'Art of Darkness', by John Robb (Louder Than War, 2023)

It is not, I think, an easy matter to write well about popular music. It is often very, very hard to account for the appeal of a particular artist, album or track, even if you feel it yourself. You’re tempted to grandiloquise, or you find yourself falling back on clichés and, if you have even the remotest degree of self-awareness, you then try to avoid those clichés and end up producing text that reads like a thesaurus. What you write stands in constant danger of collapse into meaningless sentences, pretentious metaphors, and, if you don’t check back properly, repetition.

Art of Darkness drops straight into all these traps and rarely clambers out, to the extent that I find a lot of it actually hard to read. The Blogging Goth has already given this long-awaited and much-heralded book a detailed and dreadful review, so I won’t dwell on the typos, maladroit expressions and strange lacunae which scatter almost every page, mainly because a reader can also easily appreciate the colossal work and commitment the author has put into it. Instead, there are deeper problems which relate to Art of Darkness’s aims and methods, and I will talk about them.

The Blogging Goth takes Mr Robb to task for, to all appearances, having no awareness of the extensive academic work on Goth culture and subculture, and he is right: the early chapters of the book unnecessarily rehearse what is now a very familiar story of Gothic art across the centuries. But it is a different book which haunts Art of Darkness, one more directly relevant to the subject: Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again, the 2005 history of post-punk which, for all its controversies, still stands as the baseline for anyone wanting to tackle the topic. Reynolds’s chapter on early Goth in Rip It Up tells the same story in twenty pages that John Robb covers in 530; it’s an account with plenty to contest or at least expand on, so the point must be whether Art of Darkness answers any of the questions Reynolds skates past in his breezy and vigorous prose. I would expect any ‘history of Goth’, especially one claiming to be ‘The history of Goth’, to have a go; but a passing reference in an interview with Andrew Eldritch is the only sign that Rip It Up or the questions it begs features at all in Mr Robb’s mental landscape. The biggest of those questions is how is it that we recognise as ‘Goth’ all these completely disparate forms of music?

Chapters 6 to 12 are intended to highlight the ‘dark’ elements of glam, mainstream rock, and the like which helped to produce what we know think of as ‘Goth’, but only occasionally do we get any insight into how this happened. Interviewees in the book repeatedly state that the importance of David Bowie, for instance, to the post-punks who started bands lay less in anything he wrote as such, but in his presentation of possibility, of non-mainstream models of sexuality, of drama and pretence; and that the role of punk was to open up a space in which young musicians felt they could create with minimal resources. We don’t actually need lots of information about Bowie, glam, or punk, to make any of these points. Once we pass beyond the early Goth bands whose members Mr Robb has interviewed so diligently we are promised an account of ‘How dark energy infected Indie’ (chapter 33), but what we get is a list of Goth-ish artists, not an examination of how this came about. Incidentally, you would expect me to look for a mention of PJ Harvey, and here she is, featured in three paragraphs across which Mr Robb manages to get wrong the year when she got going as an independent artist, mangles the title of her breakthrough album, and adapts his most striking statement, unacknowledged, from Andrew Collins’s famous NME review of Dry in 1992. If that’s the case with an artist I know something about, what reliance can I place on the rest?

The substantial worth of Art of Darkness lies in its interviews with musicians, but even more with the accounts of clubs, retailers and Goth experience beyond the membership of bands. The first chapter begins with a nice re-imagining of a night at an alternative club; there’s a breathless list of regional clubs on p.11, any and each of which could do with a write-up of its own; and the descriptions of venues across the country in chapters 19, 25 and 28, of the way they focused musical life, of what it was like to attend them and the risks you took to do so – club manager Doreen Allen eventually provided a bus so her clientele at Planet X in Liverpool could get home without being beaten up – are easily the most valuable elements of the book. They’re also some of the easier to read: the description of Pete Burns holding court at Probe Records in Liverpool during the late ‘70s is a hoot (p.399).

