Goth on a (Large) Budget: 'How to be a Goth' by Tish Weinstock (Octopus Books, 2024)

This is a book I wouldn’t have bought but for my vague sense of being honour-bound to cast an eye over anything about the Goth world that emerges into print, and this isn’t so much a review (theblogginggoth did a fuller one a few weeks ago) as a reflection. I will say that it can’t have been a hard book to write, whatever experience a reader of it might have: Ms Weinstock delivers her authorised lists of books, movies and clothing items in a series of short paragraphs which anyone could have come up with internet assistance. The second point is that the book offers a very narrow vision of ‘how to be a Goth’, driven by an unusual personal experience. This is Goth as it appears to an ennobled, wealthy industrialist’s granddaughter who becomes beauty editor of Vogue and marries a Guinness, a background Ms Weinstock never mentions beyond alluding to growing up in a ‘house full of precious antiques’ and her father’s death when she was five. When they aren’t long-dead actresses or fictional characters, her list of role models for young Goth women is heavy with fashion designers and artists; her roll of clothing retailers includes outlets in New York and LA, which is fine for anyone who casually jets across the Atlantic. This is a world most of us come nowhere near.

In such a world, when the rich adhere to the markers of revolt, what does Goth mean? For the author her ‘dark’ enthusiasms clearly became a means of negotiating a sense of alienation, but in circumstances of relative privilege – very different from so many first-generation Goths’ experience of suburban emptiness, as outlined by Cathi Unsworth – what’s in the darkness? Ms Weinstock praises her arty heroines for their ‘rebellion’ and ‘individuality’, but these instincts are pursued primarily through consumer choices which aren’t going to frighten anyone, no matter how edgy you regard yourself. Capitalism doesn’t care how you express your individual identity, provided you hand over cash for it; you can have any colour, including black.

In 1993, when Tish Weinstock was all of two, one of her suggested idols, Christina Ricci, played Wednesday Addams in Addams Family Values. In the movie, Wednesday gets packed off to summer camp, that particularly American childhood horror that features so largely in the narratives of alienated US children, and naturally does all she can to obstruct the compulsory wholesomeness inflicted on the youngsters there. Traditionally, that’s what all Goths have felt they’re doing: resisting the mindlessly sunny and optimistic. But 2024 isn’t 1993. This is an age of individualism, in which the ideals Goths say they stand for are precisely those that wider society claims it values too; and one of anxiety, where sunny optimism might come as relief. How To Be A Goth unwittingly contributes to the sort of debate that writing on Goth has grappled with for about a decade, for instance in Catherine Spooner’s speculations about ‘happy Gothic’ and the Spracklens’ rage about Goth going consumerist. Has it become nothing more than a vacuous style choice? This book poses the question in an acute form. The answer is, Not quite, I think.

Conformity and adherence to a common, all-embracing narrative are not what our society values now, but the urge to demand such obedience – not just to an outward standard of appearance, but an inner submission of the soul – is an abiding part of human thinking, one of our instinctive survival mechanisms. It’s easy to reach for such narratives when the times are anxious, and when malign parties are there to exploit the instinct. Goth, on the other hand, always says, No, it’s not that simple; no, I will not do as you tell me; I will not tell your story; I will tell my own.

Maybe Goth’s committed to deathliness isn’t about deathliness, but about what can’t be accommodated in univocal statements of identity and purpose, about what can’t be digested and understood. It points towards the truth that there is always more, always something else, in the same way that the priest’s black garb signposts beyond this world and therefore always unsettles by suggesting there might be another scale of value than our own. The deathliness stands not for itself, but for irreducible complexity, and the critique of any grand narrative other than ruin. Beware, it says. In that sense, we can’t tame it, no matter whether we’re onlookers or adherents – and no matter how much or how little privilege we enjoy. In that way, even a Goth on a trust fund can think of themselves as an eternal outsider. But they should beware, too: there is a subtle enemy who can buy off the Church, and it can buy them off as well.

O For A Thousand Tongues

Continuing the Rowan Williams theme, Dr Abacus does me a great service in pointing me to an article from The Times I would have to pay to consult myself, in which the former ABC opines about the plight of modern hymn-singing. Absent anything more than the vaguest knowledge of religious music on the part of the general public, he says, people asking for hymns at funerals or weddings are driven back to ‘primary-school level’ songs. It’s worse that that, I would think: every clergyperson despairs at having to sing ‘All Things B&B’ again, but that’s the ‘primary school level’ of 50 years ago or more. This is not just a random outburst from Dr Williams, as he is president of the Hymn Society of Great Britain & Ireland, but it does edge in the direction of grumpy-old-priest-ism. He pleads for priests ‘to encourage children at local schools to do more hymn-singing’ (I will do my best and we’ll see how that goes) and it’s left to the Society’s secretary, Fr Richard Cranham, to offer thanks that people still know 'All Things B&B' even if they’re ignorant of everything else. 'Apart from Away In a Manger', probably.

