Gothic Evolution

One of the things that fascinates me is how, why and to what extent people change the style they may have adopted for themselves. Of course some Goths, once they have become such, stay exactly the same as they were at 18. Others move away from the subcultural world completely, once it’s fulfilled whatever need it was that drove them there in the first place. Those who stay, but change, I find most interesting.

Now, many, many years ago I used to contribute to the Goth magazine Meltdown with the odd article or review. The editor had set it up to make her fortune, or at least her reputation, although I don’t think it really managed either in the few years it was going. Meltdown had an in-house illustrator called Dr A who would come up with cartoons to accompany articles for which no sufficiently appealing photograph could be found. Here’s the one he did for my article on Gothic academic studies.

Dr A wasn’t just an illustrator. He also played synths with a band who started out calling themselves Sneaky Bat Machine and then in the very early 2000s morphed into Goteki. Goteki, or Sneaky Bat Machine, were broadly speaking a Cybergoth band. I’m pretty sure I’ve never listened to any of their output, but feel fairly confident that it would have been the kind of thing that makes more traditional Goths quiver with rage. ‘Sounds like an ‘80s computer game soundtrack’, commented IF magazine of their album, apparently. You don’t see many Cybergoths these days – you don’t see many Goths at all, of course, but Cybers are a near-invisible minority even within the subculture now, though once upon a time, in the late 90s and early 2000s, there were loads of them. Cybergoths mingled regulation black with fluorescent tubing hair extensions, enormous furry boots, and, ubiquitously, little black goggles perched high on the arrangement of multicoloured dreadlocks and plastic that served them for a hairstyle. So Dr A was one of these fellows. Here’s a picture of the band from their Goteki phase, from their one-time record label Wasp Factory: he’s the one on the left.

I had not spared any of this a thought for years. Then not long ago while looking for something else entirely I stumbled across an artist and sculptor/toymaker calling himself Doktor A. This Doctor constructs little Steampunkish characters from a strange fantasy world called Mechtorians, all of which have their own identities, histories, and, quite often, riveted brass moustaches. He exhibits them all over the place and sometimes people buy them. It was while looking at some of his drawings that I noticed affinities, little features, that reminded me of the cartoons of the other Dr A all those years ago. There were spirals – and you might say with some justice that attenuated spiral motifs pop up in all sorts of Gothic artistic places thanks to Tim Burton and The Nightmare Before Christmas – but they still leapt to my attention. And, buried away in the depths of Doktor A’s website there are little resin caricatures of the members of Sneaky Bat Machine, which can be yours for a mere £150. The Doctor and the Doktor are one and the same, even if the resemblance may be hard to glimpse in photographs.

But Dr A has eschewed his fluorescent tubes and gigantic boots in favour of a granddad shirt and a waistcoat. This is what he looks like nowadays, as depicted by circusposterus.com. His ‘artist’s biography’ somewhat unhelpfully informs the online enquirer that ‘raised by the military and monitored by men in white coats until he was 16, Doktor A has always scribbled monsters’, giving no clue as to the nature and causes of the artist’s shift over the last dozen years from Cybergoth to Steampunk. It’s a move from a style based on a fantasised vision of the future to one organised around a fantastic vision of the past – in which the only continuity is provided by goggles, except that now they’re brass and leather whereas once they were plastic. But they’re both outsider style, linked by a dissatisfaction with the aesthetics of the present and a determination to dress up. That’s the connection, I suppose.

Mind you, the question arises – now that Steampunk’s dead, where do we go from here?