And it’s in the experience of these early Goth clubbers that we might find the beginnings of an answer to the question of how all this stuff comes to be thought of as Goth at all: that certainly can’t come from the interviewees, who, almost to a soul, scorn the word. There’s a ‘history of Goth’ to be told that wrests itself free from bands and is instead organised around the consumers of Goth culture: it’s their active filtering and processing of the fare offered to them that actually settles what is or is not Goth. John Robb continually approaches this idea and then backs away from it, but his book does provide lots of material for anyone who might want to pursue it in the future.

Art of Darkness’s last few pages enter very interesting territory, though it’s mainly through the words of the Goth academics Mr Robb has asked for help, Claire Nally of Northumbria University and freelancer Kate Cherrell, and the passionate paragraph by Kai Asmaa from Morocco describing being a Gothic person in a conservative Muslim culture. There are books waiting to be written around Nally and Cherrell’s suggestions about the interaction between Goth online and in real life: perhaps they will do so. It’s on the very penultimate page that John Robb suggests he might actually understand more than he seems to, with the statement that ‘Goth itself had no manifesto. It was … a retrospective term for something already happening’. That’s the key to its history which, for the most part, he has left unused.

Abundance and Lack

Forget-me-not is clustered all round the bonsai-ed rowan tree, so much that you can't see its pot. There is a lot of forget-me-not in the garden this year; clouds throughout the beds, in the grass, under the trees. It looks stringy and insubstantial, but brave. Vetch is a wildflower I'm particularly fond of, and that's exploded this season, its lustrous purple flowers held aloft on spiralling tendrils above the grass. 

On Thursday I cleared out the pond, discovering sadly that there were only four remaining fish: one of the adult females had gone. That explains why they have been hiding despite the warm weather, though it still leaves me bewildered as to how a heron or some other predator can get at the fish despite the two layers of mesh, one string and one aluminium, over the surface of the pond. The blighters are, I know, persistent, but they would have to be preternaturally lucky as well to be around when a fish strays into the tiny unprotected portion of the pool. The water was full of clinging algae, but very little other life indeed apart from two frogs and a couple of pondskaters: not a single snail to be seen. I wonder how it has got so barren.

Raise the Red Lanterns

One of my resolutions was to have more paper lanterns to decorate the church for Pentecost, and so I bought another couple of dozen. They will now march along the aisles and across the chancel arch in a near-continuous red line.

Pentecost is still the great feast day that gets left out no matter how we clergy try to get people interested. Once upon a time the following Monday was a Bank Holiday until 1971 when it was stripped of that status and the break was transferred to the last Monday in May, and long before that the succeeding week - the octave, really - was a time when everyone downed tools who could. Church and Chapel Sunday Schools would traditionally hold some kind of festivity in Whitsuntide, even if (as I found when I looked into the history of High Wycombe many years ago) it was just a walk to the river meadows half a mile away and a picnic. But now Pentecost slips into the background even for people who might often find themselves in church.

The loss of the Pentecost observance to the secular 'late May Bank Holiday' at least shows that the State now accepts that people should have statutory time away from paid labour and in that sense the Church has done its work in that respect. And I'm not convinced if we had a Pentecost holiday now it would have any effect on the numbers who turned up to make their communion!

Blessings Done and Missed

In the far distant past now, Peter the former manager of Widelake House care home not far away used to like me (or the Roman Catholic parish priest) to come and bless the house before he went on holiday. He used to claim that it made the place calmer and had a completely unsubstantiated suspicion that the place was built on an Anglo-Saxon burial ground which I think may have arisen from the tall tales told by a local author with a penchant for turning his surroundings into an alternate reality. But I have never been asked to do the same at Southmere, the other care home where people I know from Swanvale Halt mostly tend to go. However the manager of Southmere did ask me to call by and perform this ceremony a couple of weeks ago, and it was my great privilege to oblige. Unlike Peter, Lizzie at Southmere didn't require me to enter every bedroom except where there was a danger the occupant might actually throw something at us in wrath. Instead, from the full-scale rite of house blessing, I used only the prayers at the entrance, for a living room in the main lounge, and the kitchen, plus some general topping-and-tailing. I thought I probably rushed it a little out of a sense of self-consciousness, but they were all very appreciative. 

