When it’s worth reading a book’s Acknowledgments
because of their wit and warmth, that volume deserves high praise. Such is Cathi
Unsworth’s Season of the Witch – very possibly the best book about the early
years of Goth yet produced.
Ms Unsworth starts with four late-1970s bands which
defined what turned into Goth – Joy Division, Magazine, the Banshees, and the Cure
– and includes virtually everyone else you might have heard of over the course
of the next near-400 pages, but Season of the Witch isn’t a catalogue of What Robert
Smith Did Next and Where Nick Cave Got His Ideas. Serious-minded students of
the post-punk will get the information they might want (and will also, on p.277,
find the best explanation of what ‘subcultural capital’ means in a single paragraph
where Paul Hodkinson once took a whole book), but the pieces are scattered and
woven into something grander. This book is a single, unfolding story (the author
uses that word repeatedly) of how a subculture emerged in response to the state
of a nation which seemed to be in decline and whose revival took a malign and
darkened form.
In 1979 young Cathi Unsworth was the eleven-year-old daughter of
middle-class liberal Christian parents in a Norfolk village, reading Dennis Wheatley
under the bedclothes with a torch. There are two ‘witches’ who frame her narrative: the Wicked one, Margaret Hilda Thatcher, who her parents raged
against as ‘a traitor to her class, her sex and her country’; and the Good, a stranger
figure she became aware of at the same time and who her adolescent mind wondered
might be riding out at night to save Britain from the Satanic influence of the
Iron Lady – a figure with electric raven hair, black lipstick, and torn
fishnets on her arms, who went by the name of Siouxsie Sioux. The proto-Goth pre-teen
emerged from beneath her blankets to find her way, eventually, to the handful
of East Anglian venues that might play the music that spoke to her, to London
to find kindred souls and finally, at 19, to write for Sounds and share what she
felt about those songs, albums, and bands.
But she is not the focus of her own narrative: she
observes from a distance the interactions of the artists who express the malaise
of Thatcher’s Britain in their work, their combinations, fallings-out and
dramas, heard far off in Norfolk like armies clashing by night. Eventually, as
she says, they all knew one another, these often fractured souls, a sort of
cosmic kaleidoscope shifting and moving the individuals around like shards of
sparkling glass to channel the stream of Goth in new directions. But whereas histories
of Goth tend to organise themselves around the bands, thriller-writer Ms
Unsworth turns these eleven years, bookended by Mrs Thatcher’s ascension and then
downfall, into something like a myth – a blackly comic one, shot through with true
tragedy. We range from Siouxsie running through a train in a blind rage to hunt
the band members who’d abandoned her mid-tour, to the blanching realisation
that Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins was working through her abusive
relationship with bandmate Robin Guthrie in music everyone else thought was ‘the
voice of God’, mainly because they couldn’t understand the lyrics. Wire called Season
of the Witch Goth as ‘Dickensian epic’; I think of it as a classical historical
drama with added backcombing: ‘Eyeliner Claudius’, if you will.
Where Art of Darkness is a stiff-legged Frankensteinian stumble through the Goth past, Season of the Witch gambols like a lambkin across a meadow scattered with Spring flowers. That’s not the mood, of course, but you get my drift. It would be hard not to enjoy it even if you had little interest in the subject as the narrative continually pulls back and zooms in filmically, delineates the peculiar local horrors that inspired Gothic souls from Melbourne to Morecambe, and offers us historical scope not just in the political landscape of the time, but in the subcultural forebears Unsworth points to at the end of each chapter. These ‘gothfathers and gothmothers’ (as well as the pointers to books and films the Gothic-curious might like to consult) are not always the obvious ones: as well as Poe and the Brontes we are also given Maria Callas and, most wondrously, Fenella bloody Fielding. I am an almost-exact contemporary of Ms Unsworth and can testify, as she does, to the formative influence of what Mark Kermode called the greatest movie ever made, Dougal and the Blue Cat, and Fielding’s eerily prophetic, Thatcher-prefiguring performance as the Blue Voice who wants to eliminate all other colours: ‘Blue is beautiful, Blue is best. I’m Blue, I’m beautiful, I’m best!’
This marvellous volume is not a textbook – it is a soap-opera
of both a grand and an intricate kind. But it is also a triumphant justification
of a way of being. Ms Unsworth titles her first chapter ‘The Rebel Alliance’,
insisting that ‘Goth in the time of Thatcher was a form of resistance against
stupidity and ignorance’, elitist but also meritocratic: ‘Those who created the
best music of the 80s came from all backgrounds and many of them overcame all
manner of abuse, poverty and neglect’. Her final paragraph is like the raising
of a banner on a battlefield:
… So if anyone picks on you for being different in any way, please use this book to hit them about the head with the facts and rest assured, you are in good company. Goth has been ridiculed and derided for decades as being miserable, morose and moronic … [but] it stands for all the essential forces of creativity, friendship and vision, not to mention humour … Forty years on, it’s time for the curse to lifted and the words spoken in darkness to be heard in the light. I am a Goth.
So much for the second work on its subject published this year. What former Cure member Lol Tolhurst’s in September will bring, we wait to see.
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