had only just head of these bands but was hoping to fake a look of insider insouciance with the aid of a newly-acquired pair of crimpers and some fishnet tights off the market. They probably had never even heard of The Damned before, let alone being able to name all of their previous line-ups and list all their albums off the top of their heads! Burn them!
One of those covers that pisses all over the original, if this was the band in crisis then I’m almost glad it happened.
Ah! One of the previously mentioned Goth Gateway chart singles of 1985 and interesting what you have to say about this White Album Beatles’ cover. As any fule kno, Sioux and Severin were part of the so-called ‘Bromley Contingent’ of Pistols fans – and in my personal opinion, the most original band to have evolved out of the environs of 430 King’s Road. However, we have all been taught that the first rule of Punk – according to either Johnny Rotten, Malcolm McLaren or Jamie Reid, accounts of the originator of this phrase vary – is to “never trust a hippy”. A rule that the Banshees broke straight away on their debut album The Scream (1978) by including a cover of the White Album‘s Manson-baiting ‘Helter Skelter’. The Beatles ninth and most enigmatic album (actually titled The Beatles) had, Steve Severin told me: “always been an influence on the way we work.”
The crisis you refer to is the loss of Banshees’ guitarist John McGeoch, who had an alcohol-related breakdown after recording A Kiss In The Dreamhouse in 1982, the third album he had made since he took over from John McKay, who had walked out on the band at the start of their Join Hands tour in September 1979, along with drummer Kenny Morris. At that point, support act The Cure’s Robert Smith and Lol Tolhurst had stepped into the breach and Smith was more than willing to reprise his role, reeling as he was back then from the critical battering given to latterly-canonised Goth classic Pornography and his own personnel problems.
Bungalow Bob’s re-entry into Banshees orbit signalled the start of a madly creative era, fuelled by large amounts of psychedelic refreshments. Before long, Smith and Severin had sailed away to their own recreation Pepperland, recording their Blue Sunshine album as The Glove – perhaps the nearest Steve got to realising his cherished ambition of working with Abbey Road engineer and Pink Floyd producer Norman ‘Hurricane’ Smith on a version of Floyd’s ‘Arnold Lane’. Bob staggered out of the sessions arm in arm with drummer Andy Anderson, who helped a henceforth revitalised Cure hit whimsical pop gold with ‘The Lovecats’. Meanwhile, Sioux and Budgie went wild in Hawaii making The Creatures’ first album, Feast, then scored their own chart hit with jazz-tastic Mel Tormé cover ‘Right Now’.
When the two halves of the band got back together again, what else could they do but record an opulent version of John Lennon’s tender ode to Mia Farrow’s sister Prudence, written after learning country-style finger picking from Donovan at a Transcendental Meditation course in Rishikesh, India in February 1968. This was a song I was more than familiar with when the Banshees version came out – I was already obsessed with The White Album and all the stories that swirled around it, and ‘Dear Prudence’ was one of my favourite tracks. I loved the way the Banshees dressed it up with the ornate harpsichord playing of Bob’s sister Janet Smith and all its hallucinogenic shimmerings – this was one of the very best songs to practise lightbulb-changing dancing to at the Underworld Goth disco in Yarmouth. But I cannot agree with your dissing of its source material – as Severin himself put it: “Songs like this are more than just pop music.”
Sticking with covers, largely as it was their biggest hit so got Murphy and Ash on Top of the Pops, even if ‘Bela Lugosi’ was the better song.
Yes, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ which came out on 6 August 1979, is what I call The First Foundation Single of Goth and time has done nothing to diminish its dark power. We can see from this clip some of what stopped early reviewer Tom Vague in his tracks when he first encountered their carefully choreographed and combative live show just before Halloween in 1980, reporting that: “Pete Murphy is Iggy Pop reincarnate and the rest don’t look too friendly. Nobody knows what to make of them. The audience don’t know whether to stand around posing or dance…”
Most of Bauhaus met at art school, which is obviously where their name came from – originally, they were Bauhaus 1919 in honour of the arts movement, and photos reveal their German antecedents styled themselves in remarkably similar style to Eighties Goths. Bassist David Haskins designed the sleeve for this Halloween 1982 Bowie cover, transposing the Ziggy flash over their own, self-designed logo. They were an extremely inventive band – they also broke into a disused shoe factory in their native Northampton one night to create their authentically terrifying video for ‘Mask’; before making their most fabled appearance in the opening scene of Tony Scott’s 1983 The Hunger, playing ‘Bela’ live in nightclub prowled by über-Nostferatus David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve. Spooky fact 4 – David is also in his own magick circle with Northampton’s resident Magus, From Hell author Alan Moore.
As Tom Vague recognised, posing IS the name of the game with Bauhaus and this single would call out all the would-be Lord Byrons to the dancefloor in Goth discos up and down the land. If you were too young to ever have experienced the delights of ‘Ziggy Stardust’ interpretive dancing at the time, then all is not lost – you can witness for yourself with perhaps the ultimate Goth Document, this video of an entire night at Batley, West Yorkshire’s equivalent to The Batcave, live from Goth’s Own County.
NB, although Murphy claims the spotlight, it was guitarist Daniel Ash who more young boys – and girls – aspired to look like. Here he is sporting his trademark crimped Mohawk which was one of the most widely emulated looks in the Eighties Gothiverse – as the Batley footage further reveals.
I remember we picked over that club night in Batley to death when its home video-style promo resurfaced on YouTube. Another mean and moody provincial Goth club anthem here, as you mentioned, quite disorientating at times, especially those chord changes.
Really glad you had Killing Joke next as they also had their own resident magician, Dave The Wizard, who had a heptagram tattooed on his face and used to come onstage with them, breathing fire into the audience, from their earliest of gigs. At one point they shared a squat with him on Portland Road in Holland Park, which is now the most expensive address in London and home of exactly the sort of free market spiv that Jaz Coleman and drummer Big Paul Ferguson saw coming in their crystal ball when they founded KJ in May 1979. HA!
There is no denying the undiminished power of this brooding monsterpiece, but Jaz tends to rather disdain this now for being ‘too commercial’ and therefore ‘too easy’. As you suggest, the chord changes betray the former choirboy and child classical prodigy’s total mastery of musical form and Jaz suffered a notorious schism within himself just before KJ’s first TOTP appearance in March 1982 for ‘Empire Song’. Coleman fled to Iceland, leaving Big Paul to mime his voice for the camera while an elaborately camouflaged stand-in masqueraded behind Jaz’s keyboards. Thankfully, while he was in the Land of the Ice and Snow, Jaz was able to invoke his Holy Guardian Angel, who helped him reconcile his classical urges with his punk persona and now he is celebrated equally in dinner jacket and leather jacket circles.
‘Love Like Blood’ did indeed resound through every town and village of the Eighties, arriving at a time when Jaz’s old enemy Margaret Thatcher had rent the country asunder with her war against the miners, which perhaps adds to its dissonant air. In Yarmouth, there was even a trad Butlins-style entertainer, complete with curly perm and pinstriped leather trousers (a fashion atrocity I have still yet to recover from) who would perform his own stunning interpretation of this in the Brunswick lounge upstairs from the Goth disco. But let us not forget either that KJ were also responsible for the ultimate Ziet-Goth single ‘Eighties’, whose message was received loud and clear all the way to Seattle. There it was transmogrified it into the next important youth culture beginning with a G as Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’.