Members of the congregation do frequently finish their days in Southmere and Widelake, and for yesterday's ritual we were accompanied by Susan and Sheila. Sheila is a relatively recent arrival, as is her husband who came here and was almost at once taken to hospital, before returning in a very shaky state. I'd been in to see Sheila last Monday but Dermot had been asleep, and, as his son told me in the evening, at almost the same time as I was marking Southmere's door lintel with oil and spraying holy water around, Dermot had been slipping out of this earthly realm. It would have been better had I gone to say a prayer for him, but (not for the first time) I am left hoping that they work in retrospect.

The Anchoress, Queen Elizabeth Hall, 20.5.23

Given the excitement of the Spring Fair that I knew was going to occupy so much of Saturday, responding to The Anchoress's email on Friday evening alerting me to the late availability of a handful of tickets for her concert on the South Bank would have been foolish in the extreme, so naturally I did. I cooked a dinner I could take with me, and calculated that if everything worked out I would be able to catch a train that would get me into London well in time (rather than just in time). So it proved, and I was able to take part in an evening of energetic and passionate music, without the slight fragility that sometimes characterises The Anchoress's recorded work. I didn't know about her until relatively recently, thanks as usual to Radio 4, though she's been about for ten years or more. Despite all the seats being sold according to the South Bank website, there were nine seats around me vacant; two rows ahead were a couple I know from Swanvale Halt.

Spring Fair 2023

It looks as though the church's Spring Fair may have taken in excess of £4000 this year, which is at the upper end of what we used to make when it was at the big field on the edge of Hornington, for a lot more outlay and effort. We've been assisted by fine weather and a variety of entertainers drawn from the local community including a couple of choirs, the Hornington Youth Band, and a dance class. I knew several of the young members from the Infants School and their teacher got married in the church (as she reminded me) ten whole years ago. I took the opportunity to book in a baptism with the parents of another dancer for their new daughter. This encapsulates the community feel of the whole event, something like a celebration of what it means to be Swanvale Halt. And our church treasurer safely gave birth (in hospital, not on-site) in the middle of the afternoon, so four thousand quid and a baby is not a bad profit on the day.

Laying Groundwork

The last time Swanvale Halt church did a round of Mission Planning was several years ago. We loyally got everyone involved in it, and took the PCC to a nearby church to talk through it all and narrow our mass of ideas down to a few achievable, measurable examples. I suspected at the time that we'd gone for the ones that were slightly too easy to achieve, and as a result had ended up with not a lot to show for all our efforts. We were beginning another round when the pandemic intervened and put a stop to everything apart from keeping going. Now we are off again! 

I, Grant the churchwarden and Ceri from the congregation (a relatively new member, who volunteered) met with the lady from the Mission Enabling section at the Diocese a few weeks ago, an encounter which genuinely helped (sometimes I think despite itself) to clarify the way forward in my mind: previous meetings had left me somewhat bewildered as to how exactly the process was supposed to work. Now I had a clear steer, to focus on putting in place some of the conditions for moving forward rather than picking on grand schemes, and to keep it small-scale but open-ended, as opposed to the very 'closed' tasks that emerged the last time we went through this exercise: so, for instance, rather than trying to find the money to pay a musical director (an ambitious scheme which may not work), setting up a group to pray for the mission of the church (which may bring some insight as to whether that's what God would have us do). 

The PCC liked the single-page document I came up with. Not surprisingly, as my initials are next to most of the action points. But those action points are, initially, to find laypeople to do the actual work. They don't get off that easily!

Out of the Depths

Installing a new audio system in the vestry has meant emptying the rickety old wooden cupboard which housed the old one. I thought that, after 13 years here, there was nothing left to discover, but wedged in the bottom of a drawer in the cupboard was this hideous artefact which I can’t remember looking at before. Perhaps I had blanked it from my memory.