When we used to get together to plan the monthly Family Service (RIP) at Swanvale Halt, Edgar (RIP) could usually be relied on to argue that we needed to strive to include modern hymns that non-churchgoers knew. "But Edgar", I would say, knowing that what he meant was something written in the 1970s, "the problem is that people now don’t know any hymns. We can’t just restrict ourselves to the half-a-dozen that they might possibly have heard of" (especially when that includes the aforementioned 'Away In a Manger'). My main reflection is that, quite apart from any spiritual deficit that might result, the lack of hymn-knowledge is a tremendous cultural impoverishment. Lots of traditional hymns are nothing very special, but some are stunning. Anyone who thinks that trad church music is boring should have been at our evening mass last Sunday when we sang 'O For A Thousand Tongues' to the tune Lyngham. As I told the congregation, it’s a good 18^th-century hymn tune so for the bit where you repeat lines you can basically sing the words you want and whatever notes you want and provided we all come together at the end it will be all right. And it was sensationally uplifting. As for schools, the usual fare at our Infant School – apart from the songs the children sing, which tend to be seasonal rather than religious – we troop into assembly to the worship songs the head teacher is familiar with from her own place of worship, but I remember the day when she instead decided to play 'Eternal Father Strong to Save', which is one of my favourites, rigorous in its theology and incomparably powerful in its emotion. I definitely got a lump in my throat. And yet, although I think many people would probably recognise this song if it was put in front of them, they probably aren’t aware enough of it, or many, many more like it, to remember it otherwise.

What we do about this is another matter. Once upon a time we had a thing called ‘Sunday Sing’ which was simply a group of us gathering one Sunday evening a month to sing hymns that might be coming up in worship in the next couple of months, with tea afterwards. But only the usual suspects ever came, not the souls who could have benefited most from singing them. Still, I’ve often wondered whether hymns are, potentially, a bridge to unchurched people.

Perhaps the Goth-inflected Irish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, Bambie Thug, has some knowledge of hymns, though they show no overt sign of it and Roman Catholics aren’t all that used to singing compared to Anglicans. Following the usual Goth strategy of turning negative emotions and experiences into something positive and active – victimhood to autonomy – the artist’s witchy imagery of candles, pentangles, and baths full of flower petals and coloured dye, provokes Irish priests to outbursts that read more like an old bloke ranting in the pub than a sermon, but although I’m sympathetic I don’t warm to it a lot either. I understand what’s going on, but these occult mechanisms of blessings and hexings are either a way of talking to and animating elements within yourself – a form of meditation – or an attempt to make things happen in the real and concrete world by bargaining with forces that in fact aren’t there – a form of magic. Either way, they're a spiritual dead end. Mx Thug would be far better off, ultimately, getting to know a few hymns: I can't help feeling that they, and the great majority of people, are missing out terribly.

Far East Gothic

Radio 4 is redoing The Wombles at the moment, though I can’t see (or rather hear) Richard E Grant narrating as any kind of credible replacement for Bernard Cribbins. Still, rather like the Wombles ‘making good use of the things that they find’ as the song goes, Goth fashion was originally a matter of salvaging bits and pieces other people discarded or used differently – lace, and velvet, and torn fishnet-stocking sleeves, that sort of thing. By the late 1990s and early 2000s some Goth scene participants had realised they could make some money (and maybe even a modest living) out of the things they enjoyed wearing, by making them for other people to buy: every Goth girl (and a lot of the boys) knows how to sew, though actually making stuff anyone might want to wear required a bit more application. There were of course the one-stop-Goth-shops in Camden where you could pick up desperately cheap corsets, skirts and coats that were only one step up from Halloween fancy dress and would fall apart after a couple of evenings out; but there were the serious makers like Darkangel too. Based in Tavistock, Darkangel* was the brainchild of Carri who began as a photographer and has cycled round in that direction again now that, she says, it’s ‘very difficult for small independent labels such as ours to survive when competing with low cost overseas manufacturers’. In fact, my only item of clothing from any Goth retailer is a Darkangel brocade frock coat – it has a suitably clerical collar, not that I’ve had a chance to wear it for a long time, since S.D. gave me a vintage frock coat from the 1930s. Good, heavy wool, that, keep you warm if nothing else.

I hadn’t noticed Darkangel’s claims to be an ethical manufacturer, specifically ‘avoiding using any fabrics, trimmings or other components that are made in China’. I wonder what Carri makes of one of the makers whose wares were flashed across my LiberFaciorum feed the other day, the Guangzhou-based fashion house Punk Rave. They’ve been going since 2006, though I’d never heard of them (in contrast to Poland’s well-known Restyle brand, with its big round hats, huge hoods, and astronomical imagery). Punk Rave’s founder and head designer, Zhi Yi Kim (or sometimes Kin) comes from Chinese/Korean ancestry; she started out (she says on the company website) from a poor background and was always interested in clothes. An early clothing store business didn’t work out, but after a stint slaving in a Beijing restaurant Ms Kim went back home to Guangzhou to try again, having discovered punk and Goth culture through a friend and realising that the styles she kept being instinctively drawn to had a name and a meaning. Dissatisfied with the clothes she was selling – mainly, then, for export – Ms Kim took a design course at Baewha Women’s University and set up Punk Rave. In 2010 a sub-brand, PyonPyon, was started to market clothes specifically in the Japanese-oriented Gothic Lolita style. Further lines ‘Fashion Series’ and ‘J&Punk Rave’ now cater for a Chinese home market as, Ms Kim says, ‘domestic young people acceptance of punk Gothic culture is far greater than when she first started designing’. Punk Rave came to pre-lockdown London Fashion Week in 2020 (you can even see a catwalk video here) and now sends its wares to online Goth influencers to try out, and the founder has a go at describing Gothic fashion for anyone in doubt on the matter. So this is not a local cottage industry outfit, nor a mainstream fashion house which occasionally uses Goth ideas, but a basically Goth retailer becoming part of the international mainstream.