Any horrid hessian chasuble must surely date to the time of Fr Edward in the 1970s and makes me ponder yet again what was going on in that far-off epoch. It wasn’t just a liturgical reflection of the Time That Taste Forgot the secular world was passing through, but represented a real belief that the future of religion lay with jettisoning past ideals of beauty and order. We are to retain Catholic markers like vestments – we’re not getting rid of them – but our credibility rests on abandoning elaboration, decoration and richness in favour of something that signals simplicity and ordinariness. That will be part of the renewal of the Church. Clearly this didn’t work, because the causes of the modern world’s disenchantment with Christianity lay elsewhere; but, even within its own terms, just the same kind of aesthetic hamfistedness that could produce over-elaboration and over-decoration could also result in the ugliness of hessian and orange (and the latter isn’t as entertaining as OTT baroque is).

Fr Thesis is well-known for 'discovering' wonders in the recesses of his West-End vestry and some of us are convinced the Ark of the Covenant is hidden there somewhere; but I, apparently, only unearth horrors.

Well It Was Your Loss

Is there any end to the Coronation? Our Messy Church concentrated on that theme yesterday, and all the children's crafts focused on making bits and pieces of the regalia (including cloaks made out of patches of red velvet which we happened to have been given some time ago), culminating in them having their photographs taken sitting in the Bishop's Chair. This is an impressive 18th-century bit of furniture which we have acquired somehow, and as it is viciously uncomfortable it's highly suitable to support the bottoms of bishops. For one granddaughter of the manse, it was clear, being photographed in a crown with royal regalia in either hand just confirmed the view of the world she has had all along, and I suspect she wasn't the only child for whom this was the case.

Hardly anyone came. We eventually worked out that this was almost certainly because of the rival attraction of a major village fair not far away, especially as the weather had been grim in the morning and lovely after lunch. Providentially this turned out not to be a bad thing as making the kit was so complicated any more children than we had would have been still constructing crowns as darkness fell. 'This is the best Messy Church I've ever been to', said Lottie. So there. 

Two Out Of Three

My shoes were, I think, the only brogues in the tiny, tiny downstairs performance area at the Hope & Anchor in Islington on Monday night. It's a long time since I've seen or rather heard any music live, the timings that evening seemed to fit, and I knew one member of one act and the partner of another, so I decided to go. Madame Morbidfrog's husband (I ought not to call him Mr Romeburns, as that isn't his musical outlet at the moment) had the cheek to come on on time and so I missed his entire set ('I'm sure you can catch it on Youtube', he reassured me), but I did manage to see the others. I liked Last July most, and will look up some of their stuff. 
Since when did Goth acts (a more suitable word than 'bands' when you're only talking about a single person) record all their keyboard and percussion work at home and then play live with just a guitar and vocals with the recording accompanying them? My goodness!

Lay Led

'The thing about the informal service pattern', Giselle the lay reader said to me, 'is that what's informal for Swanvale Halt would be very formal in most other places'. That's nothing more than the truth, I thought, and there and then I determined that we should work towards having a team of laypeople planning and leading one of these non-eucharistic first-Sunday-in-the-month services. Giselle was the obvious person to organise it. We are not used to services here that aren't led by clergy: a Family Service in the month before I arrived back in 2009 was taken by Paula the Pastoral Assistant (who is used to speaking in public anyway), Lillian occasionally led Compline in Holy Week when she was lay reader, and the last time I was down with Covid Jack the retired former teacher did the talk at Messy Church. But that's about all. Part of me knows that to break things open a bit I need to be willing to step back and let others take a lead, but another part suspects I am selling the church short if I don't give them their money's worth out of me.

I certainly couldn't have stomached going so heavily on the Coronation theme as Giselle's team did this Sunday (not that there was anything sycophantic about the service - it focused on heavenly kingship as earthly), and it all went fine though Matthew who led some of the responses was a bit quiet (his microphone seemed to be working OK, however). I knew that the people involved were normally quite reticent souls with a genuine spiritual life who I could trust. In fact it was me who got things wrong. I'd managed to run off some copies of the service leaflet with two pages out of order, thought I'd junked all those, but hadn't, and so we began one hymn with half the congregation singing the wrong thing and had to stop. Shades of the 1727 Coronation - but there the resemblance ended. 

And All The People Rejoiced

'We do pageantry better than anyone else', you often hear as a verdict on royal spectaculars, and it would be churlish to reply to anyone who might say so that you might rather we did cancer screening better than anyone else. We never used to, of course. Struck by how magnificent and simultaneously manipulating Handel's Zadok the Priest is, I looked it up and discovered that when it was first performed at George II's Coronation in 1727, the Westminster Abbey choir got it in the wrong place, having forgotten to sing one anthem completely, and mangled another so badly that the choristers couldn't finish anywhere near together. Famously at George IV's Coronation his estranged Queen Caroline ran round the Abbey knocking the doors and shouting to be let in, while Queen Victoria had the ring jammed on the wrong finger before the Archbishop of Canterbury tried to hand her the orb when she'd already had it. 

So we might legitimately ask when we began to do it better than anyone else, and why. Even at Edward VII's Coronation (which had to be delayed after the King fell badly ill) the Archbishop put the crown on the monarch back to front, but it was around that time that royal events became carefully-managed spectacles that aimed at perfection. This must have been for two reasons. Before the early 1900s, the only way of recording Coronations would have been in paintings and prints, rather than photos and film, and ritual howlers could be safely erased. Secondly, they only matter when the audience isn't the aristocrats and grandees for whom the ritual was originally devised, who know what to expect, but the mass of the population. Errors and blunders may lead them to find their betters ridiculous, and learn to hold them in contempt, whereas the point of the thing is that they should become accustomed to revere them. Because no matter how fine a person Charles III may be, and however much he may believe the moving words about service and humility embedded in his oaths, the institution he embodies locks together and renders more palatable the way things are. It makes them look eternal and natural, and at the same time as it radiates 'history', it obscures the actual historical processes which have led to our current moment.

Some lovely musical moments, especially, aside, I found the Coronation service looked curiously cheap. This sounds like an absurd thing to say given how expensive we know it all is, but the merciless clarity of television made it look like The Mikado done by a ropey travelling theatre. Take the Crown of St Edward, a lavish, grandiose, charismatic object if ever there was one. Under the camera it might as well have been plastic. As it was, it rested on the head of a tired elderly gentleman who very clearly was anxious it didn't fall off (a reasonable worry as he apparently isn't allowed to touch it). Even for me it was hard to discern the mystical action of the Holy Spirit in this.

I wonder whether the issue is to do with what we expect. Any liturgical function has to work with the human as well as the inanimate material to hand, and I think we may have come to expect that such events should be managed by movie directors and carried out by beautiful or at least impressive thesps. Everything should look like Game of Thrones, and it just can't. The basic bonkersness of the whole thing becomes unavoidable, and it will interesting to see what long-term effect seeing it all will have. 

In the same way, watching a eucharist online is a strangely weird and unaffecting experience even if it's done perfectly. You are supposed to be there - and a Coronation is designed for those present too. But the British establishment wants it to be a moment when they can persuade the whole population to buy into their continued dominance. Can it do so the next time round?

Tears Before Bedtime

We all remember the occasion at Church Club when, as their craft, all the children were making paper chains which would be gathered together as part of a great national paper chain being organised by the charity Christian Aid, I forget exactly what for. Maddy was deeply reluctant to give up her chain and in fact on being told that was the idea began to cry and for some reason couldn't stop. Even after we conceded the point and let her take her bit of paper chain home, she was sort of stuck in one emotional gear and carried on weeping unconsolably even as her mother collected her and ushered her away.