But what are the clothes like? Unlike Restyle, Punk Rave does try bravely to cater for chaps, but although there’s a range of dramatic cloaks, coats and shirts, such as the Halifax jacket below – with integral weskit, as far as I can make out – on offer, what I really want is an interpretation of the traditional gent’s suit. Ah, if only I had the talent to do it myself, or believed enough people would buy such an artefact.

Predictably it’s in the women’s range that Punk Rave is most interesting. We might legitimately claim that ‘all Gothic life is here’ (it's not even all black), but in amongst the more familiar Victorian and punky-influenced stuff we find some really beautiful items such as the Cheongsam jacquard dress (trad Chinese style, Gothically reinterpreted with buckles and lacing), the Amaterasu kimono dress in cotton and leather, named after the Japanese sun goddess and which you can easily imagine Yuuko-san from xxxHolic wearing, and this lovely asymmetric velvet coat the company just calls ‘Avant’. I don’t know what conditions this schmutter is made under, but it’s no cheaper than Darkangel was.

There’s another political aspect to think about, too. Ms Kim seems to envisage fashion as having something to say about ‘promoting a future-oriented consumption model that achieves a cultural, environmental, scientific and technological balance’, and sums up the punk ethos as ‘never depressed, never slavish’. Such comments are two-edged in modern China. She’s probably safe as long as she carries on making money and doesn’t comment too much.

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*[I notice an increased emphasis in parts of the Goth world on ‘fairy’ motifs. You find this in Carri of Darkangel's current photography, in events including the annual Fairy Ball in Glastonbury, and the styles occasionally adopted by my friends such as Madame Morbidfrog and Lady Wildwood. There’s some crossover with pagan and medieval themes, and enough material for a short thesis].

Goth Walk 37: Cocktails With Elvira

Curiously I found out about the 1932 Elvira Barney murder case through my investigations into Surrey Anglo-Catholicism. The Sisters of St Mary at Spelthorne once ran the only sanatorium in the UK for women alcoholics, and one of their celebrity patients was an actress called Brenda Dean Paul. Through her I discovered Elvira Barney née Mullens, a knighted stockbroker's daughter acquitted of murdering, and even of manslaughtering, her lover Michael Scott Stephen at her apartment in William Mews, mainly, it seems, because nobody liked him very much. Her defence counsel, the former Attorney General Sir Patrick Hastings may have had a bit to do with it;  she may, so one story goes, have repaid the debt by nearly running him down driving on the wrong side of the road between Paris and Boulogne later in the summer. She definitely did crash into the wife of the ex-Hungarian Prime Minister Count Karolyi in Cannes, a sentence which could only be written in the 1930s. These events all have a dark humour about them, but there's no fun to be got out of Elvira's own death in a hotel room in Paris in 1936 from an apparent cocaine overdose. I did find myself, for the first time ever, quoting Barbara Cartland: her novel A Virgin in Mayfair describes the milieu of Elvira and the Bright Young People, and includes, in a description of a Soho nightclub, one sublime line: 'everyone kept saying how thrilling it was to be there, and how they ought not to have come'. As Mr Gloommovie said, how good a quiz night question would that be - Who wrote this, Oscar Wilde, PG Wodehouse, or Barbara Cartland?

There were very few of us on the Walk, fewer than half the people who'd actually confirmed they were coming. I picked up doing the Walks from the Young Lord Declan back in the old days when we might get thirty or forty participants, and the old London Goth Meetup group used constantly to get new blood (as it were) passing through. Now it seems as though I'm doing them for a loyal but tiny group of people I've known for years and that's not as fun. I don't have another topic immediately in the pipeline, so perhaps it's time to call a halt. 

Even my one photo was rubbish! Instead I took this along the King's Road in Chelsea.

Swanvale Halt Book Club: 'Goth: A History' by Lol Tolhurst (Quercus, 2023)

It’s only at the very end of his second book – his first, Cured (2016), described how The Cure came into being, what he did in the band, and how he crashed out of it – that Lol Tolhurst lets us in on the plan. At first he thought of writing an encyclopaedia, he says, before concluding that he wasn’t up to it and that nobody would be satisfied by anything he might produce, and so, instead, he wrote a memoir. But its subject isn’t ‘my time in The Cure’ – the earlier volume covered that – rather it tells how music, literature and aesthetics have fed into Mr Tolhurst’s sense of who he is and how he looks at the world. You do get a thirty-page account of the life and times of The Cure, but you also get encounters with other great names in the post-punk and Goth world, the bands Messrs Smith, Tolhurst et al saw perform, met, or worked with. Sometimes the connection is a bit oblique: a discussion of Depeche Mode begins with the author describing how he bumped into Andy Fletcher when they were both being treated at The Priory, and I can’t see any overlap that justifies two pages on the Sisters of Mercy at all, but along the way Mr Tolhurst addresses exactly the kind of questions other works haven't tackled. What was it like being a teenage music fan in the 1970s? He outlines the importance of John Peel, the music press and local record shops. What led proto-Goth young people to start playing music in the first place? He describes the drabness of his and Robert Smith’s Crawley surroundings and how their first visit to Salford revealed exactly why Joy Division sounded like they did; he relates Julianne Regan of All About Eve’s similar feelings about the landscape she grew up in, and David J of Bauhaus’s about Northampton. During an account of The Cure’s tour supporting the Banshees in 1979, he ponders the differences between London and the suburbs, laments the grotty venues they often played, and marvels at Siouxsie’s brisk methods of dealing with the unenlightened males who gave her grief at concerts. Why did musicians keep going? Mr Tolhurst tells us how making new music with French group The Bonapartes made him feel better after the stresses of his own band; David J describes performing as ‘an exorcism’ of negative feelings; Julianne Regan confesses that making music was a compensation for a decidedly unromantic existence. The chapter on the poetry that’s meant something to the author, and the concluding section on wider Goth culture, are there, again, to stress his sense of being part of something bigger than just one Goth band at one moment, something that ultimately brought him meaning.

You will look in vain here for Lol Tolhurst saying a single bad word about anyone. The closest he gets to being personally critical is in an account of The Cure’s first trip to California in 1981 when they find themselves staying in the same ‘kitschy motel’ as Joe Jackson: ‘Joe represented the new wave movement. Oh dear’. And that’s it. For all the gloomth of the Goth world, this book is overwhelmingly positive. It’s kind, humane and humble, conversationally-written and easy to read, and there is nothing else like it at the moment. Take off the odd paper half-jacket around the cover, and it’s even rather beautiful, bearing an embossed black raven against a cloud on the front and a feather on the back, with a neutral grey background, a bit like a children’s adventure book from the 1950s. Lol Tolhurst’s girlfriend in 1977, when the book starts, was a black-clad girl with straight black hair he calls The Raven; and we know that, in the dark, All Cats Are Grey.

Nouveau, Arabesque, Gothic

Time ticks on and the next Goth Walk approaches fast: on Thursday I traced the route, discovering that we would be going past the houses of both Noel Coward and Bram Stoker: now what a double-act that would have been. We will (all being well) finish at 5 Mulberry Walk in Chelsea, the one-time home of Ruth Baldwin. Socialite and prodigious drug-taker, Ruth was the girlfriend of heiress and motorboat racer Marion 'Joe' Carstairs, and died from an overdose in the flat of Oscar Wilde's neice Dolly in 1937. I didn't realise the house would look like this: built in 1913 for a Danish aristocrat and stained-glass designer, it's a startling block of Art Nouveau sensibility in a Bohemian portion of London. It's not the only example in the streets nearby, either.

I had enough time to return, after an initial visit twenty years ago, to Leighton House in Kensington, reacquainting myself with its startling neo-Moorish decor. Frederic Lord Leighton's actual art was superb and empty, its classical dullness enough to make me forgive Watts who at least put some soul in his soporific allegories; but his house is another matter, a tiled jewel. Nobody at all mentions the great green-painted iron girders and pillars to its rear, which are just as striking in their own way. 

On the Tube back home I found myself sitting next to a gent who was flicking through what I later discovered was ES, the Evening Standard magazine. He wasn't interested in an interview with Marina Abramovic, and eventually settled on a piece about holidays in Greece, but not before passing a series of photos of young people in what seemed like Gothic outfits. What was it? The paper exhausted the fellow's interest and he stuck it behind him, but although I tried to attract his attention before I left the train to see if I could have it, he was embroiled in Candy Crush and big headphones and so I abandoned the attempt. It was only through a friend that I found out the ES was profiling Slimelight, the veteran Goth club in Islington, and the whole article is on Slimelight's Instagram. It's gratifying to have such favourable coverage, though it does rather give the impression that Goth fashion has been taken over by a fetish aesthetic which, though it does seem quite prominent at the moment (rather like Steampunk was a few years ago and Cyber a few before that), isn't completely hegemonic.

Back to the Caves

My last visit to Chislehurst Caves in 2008 was under the auspices of London Gothic. Yesterday's wasn't, though it included a lot of the same people and, as we all agreed, was pretty much the same as the earlier one except that we were all fifteen years older. 

There's a lot of history in Chislehurst Caves, though perhaps not quite as much as the attraction itself claims. It was WJ Nichols of the British Archaeological Association who came up with the theory that the Caves had been excavated by Druids, extended under the Roman occupation of Britain, and then further exploited by the local Anglo-Saxons. None of these ideas is actually impossible, but equally they aren't very likely, and certainly haven't been proven: there's no actual archaeological material that might solve the question one way or the other. I can't find anything online about William Nichols apart from his theories on the Caves, but he published them in the BAA journal in 1903, a time when, says the Wikipedia article on the organisation, it was 'at a low ebb'. It certainly wasn't an academic association, more a collection of amateurs who liked dibbing about in the mud and telling one another what they'd found as a prelude to a good dinner in a provincial town; already, by the early 1900s, it was something of a relic of the age when it was founded, long before archaeology was anything like a learned discipline. Our guide yesterday evening referred to him as 'Dr' Nichols, but I wonder whether he wasn't a Dr in the same way Dr Johnson was.

What we know is that the Caves appear in the historical record in a 9th-century charter; that they've had incarnations as chalk and flint mines, a WWI ammunition store, mushroom production centre, film location and music venue, and, most notably, refuge - especially for the 15,000 southeast London residents who sheltered here during the Blitz, creating a self-managed underground town complete with its own chapel blessed by the Bishop of Rochester (and which remains a consecrated space). That a variety of desperate souls and ne'er-do-wells might also have found their way here over the centuries is also not essentially impossible, providing some justification for the various tall tales the guides like to tell and visitors like to hear. 