Yesterday we were apparently in a somewhat fraught mood. There are very often some tears at Church Club as one child or another gets accidentally (or not so accidentally) slapped by one of their companions, or hit by an ill-aimed ball. But on this occasion the children who didn't find some reason for crying were in the minority, whether it was a barely-perceptible injury or a passing inability to make a bit of cardboard stick on a sheet of paper. Perhaps it was to do with the phases of the Moon.

We finished as always by shooing the little darlings out of the hall and into the arms of their waiting parents and guardians. And disaster struck one more time as Edie couldn't find her cardigan. Someone else had taken it and the one she was left holding wasn't hers: this was a catastrophe of such proportions it clearly demanded more desperate tears. 'It's fine', Edie's mother insisted, 'it'll turn up', as Grace's father standing nearby commented that earlier in the year his daughter had lost all six of her cardigans in a week. 

Bank Holiday Discoveries

It isn’t unknown to find a folly not listed in the great survey by Headley & Meulenkamp, but it’s much rare for them to miss a whole garden landscape with its attendant follies. They can be forgiven for overlooking the arrangements at Deepdene near Dorking, as they were completely ruinous and, in the case of one of the structures, actually buried by the local council. But having discovered this place existed, I went to look at it yesterday, a little Bank Holiday excursion.

In 1652 Charles Howard, one of the family of the Dukes of Norfolk, inherited the Deepdene estate and remodelled the garden immediately to the rear of the house in the form of a long, narrow amphiteatre. To this he added a modest flint Tower at the side, and right at the top a Grotto; and opening off one side, next to the Tower, were caves which Mr Howard enlarged and embellished with arched openings and where he ‘conducted experiments’ in his own laboratory). A later owner of Deepdene, banking heir Thomas Hope, added a second layer of folly-building, remodelling the Grotto and adding a Temple to the top of the Terrace above the garden, and, half a mile off to the southeast, a Mausoleum to house first the body of his son who died at the age of 7, and then himself and other family members.

Should we categorise Deepdene as yet another Gothic Garden? It’s not far off, though it’s a very mild example of the genre. Charles Howard’s Embattled Tower is just a toy, sitting very undramatically by the side of a nice flat lawn, and it comes as something of a disappointment to discover that his ‘experiments’ in the caves were in the fields of tanning and leather-working, rather than alchemy or revivification of the dead as we might hope. Thomas Hope’s enthusiasms went nowhere near Gothic, and instead it was Egypt and Greece that captured his imagination (he remodelled the family house in London, built by Robert Adam, in Egyptian manner); but while his follies weren’t Gothic in style, they certainly had an umbrageous personality. At the back of what’s left of the Grotto you can see the false wall be put in over Charles Howard’s flints, with niches to hold artefacts from his own Grand Tour. The Temple at the top of the slope, demolished in 1955, combined Classical and Egyptian motifs, and had Egyptian statues looming either side of its central portico. The Mausoleum is a profoundly gloomy structure even in the Spring sun, squat and pylon-like. I wondered why the orientation panel at the entrance to the grounds included little motifs of screaming Grecian theatrical masks until discovering that Mr Hope put them on the Temple.

However we might think about that, what can’t be doubted is that Deepdene is a garden without a house: that was, scandalously, demolished as late as 1969. The whole landscape passed to the Council who decided that the safest thing to do with the Mausoleum, for instance, was to stick a concrete cap on it and then bury it; it was only exhumed in 2015 when a group of local enthusiasts persuaded the authorities to try and revive the garden. A copy of one of Mr Hope’s Coade-stone lions was placed in the middle of the lawn, the Grotto relieved of the brick pillars put in when it was used as an ammo store in WW2, and the walks reopened. And that wartime usage is another layer in Deepdene’s history: Charles Howard’s underground laboratory became a secret telephone exchange, while the woods are still marked with processions of anti-tank dragon’s teeth, arranged up and down the slopes.

Deepdene was my intended destination yesterday; Coverwood, however, was a happy accident, as I followed the yellow signs indicating a garden open under the National Gardens Scheme, and found a working farm, a Jacobean-style Edwardian house in the woods along the valley, and calming lakes.