Many of those tales are, not unnaturally, ghost stories. The Caves have been open as a tourist attraction since the 1950s, and such places develop an institutional culture in which people tell stories to process their relationship with them (I know, I've worked in them). This performs two functions. First, it develops the sense of ownership and commitment among the people who work there, cementing their status of 'guardianship' as they welcome visitors to come and look round. Second - especially where the site history may well have involved suffering and sorrow - the ghosts encode those experiences and provide us with a way of negotiating with them, of working out what we feel. Our guide yesterday told us that many years ago he used to hear the voice of a small girl laughing when he was in the tunnels alone, and, after an older colleague told him about a child who had died while playing in a far-flung part of the Caves during the War, concluded it was her: 'I got into the habit of saying hello to her when I started work in the morning', he said, 'and eventually I didn't hear her anymore'.

I wish I'd asked the context for the proud statements on the original entrance signs, visible in photos around the building, informing visitors their ticket prices went to support 'The Sanitary Fund'. I also wish my photos had come out better: this was the only half-decent one, and even it's pretty rubbish. Not a single ghost on any of them (I think). 

Book Night

A little while ago I reported on Cathi Unsworth's fantastic epic on Goth In The Time Of Thatcher, Season of the Witch, and on Wednesday managed to catch a date in her tour promoting it. The Dublin Castle in Camden, along the road towards Regents Park, I discovered, doesn't serve wine, so I opted for a half of Camden Pale and took it through the swinging doors that led to the music area at the back of the pub. There were about thirty of us listening not just to Ms Unsworth but also to writer Richard Cabut, a gentleman more central to the historiography of Goth than I realised, reading from his novel Looking For A Kiss. Both painted a picture of this particular part of London as a psychogeography of the marginal and the uneasy, which Goth, or Positive Punk, or whatever you might want to call it, fitted into. The authors answered some questions from compere Travis Elborough and from the floor - always a hit-and-miss business, that, but it gave some opportunity to reflect on the debatable politics of Goth.

While I was waiting for the doors to open I wandered down to Gloucester Gate and came across this incredible fountain from 1878 in the form of a Coad-stone folly by the side of the road, looking like a grotto or tiny cave incongruously topped by a bronze milkmaid. I couldn't remember seeing mention of it before, but to my relief it's in Philip Davies's Troughs and Drinking Fountains. He rejoices that Camden Council has been persuaded to restore it. That was in 1989: it could do with a tidy-up again. 

'Season of the Witch', Cathi Unsworth (Nine Eight Books, 2023)

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.

Goth Walk XXXVI

It would be churlish to point out the paucity of deep black among the Walkers yesterday, pictured as we paused for a group photo at the fountain opposite the Old Bailey. After all, temperatures were in the mid-80s, and as we followed our route we took advantage of as much shade as we could find at the stopping-places, winding from Lower Marsh at the back of Waterloo, over the river and then up through Covent Garden and Holborn before finishing at the north end of Blackfriars Bridge. Our subject was the Gordon Riots, the few days in June 1780 when the Government lost control of the capital, a series of (some argue) proto-revolutionary disturbances which began with religious prejudice and ended in an all-out if disorganised attack on the 18th-century legal system. London seemed unusually loud as well as hot, and at various points I found myself competing with trains, police sirens and rickshaw drivers belting out Queen at enormous volumes, and we battled with crowds on both north and south banks of the river. The capital strikes back.

'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.

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!

Goth Old, Goth New

The display about the foundational Goth club, the Batcave, at the Museum of Youth Culture in Soho, is only open for a few days. Madame Morbidfrog and others were there for the private view during the week, but I could only get along today with Ms Mauritia after celebrating Mass for the Annunciation this morning - a case of from blue to black. Lots of monochrome photos of young people in the particular style of that moment (spiky hair, studded collars and fishnets all derived from punk), posters and flyers covered a wall, introduced by a very helpful big map showing the Batcave's various venues during the years of its existence. There was also a little display case of objects, again mainly paper, but also including a club t-shirt and what looked like a teddy bear in a gimp suit: without a caption its significance was unclear. Between the map and the display were a set of information captions which for inaccessibility in size or type rivalled any I have seen in my career in or out of museums. We eventually realised, from the page numbers, that they were taken from a book. Now, I would have been prepared to pay and even pay through the nose for a nice glossy history of the Batcave, but it turned out that the book accompanied a compendium of music which amounted to a do-it-yourself guide to '80s Goth, and even if it has a few unfamiliar gems in it I could live without that. The show, essentially, was promotion for the product. We were not delayed long, therefore, and set off in search of free art galleries and afternoon tea.

Tea gave us a chance to complain about the current domination of the Goth world by nostalgia, or at least the sense of retrospect. I know it's a bit rich for me to moan about this as I've been banging on about its history for ages, but nobody now seems to produce anything else. As real Goth clubs go under, we celebrate one of the places where it all started; as fewer Goths seem to appear in public, we analyse where those that remain have come from. There are two major books coming up in a month or two examining the history of Gothic, John Robb's The Art of Darkness and Cathi Unsworth's The Season of the Witch - I wonder how they will each justify their space in an increasingly crowded field? The bands our friends occasionally rave about, even when they're newcomers, don't seem to bring anything very fresh to the table. On LiberFaciorum at the moment I seem to be bombarded with adverts for Goth-friendly clothing retailers - Disturbia, EMP, Killstar - and under the televisual influence of Wednesday Addams big white collars in various styles seem to be in for women, but, most of the fashion seems to be, in Ms Mauritia's words,  'Goth as Shein imagines it'. (Mind you, Stylesock seems to be doing interesting things, not all of them Gothic by any means, if you're a young person with enough money to spend on them, even with much-neglected men's clothing, which most of the time boils down to t-shirts and little else). Ah, age does terrible things to us, friends, and not even just physically.

Peace Be With You All

Returning to work after a fortnight’s break in the Autumn is always a bit of a rude awakening for me: no matter how much activity I may have packed into those two weeks, they very soon recede into the mists of memory. The last out-of-the-ordinary event of my holiday was attending a Goth night at Aces and Eights in Tufnell Park: I was glad I did, but the transport system has now made it very hard for me to manage nights out like this, as the last train for Swanvale Halt leaves London well before midnight. On Saturday I parked in Kingston and caught the train there, and even the Kingston trains ran no later than 0.42 unless I’d wanted to catch the one an hour after that culminated in a bus journey from Surbiton. I managed to make it to an 8am mass the next day, but the church I first tried was shut leading to a mad rush to the Cathedral. I’m not sure which edition of the Prayer Book the celebrant was using, but their prayer that the Lord might ‘so rule and govern the heart of thy chosen servant George our Queen’ suggests they’d been up late as well.

So Monday morning began with Bible reading. While I was away various things had gone slightly awry, people not being where others expected them to be, and allegations of unhelpfulness by some parties against others, and I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with them (I shouldn’t have looked at the emails in advance). My eye was drawn to Christ’s instructions to the disciples in Luke 10, ‘First say, Peace be to this house’, and that seemed like a clear instruction if ever there was one. We mustn’t allow a high value placed on the Peace of God to obscure real problems in a Church community, but it does no harm for it to be the first word the pastor says to it. It reminded me what I am here to do, and I thank God for that.

Goth Walk 35: Chasing the Golden Dawn

It finally happened: my Goth Walk about the history of late 19th- and early-20th century London occultism was originally going to take place as part of my 50th birthday celebrations in May 2020, but of course other events intervened. Even when pandemic conditions allowed us to proceed (and get into the Main Quad of UCL for the last stop), the first date was stymied by a rail strike, the second by a heatwave (Goths die in hot weather, as the joke has it), and yet another rail strike put paid to a third. I began to think it might never happen, but it did, and yesterday. I did think it might have been nine years since the last one, but on checking find it's a mere seven. 

We started at one of our favourite old haunts, the cavernous Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street, and then wound our way up through Holborn and Fitzrovia. Here we are pictured on the steps of St George's Bloomsbury: some of the stops were directly relevant to the Matherses and other characters and events involved in the story, and some were just convenient places to take a breath, like the rather nice find of Whitfield Gardens off Charlotte Street, culminating in front of the Slade School of Art where Annie Horniman and Moina Mathers - or Mina Bergson as she then was - I suspect rather fell for each other without really recognising what they felt. A tale of odd personalities, beliefs and events, and, to my thinking, some startling talents diverted from their true vocation; which even applies to Aleister Crowley, who by all accounts was a pretty good cook and probably should have run a restaurant rather than an occult society.

We realised how long it had been since some of us had seen one another. Archangel Janet was visiting from Somerset in the company of Lady Wildwood, down from Herts; Sir Goingpostal made it in from Essex; Lady Metalmoomin complimented Janet on her elegant undyed grey: she has now gone undyed herself. Apart from the entertainment and information, I hope, this is of course part of the point of the whole thing. I have some inklings of subjects I might try next: 'Mew Pussy Mew', 'Lud Heat', 'Taking Liberties', 'No Popery', 'Cocktails with Elvira', or 'Tap'd in Bunhill'. That's enough work to keep me going awhile.

Photo by Archangel Janet.

S Tosoni & E Zuccala, 'Italian Goth Subculture: Kindred Creatures and other dark enactments in Milan, 1982-1991 (Palgrave, 2020)

The authors’ earlier Creature Simili came out as long ago as 2013; the newer book covers the same ground, but has been considerably reworked – so they say, as I don’t read Italian that fluently I will have to take their word for it! This is a thorough sociological examination of Italian first-wave Goth, at least in the vicinity of Milan, a very precise context. The Creature Simili (Kindred Creatures) of the title were an absolutely specific, and in fact self-named, group, the editors and originators of a fanzine called Amen. They had been taking part in the radical punk-based squatting movement in the city, a response, Tosoni & Zuccala’s interviewees felt, to the eclipse of the sort of political hopes engendered in the 1970s. The punks were desperate, nihilistic, and made their point by rejecting everything from the surrounding society. The Creature Simili collective felt the same, but found the punk template restricting and unimaginative and, while maintaining sympathetic links with the world of the squats, wanted to branch out musically and socially, activist but not so extreme: they were the punks’ ‘Kindred Creatures’. They and the black-clad folk they drew in didn’t refer to themselves as Goths for several years, when the word made its way over from London, and instead became known as ‘darks’, and their subculture, simply ‘Dark’. Tosoni & Zuccala describe the different groupings within Milanese Dark, the loners and the club-goers, the hangers-around in public squares, the mutual scorn between the fancy-dressers who changed in the safety of the toilets at clubs like the Hysterika, and the hardliners who crimped their hair and wore black every day and risked the wrath of families, teachers, and other young people. The interviewees describe how music, clothing, and the wider Gothic tradition (including aspects of it very few people outside Italy would be aware of) fed into their sense of self and helped them navigate a way forward. They describe how violent the streets of Milan could be for darks, and how often they had to run away from skinheads and paninari.

Tosoni & Zuccala’s approach concentrates on what they call the ‘enactments of dark’, as a way of trying to escape from previous analyses of subculture based on thinking about subcultural practices. An ‘enactment’ is a particular social context within which a subculture is experienced, and individual practices can have different significance and weight in different enactments. Once you’ve grasped that you can put aside the sociological theorising; you also need, to an extent, to cope with the translation which seems to have been done by someone who isn’t completely fluent in English. There is one particular phrase which kept catching me out: ‘breaking someone’s balls’ in Italian seems to mean ‘giving someone grief’, but the literal translation reads very oddly in English.

What this book does is show clearly how Goth evolved in a particular social, geographical, and historical context, and how the Gothic tradition enabled groups of young people to explore their sense of self and the world in that context. I imagine parallel studies in other countries would reveal illuminating differences and similarities, so I hope someone is writing them!

The Shadows Lengthen

In other news, and continuing our occasional series about the travails of the Goth world, I note that another club night is hoping to find a new home having been ejected from its existing one. I never made it to Shadows of the Crypt, though its organiser Dr Trenchpose kept inviting me, and now it’s been set wandering from the basement of 30 Prescot Street near London Bridge. Had I ever attended, I would have found it was beneath a church, the Roman Catholic Church of the English Martyrs, and using the premises of a private members’ club called Vout-o-Reenees.

The background is a bit obscure, and all Dr Trenchpose will say is that Vout-o-Reenees is being taken to court by an organisation called Flame of Love and has thrown Shadows of the Crypt to the lions in order to appease its landlords, the church. There are all sorts of things going on here. Flame of Love is a Roman Catholic devotional society inspired by the writings of a Hungarian mystic called Elisabeth Kindelmann, who died in 1985. A very ordinary and humble person, Mrs Kindelmann recorded a series of conversations with Jesus and the Virgin Mary in her Spiritual Diaries, a set of revelations she never attempted to publicise, and nobody seems to explain how they came to their current prominence. The Church officially has a very ambiguous attitude to the Kindelmann revelations, as it does to those of Fatima, Medjugorje, or lots of other places and occasions when Our Lady has allegedly expressed her opinion; Flame of Love has a cell based at English Martyrs, in the same way that Anglican parishes might have one of Our Lady of Walsingham, but the relationship between official church and mystical/campaigning cell is not clear, and, who knows, perhaps a bit uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Vout-o-Reenees is a surrealist art club which has been going since 2014, and is run by Sophie Parkin, the great Mollie Parkin’s daughter. It looks rather fun, but at a membership fee of £375 per annum, I won’t be joining, and neither will a lot of artists starving in garrets.

When churches let out their property, they need to do due diligence, and I’ve got little sympathy if they don’t. Years ago the Tiger Lillies played the Union Chapel in London and, unsurprisingly, a huge stink ensued about elements of their act, after the event. Even I find it very hard to listen to ‘Banging in the Nails’, and if you are in any slight way aware of the Tiger Lillies you will know to expect blasphemy, sex and violence in considerable quantities if you go to a concert of theirs. It wouldn’t have been hard to work out that they might not be the most appropriate band to play in a church.

At Swanvale Halt we have quite a thorough hiring policy, which we drew up after a request to let space to a yoga class: aware that at the higher end yoga enters Hindu mysticism, I was a bit wary, until the teacher assured me there was nothing of that sort ‘apart from an Omm at the end’ which I thought was acceptable. I wanted to have something to guide our practice rather than taking arbitrary decisions case-by-case, and was quite pleased with what we came up with. Most of the time, it just needs a conversation, for instance with Justin who runs the regular concerts and booked an act who used a pentagram in their publicity, or with Harry, our office manager’s son, about what he intended to include in his Dungeons & Dragons group in the church hall. Looking at the art events Vout-o-Reenees hosts, there’s a certain amount of challenging material, a bit of nudity and folk wearing SLUT t-shirts, and so on. If English Martyrs decides they don’t want this kind of thing operating out of their basement, they should have been paying more attention, really.

‘I hope this isn’t just about hating the Goths’, said my friend Ms DarkMorte, and so do I, but then I know a bit more about it than most. I also know that Goths like playing around with challenging imagery in a slightly camp and burlesque way, and some of that imagery I don’t like very much either. Ultimately a church is under no obligation to promote anything other than its own ideals: the rest of secular society can happily get on with anything else. Part of me would love to have a Goth night operating out of our crypt, if we had one other than a five-foot high cellar room where put the gardening tools, but the trouble is that, even if you have someone running it you trust and can work with, their own 'external contractors' – DJs and acts – might be less easy to keep tabs on. It’s all quite hazardous, and, looking at Shadows of the Crypt’s Halloween event last year, I would have found it very hard to accommodate ‘Miss Fortune’s Midnight Blood Burlesque’ …

Gothic Conversations in the Netherlands

As a distraction from current events, though we could discuss those and their resonances for a long while and may well yet, here is an offering from a different world. A couple of weeks ago our friend Dr Catherine Spooner was in the Netherlands – s’Hertogenbosch, to be exact, at the Den Bosch Design Museum – to talk about their exhibition ‘Designing Darkness’, which examines something we have long been interested in: the links between the Goth world and the wider Gothic tradition of which it is a part. Catherine took part in two discussions: the first, a two-hour marathon chaired by Ama von Dantzig (hard to know how to characterise her: ‘cultural and development researcher and organiser’ might be a summary) and involving a number of other speakers; and the second, a one-on-one conversation with curator Tomas van den Heuvel. Here they are, should you want to look them up.

The participants in the longer talk, apart from Dr Spooner and the two ‘official’ speakers, were academic Nick Groom from the University of Macau, though joining from his house on Dartmoor; Trae and Dani Ashes who run Goth podcast ‘Cemetery Confessions’, from the US; Mel Butler (who we’ve met before) from Yorkshire; and, in person, Lisa der weduwe from the Museum of Youth Culture in London. The talk covered four broad areas – ‘Goth and the ‘80s’, ‘Victorian Gothic’, ‘Belonging’ and ‘The Future of Gothic’, which seemed a bit arbitrary to me and which certainly strayed all over the place from their appointed limits, but also came up with all sorts of interesting thoughts and insights. The interaction between Goth and Gothic was a constant theme, illustrated when Nick Groom called attention to his S.O.P.H.I.E. lanyard – the campaign group set up in the name of murdered Goth Sophie Lancaster.

In the first section, Lisa der weduwe described the Goth-related photos in her museum’s collection, and its appeal for further information related to the experiences of first-wave Goths, while Dr Groom gave his memories of actually being there – a very individual experience, as he remembered it, mediated by fanzines and tape-swapping rather than attending venues which later became mythically famous: it was more than ‘a few tiny clubs in London or Leeds’. It’s a different story from the one that usually gets told. Mel Butler, on the other hand, described actually moving to Leeds in order to join the Goth scene there, and finding that she’d found her ‘tribe’, a place of safety. Dr Spooner then commented on the worldwide spread of Goth, and the development of specific local forms. The discussion on ‘Victorian Gothic’ elaborated on the genre’s history (not just ‘Victorian’, in Catherine’s account) and the role of literature, including Gothic’s ability to filter the ambiguities of empire and progress.

The discussion of ‘Belonging’ brought in Trae and Dani who waxed very philosophical. It was here that we got into the knotty and interesting area of identity and the way Goths’ self-conception is changing. The two podcasters pointed out that while Goths in the ‘90s tended to conceive of their sense of identity in ‘essentialist’ terms – that Gothic was something you felt inside and then externalised – they now tend to think of it as something more performative and complex: ‘interior and exterior in a constant conversation … constantly bringing forth through bundles of objects and interactions’. As they pointed out, this exactly parallels shifts in the politics of gender and sexuality, which is both fascinating and yet, at the same time, only what one might expect. As for ‘The Future’, everyone talked about the dynamic potential of Goth and Gothic (despite, perhaps, the small numbers of actual Goths there are about at the moment). In response to the question whether Goth had lost its radical edge, Dr Spooner argued that this depended entirely on context: there were plenty of settings where Gothic affinities still, and always would, present a challenge to established and complacent understandings and authorities.

For her one-to-one with Tomas van der Heuvel, Catherine sat at a table spread with copies of her books (which we have talked about on occasion) and elaborated on some of the themes of the earlier discussion. Pressed for a definition of the Gothic, she deferred to her old tutor Chris Baldick, who stated that every Gothic novel expressed three aspects: ‘claustrophobic enclosure in space, and fearful inheritance in time, developing into an increasing descent into disintegration’, and made reference to the ‘travelling tropes’ of Gothic identified by Roger Luckhurst which we have only just discussed here. They talked about the exhibition itself and agreed that the question ‘But is it Goth?’ helps you ask and answer other questions, and Catherine complimented the inclusion of commercial Goth schmutter, as well as the high-end designer-wear and handmade clothing and accessories that such displays usually concentrate on. The fakery of Gothic, Gothic camp, the growing influence of folk horror on Gothic (I recently discovered completely by accident that Catherine has been writing for Hellebore, a folk horror journal I bought as a result of reading about the Hexham Heads – but that’s another story) and mutations of Gothic that focus on the future, all made an appearance; as did Catherine’s next project, an account of the white dress in Gothic. If that book ends up including PJ Harvey’s white Chalk dress, now in the V&A, you will have to blame me …

well. That’s a lot to take in and you’re probably better off watching the videos. When trying to account for why the Design Museum should have staged the show in the first place, Tomas van der Heuvel argued that ‘design is something you do yourself’ and so the idea of designing an identity was worth a museum of design examining. He was less convincing as to why it was Gothic they chose, but I suspect what may have happened is that an initial interest in how those weird people in black put their ‘design’ together broadened out into an awareness of what Nick Groom quite rightly called Goth’s ‘vast hinterland’ in the Gothic tradition as a whole. That leaves the matter of identity. I see what Trae and Dani mean when they point out the fluidity and performativity of Goth, but I have to recall my own deep and abiding macabre fascinations which extend way back into my young childhood and which I have always insisted propelled me in a way I experienced as virtually inevitable towards the Goth world rather later than most people enter it: for me it was very definitely an internal itch that I then externalised. So I remain, I’m afraid, stuck conceptually in another age!